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Full-Text Articles in Legal Remedies
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Michigan Law Review
Clarity can be a considerable virtue in property rights. But even when property rights are defined clearly in the abstract, ascertaining the scope of those rights in concrete situations often entails significant cost. In some instances, the cost of acquiring information about the scope of property rights will exceed the social value of that information. In those circumstances, further search for information about the scope of rights is inefficient; the social harm avoided by further search does not justify the costs of the search. Potential resource users, however make decisions based on private costs and benefits, not social costs and …
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
Twenty years ago, Deborah Hensler and a team of scholars at the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice issued a report entitled Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics. Pressure had been mounting both in the business community and the Republican Party to "reform" tort law throughout the 1980s. There was concern that Americans "egged on by avaricious lawyers, sue[d] too readily, and irresponsible juries and activist judges wayla[id] blameless businesses at enormous cost to social and economic well-being." The RAND report argued that the real risk of a torts "explosion" came from the world of mass …