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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Patent Lottery: Exploiting Behavioral Economics For The Common Good, Dennis D. Crouch
The Patent Lottery: Exploiting Behavioral Economics For The Common Good, Dennis D. Crouch
Faculty Publications
Lotteries are immensely popular. Players are willing to give the organizer a large monetary cut of every ticket purchase in return for a chance at a jackpot. In some ways, our current patent system operates as a lottery as well. Most patents are relatively worthless, while a few are highly valuable. Reaching the major payout of a highly valuable patent takes perseverance in the face of tremendous uncertainty. Like lottery players, small entrepreneurial companies and individuals have shows signs of bounded rationality. In particular, what I call the patent lottery effect is associated with the phenomena of potential innovators overweighting …
Resuscitating Hospital Enterprise Liability, Philip G. Peters Jr.
Resuscitating Hospital Enterprise Liability, Philip G. Peters Jr.
Faculty Publications
No tort reform has more potential to improve the quality of medical care and to reduce the frequency of patient injuries than exclusive hospital enterprise liability. Hospital enterprise liability would make hospitals liable for all patient injuries occurring in the hospital that are the product of provider negligence, regardless of the independent contractor status of the providers. In its "exclusive" form, enterprise liability would also eliminate the personal liability of individual physicians and nurses. Exclusive hospital enterprise liability has the potential to revive the dormant deterrent power of tort law. The reasons are simple. Unlike individual physicians, hospitals are experience-rated …
Health Courts?, Philip G. Peters Jr.
Health Courts?, Philip G. Peters Jr.
Faculty Publications
This article undertakes the first detailed critique of the proposal from Common Good and the Harvard School of Public Health to replace medical malpractice jury trials with adjudication before specialized health courts. Professor Peters concludes that the modest benefits likely to be produced by the current health court proposal are matched by the risks of bias and overreaching that these courts would also present. Missing from the plan is the doctrinal change mostly likely to improve patient safety - hospital enterprise liability. Without enterprise liability, the health court proposal is unlikely to achieve its patient safety goals and, as a …
Non-Beneficial Pediatric Research And The Best Interest Standard: A Reconciliation, Paul J. Litton
Non-Beneficial Pediatric Research And The Best Interest Standard: A Reconciliation, Paul J. Litton
Faculty Publications
Federal efforts beginning in the 1990's have successfully increased pediatric research to improve medical care for all children. Since 1997, the FDA has requested 800 pediatric studies involving 45,000 children. Much of this research is "non-beneficial"; that is, it exposes pediatric subjects to risk even though these children will not benefit from participating in the research. Non-beneficial pediatric research (NBPR) seems, by definition, contrary to the best interests of pediatric subjects, which is why one state supreme court has essentially prohibited it. It also appears that the only plausible rationale for this research is utilitarian, as it risks some children …