Law Commons^™

Remediating Racism For Rent: A Landlord’S Obligation Under The Fha, Mollie Krent

Michigan Law Review

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) is an expansive and powerful piece of legislation that furthers equal housing in the United States by ferreting out discrimination in the housing market. While the power of the Act is well recognized by courts, the full contours of the FHA are still to be refined. In particular, it remains unsettled whether and when a landlord can be liable for tenant-on-tenant harassment. This Note argues, first, that the FHA does recognize liability in such a circumstance and, second, that a landlord should be subject to liability for her negligence in such a circumstance. Part I …

Tort Law And Civil Recourse, Mark A. Geistfeld

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Recognizing Wrongs. by John C.P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky.

Resolving "Resolved": Covenants Not To Sue And The Availability Of Cercla Contribution Actions, Jacob Podell

Michigan Law Review

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA)—as part of its dual goals of cleaning up hazardous-waste sites and ensuring that the polluter pays for that cleanup—gives private parties two mutually exclusive causes of action: cost recovery and contribution. Contribution is available in limited circumstances, including if the party has “resolved” its liability with the government. But CERCLA does not define this operative term. Federal courts are split over how the structure of a settlement resolves liability. Several courts follow Bernstein v. Bankert, which held that any conditions precedent and nonadmissions of liability strongly suggest that a party …

The Ncaa's Special Relationship With Student-Athletes As A Theory Of Liability For Concussion-Related Injuries, Tezira Abe

Michigan Law Review

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the primary governing body of college athletics. Although the NCAA proclaims to protect student-athletes, an examination of its practices suggests that the organization has a troubling history of ignoring the harmful effects of concussions. Over one hundred years after the NCAA was established, and seventy years after the NCAA itself knew of the potential effects of concussions, the organization has done little to reduce the occurrence of concussions or to alleviate the potential effects that stem from repeated hits to the head. This Note argues for recognizing a special relationship between the NCAA …

Renovations Needed: The Fda's Floor/Ceiling Framework, Preemption, And The Opioid Epidemic, Michael R. Abrams

Michigan Law Review

The FDA’s regulatory framework for pharmaceuticals uses a “floor/ceiling” model: administrative rules set a “floor” of minimum safety, while state tort liability sets a “ceiling” of maximum protection. This model emphasizes premarket scrutiny but largely relies on the state common law “ceiling” to police the postapproval drug market. As the Supreme Court increasingly holds state tort law preempted by federal administrative standards, the FDA’s framework becomes increasingly imbalanced. In the face of a historic prescription medication overdose crisis, the Opioid Epidemic, this imbalance allows the pharmaceutical industry to avoid internalizing the public health costs of their opioid products. This Note …

Retaliatory Rico And The Puzzle Of Fraudulent Claiming, Nora Freeman Engstrom

Michigan Law Review

Over the past century, the allegation that the tort liability system incentivizes legal extortion and is chock-full of fraudulent claims has dominated public discussion and prompted lawmakers to ever-more-creatively curtail individuals’ incentives and opportunities to seek redress. Unsatisfied with these conventional efforts, in recent years, at least a dozen corporate defendants have “discovered” a new fraud-fighting tool. They’ve started filing retaliatory RICO suits against plaintiffs and their lawyers and experts, alleging that the initiation of certain non meritorious litigation constitutes racketeering activity— while tort reform advocates have applauded these efforts and exhorted more “courageous” companies to follow suit. Curiously, though, …

Enterprise Without Entities, Andrew Verstein

Michigan Law Review

Scholars and practicing lawyers alike consider legal entities to be essential. Who can imagine running a large business without using a business organization, such as a corporation or partnership? This Article challenges conventional wisdom by showing that vast enterprises—with millions of customers paying trillions of dollars—often operate without any meaningful use of entities.

