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Full-Text Articles in Law
Should Automakers Be Responsible For Accidents?, Kyle D. Logue
Should Automakers Be Responsible For Accidents?, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
Motor vehicles are among the most dangerous products sold anywhere. Automobiles pose a larger risk of accidental death than any other product, except perhaps opioids. Annual autocrash deaths in the United States have not been below 30,000 since the 1940s, reaching a recent peak of roughly 40,000 in 2016. And the social cost of auto crashes goes beyond deaths. Auto-accident victims who survive often incur extraordinary medical expenses. Those crash victims whose injuries render them unable to work experience lost income. Auto accidents also cause nontrivial amounts of property damage—mostly to the automobiles themselves, but also to highways, bridges, or …
Reckless Juveniles, Kimberly Thomas
Reckless Juveniles, Kimberly Thomas
Articles
Modern doctrine and scholarship largely take it for granted that offenders should be criminally punished for reckless acts.1 Yet, developments in our understanding of human behavior can shed light on how we define and attribute criminal liability, or at least force us to grapple with the categories that have existed for so long. This Article examines recklessness and related doctrines in light of the shifts in understanding of adolescent behavior and its biological roots, to see what insights we might attain, or what challenges these understandings pose to this foundational mens rea doctrine. Over the past decade, the U.S. Supreme …
A Corrective Justice Justification For Considering The Response Of The Hypothetical Person Of An “Ordinary Level Of Susceptibility” When Assessing Reasonable Foreseeability In Cases Involving Negligently Inflicted Psychiatric Injury, Martin Allcock
Research outputs 2014 to 2021
The law has long been concerned with limiting recovery for pure psychiatric injury in negligence in order to prevent liability to plaintiffs who are unusually susceptible to this type of injury. The justifications provided by courts for this concern have often centred on the idea that holding a defendant liable to such a plaintiff will be unreasonable. However, there is a gap in the reasoning of the courts and in the scholarly literature as to the potential theoretical justifications for measuring the reasonableness of the defendant’s conduct against the effect of that conduct on the hypothetical person of an “ordinary …
The Role Of Fault In § 1983 Municipal Liability, Michael Wells
The Role Of Fault In § 1983 Municipal Liability, Michael Wells
Scholarly Works
Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, local governments are not vicariously liable for constitutional violations committed by their employees. Those governments, however, are liable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations committed by "policymaking" officials. In the face of these two principles, courts have struggled with cases in which an underling commits a constitutional violation and the claim of municipal liability is based on a policymaker's failure to prevent it. The government can be liable in these "indirect-effect" cases for a policymaker's "deliberate indifference" to safeguarding constitutional rights, a standard that demands an even greater showing of culpability than …
Healthism In Tort Law, Elizabeth Weeks
Healthism In Tort Law, Elizabeth Weeks
Scholarly Works
This article draws on the author's recently published book, Healthism: Health Status Discrimination and the Law (with Jessica L. Roberts) (Cambridge University Press 2018), examining tort law doctrine and policy for examples of differential treatment of health status or behaviors. Just as scholars previously have drawn attention to discrimination based on race, sex, age, and other protected categories in tort law, the article urges similar examination of tort law's potential to discriminate against the unhealthy. The article discusses the potential for healthism in the reasonably prudent person standard of care, contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, noneconomic damages caps, impaired …