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Legal Remedies Commons

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Supreme Court of the United States

University of Michigan Law School

Journal

Liability

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Legal Remedies

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee Oct 2012

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 …


Copyright And The Vagueness Doctrine, Bradley E. Abruzzi Feb 2012

Copyright And The Vagueness Doctrine, Bradley E. Abruzzi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Constitution's void-for-vagueness doctrine is itself vaguely stated. The doctrine does little to describe at what point vague laws-other than those that are entirely standardless-become unconstitutionally vague. Rather than explore this territory, the Supreme Court has identified three collateral factors that affect its inclination to invalidate a law for vagueness: (1) whether the law burdens the exercise of constitutional rights, (2) whether the law is punitive in nature, and (3) whether the law overlays a defendant-protective scienter requirement. Measured against these factors, copyright law does not meet the vagueness doctrine's minimum requirement of fair notice to the public. Copyright, by …


Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky Oct 2002

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 …


Longshoreman-Shipowner-Stevedore: The Circle Of Liability, Harney B. Stover, Jr. Jan 1963

Longshoreman-Shipowner-Stevedore: The Circle Of Liability, Harney B. Stover, Jr.

Michigan Law Review

It is universally recognized that in the past two decades the United States Supreme Court has substantially revised the law under which seamen, longshoremen and harbor workers (or their survivors) may recover damages for personal injury and death. One of the more recent and most authoritative texts in the field of admiralty and maritime law devotes an entire chapter, 147 pages in length, to the subject of the rights of seamen and maritime workers (or their survivors) of recovery for injury and death. The introduction to that chapter likens the Court's rewriting of the law in this field to a …