This Article introduces the reciprocal exchange, a type of insurance company that operates without any meaningful use of a legal entity. Instead of obtaining insurance from a common nexus of contract, customers directly insure one another through a dense web of bilateral agreements. While often overlooked or …

Valuing Control, Peter Dicola

Michigan Law Review

Control over property is valuable in and of itself. Scholars have not fully recognized or explored that straightforward premise, which has profound implications for the economic analysis of property rights. A party to a property dispute may actually prefer liability-rule protection for an entitlement resting with the other party to liability-rule protection for an entitlement resting with her. This Article presents a novel economic model that determines the conditions under which that is the case—by taking account of how parties value control. The model suggests new opportunities for policymakers to resolve conflicts and to develop better information about property disputes …

Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty To Protect Property, Christopher Serkin

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause is to protect property owners from the most significant costs of legal transitions. Paradigmatically, a regulatory taking involves a government action that interferes with expectations about the content of property rights. Legal change has therefore always been central to regulatory takings claims. This Article argues that it does not need to be and that governments can violate the Takings Clause by failing to act in the face of a changing world. This argument represents much more than a minor refinement of takings law because recognizing governmental liability for failing to act means …

Houston, We Have A (Liability) Problem, Justin Silver

Michigan Law Review

The development of private manned space flight is proceeding rapidly; there are proposals to launch paying passengers before the end of 2014. Given the historically dangerous nature of space travel, an accident will probably occur at some point, resulting in passengers’ injury or death. In the event of a lawsuit stemming from such an accident, a court will likely find that a space flight entity operating suborbital flights is a common carrier, while an entity operating orbital flights is not. Regardless of whether these entities are common carriers, they face a threat of high levels of liability, as well as …

Outsourcing Regulation: How Insurance Reduces Moral Hazard, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores the potential value of insurance as a substitute for government regulation of safety. Successful regulation of behavior requires information in setting standards, licensing conduct, verifying outcomes, and assessing remedies. In various areas, the private insurance sector has technological advantages in collecting and administering the information relevant to setting standards and could outperform the government in creating incentives for optimal behavior. We explore several areas that are regulated more by private insurance than by government. In those areas, the role of the law diminishes to the administration of simple rules of absolute liability or no liability, and affected …

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee

Michigan Law Review

This Article provides a financial economic theory of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity awards are unpredictable, cause financial distress, and beget social cost. By focusing only on offsetting escaped liability, the standard law and economics theory fails to account for the core problem of variance. This Article provides a risk arbitrage analysis of the relationship between variance, litigation valuation, and optimal deterrence. Starting with settlement …

Unclaimed Property And Due Process: Justifying 'Revenue-Raising' Modern Escheat, Teagan J. Gregory

Michigan Law Review

States have long claimed the right to take custody of presumably abandoned property and hold it for the benefit of the true owner under the doctrine of escheat. In the face of increasing fiscal challenges, states have worked to increase their collection of unclaimed property via new escheat legislation that appears to bear little or no relation to protecting the interests of owners. Holders of unclaimed property have raised substantive due process challenges in response to these modern escheat statutes. This Note contends that two categories of these disputed laws-those shortening dormancy periods and those allowing states to estimate a …

Respondent Superior As An Affirmative Defense: How Employers Immunize Themselves From Direct Negligence Claims, J. J. Burns

Michigan Law Review

Most courts hold that where a defendant employer admits that it is vicariously liable for its employee's negligence, a plaintiff's additional claims of negligent entrustment, hiring, retention, supervision, and training must be dismissed. Generally, courts apply this rule based on the logic that allowing a plaintiff's additional claims adds no potential liability beyond that which has already been admitted. Furthermore, since the additional claims merely allege a redundant theory of recovery once a respondeat superior admission has been made, the prejudicial evidence of an employee's prior bad acts which often accompanies direct negligence claims against employers can be excluded without …

Foreword: Fault In American Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat

Michigan Law Review

The basic rule of liability in tort law is fault. The basic rule of liability in contract law is no fault. This is perhaps one of the most striking divides within private law, the most important difference between the law of voluntary and nonvoluntary obligations. It is this fault line (speaking equivocally) that the present Symposium explores. Is it a real divide-two opposite branches of liability within private law-or is it merely a rhetorical myth? How can it be justified? As law-and-economics scholars, this fault/no-fault divide between contract and tort is all the more puzzling. In law and economics, legal …

A Comparative Fault Defense In Contract Law, Ariel Porat

Michigan Law Review

This Article calls for the recognition of a comparative fault defense in contract law. Part I sets the framework for this defense and suggests the situations in which it should apply. These situations are sorted under two headings: cases of noncooperation and cases of overreliance. Part II unfolds the main argument for recognizing the defense and recommends applying the defense only in cases where cooperation or avoidance of overreliance is low cost.

Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Michigan Law Review

This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts' reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.

Is There A Duty?: Limiting College And University Liability For Student Suicide, Susanna G. Dyer

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that nonclinician administrators employed by institutions of higher education do not have a special relationship with their students such that they have a duty to act with reasonable care to prevent a foreseeable student suicide. Courts that have in recent years ruled to the contrary have done so by incorrectly basing their duty-of-care analysis on foreseeability of harm alone. With an eye toward a proper duty-of-care analysis, this Note analyzes multiple factors to reach its conclusion, including the ideal relationship between colleges and their students and the burden on and capability of colleges to protect their students …

Offsetting Risks, Ariel Porat

Michigan Law Review

Under prevailing tort law, an injurer who must choose between Course of Action A, which creates a risk of 500 (there is a probability of .1 that a harm of 5000 will result), and Course of Action B, which creates a risk of 400 (there is a probability of.] that a harm of 4000 will result), and who negligently opts for the former will be held liable for the entire harm of 5000 that materializes. This full liability forces the injurer to pay damages that are five times higher than would be necessary to internalize the risk of 100 that …

Rewarding Outside Directors, Assaf Hamdani, Reinier Kraakman

Michigan Law Review

While they often rely on the threat of penalties to produce deterrence, legal systems rarely use the promise of rewards. In this Article, we consider the use of rewards to motivate director vigilance. Measures to enhance director liability are commonly perceived to be too costly. We, however demonstrate that properly designed reward regimes could match the behavioral incentives offered by negligence-based liability regimes but with significantly lower costs. We further argue that the market itself cannot implement such a regime in the form of equity compensation for directors. We conclude by providing preliminary sketches of two alternative reward regimes. While …

To Err Is Human, Keith A. Rowley

Michigan Law Review

There are many kinds of mistakes. One kind-a rational, well-intended act or decision resulting in unanticipated, negative consequences-was the focus of Allan Farnsworth's previous foray into the realm of legal angst. Another kind-an act or decision prompted by an inaccurate, incomplete, or uninformed mental state and resulting in unanticipated, negative consequences- is the subject of the present book. Like its predecessor, Alleviating Mistakes does not confine itself to contract law, Farnsworth's home turf; it explores criminal, tort, restitution, and other areas of substantive law as well. As such, it paints on too large a canvas to capture its entirety in …

Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

Michigan Law Review

In 1543, the Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, determined the heliocentric design of the solar system. Copernicus was motivated in large part by the conviction that Claudius Ptolemy's geocentric astronomical model, which dominated scientific thought at that time, was too incoherent, complex, and convoluted to be true. Hence, Copernicus made a point of making his model coherent, simple, and elegant. Nearly three and a half centuries later, at the height of the impressionist movement, the French painter Claude Monet set out to depict the Ruen Cathedral in a series of twenty paintings, each presenting the cathedral in a different light. Monet's …

The Pathological Politics Of Criminal Law, William J. Stuntz

Michigan Law Review

Substantive criminal law defines the conduct that the state punishes. Or does it? If the answer is yes, it should be possible, by reading criminal codes (perhaps with a few case annotations thrown in), to tell what conduct will land you in prison. Most discussions of criminal law, whether in law reviews, law school classrooms, or the popular press, proceed on the premise that the answer is yes. Law reform movements regularly seek to broaden or narrow the scope of some set of criminal liability rules, always on the assumption that by doing so they will broaden or narrow the …

Conjunction And Aggregation, Saul Levmore

Michigan Law Review

This Article begins with the puzzle of why the law avoids the issue of conjunctive probability. Mathematically inclined observers might, for example, employ the "product rule," multiplying the probabilities associated with several events or requirements in order to assess a combined likelihood, but judges and lawyers seem otherwise inclined. Courts and statutes might be explicit about the manner in which multiple requirements should be combined, but they are not. Thus, it is often unclear whether a factfinder should assess if condition A was more likely than not to be present - and then go on to see whether condition B …

Prosecution Of Minor Subcontractors Under The Major Fraud Act Of 1988, Chris Liro

Michigan Law Review

In the late 1980s, a series of well-publicized defense contractor abuses brought the ordinarily obscure topic of government contracting into the public eye. These abuses included not only instances of seemingly wasteful charges, like the infamous $600 toilet seat, approved by a complicit Department of Defense, but also examples of truly fraudulent activity such as knowingly overbilling and supplying inferior quality goods. The fraud cases grabbed the public attention for three primary reasons. First, enormous sums of money were involved. Second, the nature of the fraud often posed a direct danger to United States troops, potentially compromising "national security." Finally, …

Zoning Speech On The Internet: A Legal And Technical Model, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Resnick

Michigan Law Review

Speech, it is said, divides into three sorts - (1) speech that everyone has a right to (political speech, speech about public affairs); (2) speech that no one has a right to (obscene speech, child porn); and (3) speech that some have a right to but others do not (in the United States, Ginsberg speech, or speech that is "harmful to minors," to which adults have a right but kids do not). Speech-protective regimes, on this view, are those where category (1) speech predominates; speech-repressive regimes are those where categories (2) and (3) prevail. This divide has meaning for speech …

Identifying And Valuing The Injury In Lost Chance Cases, Todd S. Aagaard

Michigan Law Review

Any plaintiff seeking to recover in tort must prove that the defendant has breached the duty of care. Even after the plaintiff has established the defendant's breach of duty, however, issues of causation and damages remain. These two issues are frequently vexing, both conceptually and in terms of evidentiary demonstration. For example, if a plaintiff proves that a defendant acted negligently, it still may be unclear whether the plaintiff would have been injured even ip the absence of the defendant's negligence. Similarly, in assessing damages, factfinders often :find it difficult to attach a monetary value to a plaintiff's nonpecuniary losses …

Affirmative Duties, Systemic Harms, And The Due Process Clause, Barbara E. Armacost

Michigan Law Review

Part I of the article lays out the major academic criticisms of DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services. Part II describes the contours of liability for failure to protect in tort. Part III offers a positive explanation for the strong presumption against governmental liability in failure-to-protect cases: permitting broad liability for failure to protect would involve the courts in second-guessing political decisions about the use of limited community resources. This explanation has two parts. First, as a matter of institutional competence, budgetary decisions about the appropriate level and distribution of public services are better suited to political rather …

Computer Bulletin Board Operator Liability For Users' Infringing Acts, M. David Dobbins

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that a computer bulletin board operator's liability for copyright infringement by users of the bulletin board should be analyzed under the theory of contributory copyright infringement. This Note calls for a standard of liability under contributory copyright infringement that accommodates the competing interests at stake in the resolution of this issue. Part I provides an overview of copyright infringement law and argues that in most situations the operator's actions, viewed independently, do not constitute copyright infringement. Part II explores theories of third-party liability. This Part rejects the doctrine of vicarious liability as an effective means for establishing …

The Case Against Intermediate Owner Liability Under Cercla For Passive Migration Of Hazardous Waste, Robert L. Bronston

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that Congress intended disposal to have an active meaning and therefore that courts should not hold prior intermediate owners liable for the passive migration of hazardous waste under section 107(a)(2). Part I examines CERCLA's definition of disposal. This Part concludes that the language of the definition, though somewhat ambiguous, supports the active defuiition. Part II considers the history of both CERCLA and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which CERCLA amended, in order to determine whether Congress intended to require affirmative conduct on the part of intermediate owners as a prerequisite to liability. Part II …