Torts Commons^™

Terra Firma As Open Seas: Interpreting Kiobel In The Failed State Context, Drew F. Waldbeser

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will ultimately argue that, despite the expansive language in Kiobel, the Court’s reasoning does not necessarily foreclose all “foreign-cubed” claims. Suits alleging human rights violations originating from conduct that took place in failed states avoid the concerns the Court emphasized in Kiobel. The Court should allow jurisdiction for human rights offenses in failed states, despite their “foreign-cubed” nature, because the already existing rationale for allowing jurisdiction for international piracy offenses is highly analogous.

Part I of this Note explores the ATS jurisprudence leading up to and including Kiobel. Besides exploring the tensions and policy interests courts are grappling …

Tort Law, Kumaralingam Amirthalingam, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The plaintiff in Tan Bee Hock v F G Builders Pte Ltd was riding a motorbike when he skidded on a metal plate placed by the defendantat the entrance to a condominium. The plaintiff sued for his injuries in negligence, nuisance, and breach of statutory duty. On the facts, Kannan Ramesh JC (as his Honour then was) found that there was nothing unsafe about the metal plate and dismissed the claims in nuisance and negligence. Having found that the defendants had not done anything unsafe, Ramesh JC also dismissed the breach of statutory duty action, and in doing so, observed …

Worse Than Pirates Or Prussian Chancellors: A State's Authority To Opt-Out Of The Quid Pro Quo, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

Privatization of public law dispute resolution in workplaces has been under intense scrutiny in the context of arbitration. Another kind of workplace dispute privatization is presently underway, or under serious consideration, in several states. In connection with state workers’ compensation statutes, one state has implemented, and others are considering, a dispute resolution model in which employers are explicitly authorized to “opt out” of coverage. “Alternative benefit plans,” created under such statutes, permit employers to, among other things, unilaterally and without limitation designate private fact-finders, whose conclusions are subject to highly deferential judicial review. This model is arbitration on steroids. While …

Tort Law [2015], Kumaralingam Amirthalingam, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Outlining The Case For A Common Law Duty Of Care Of Business To Exercise Human Rights Due Diligence, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

This article outlines the case for a business duty of care to exercise human rights due diligence, judicially enforceable in common law countries by tort suits for negligence brought by persons whose potential injuries were reasonably foreseeable. A parent company’s duty of care would extend to the human rights impacts of all entities in the enterprise, including subsidiaries. A company would not be liable for breach of the duty of care if it proves that it reasonably exercised due diligence as set forth in the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. On the other hand, a company’s failure to …

Student-On-Teacher Violence: A Proposed Solution, Perris E. Nelson

Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Aviation Law - Personal Injury - The Warsaw Convention, As Modified By The Montreal Agreement, Acts To Establish The Air Carrier’S Strict Liability For A Passenger’S Personal Injury Incurred During An Aircraft Hijacking, Robert T. Bockman

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Adding Insult To Death: Why Punitive Damages Should Not Be Imposed Against A Deceased Tortfeasor's Estate In Ohio, Alec A. Beech

Akron Law Review

A majority of jurisdictions in the United States have determined, either statutorily or judicially, that punitive damages cannot be imposed against deceased tortfeasors. However, a recent Ohio appellate court held to the contrary. In Whetstone v. Binner, the Ohio Fifth District Court of Appeals adopted the minority view when it held that punitive damages could be imposed against a decedent’s estate. This Comment takes the position that Whetstone was incorrectly decided. Specifically, this Comment argues that the longstanding purposes of punitive damages are not furthered when such damages are imposed against estates and that Ohio law supports this conclusion.

Home Is Where The Confusion Is: Pennsylvania Formally Adopts The "Gist Of The Action" Doctrine And Builds A House For Ambiguity In Bruno V. Erie Insurance Co., Lauren Anthony

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Pleading Actual Malice In Defamation Actions After Twiqbal: A Circuit Survey, Judy M. Cornett

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Cost Of Rules, The Rule Of Costs, Victor Marrero

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Unsatisfactory State Of The Law: The Limited Options For A Corporation Dealing With Cyber Hostilities By State Actors, Daniel Garrie, Shane R. Reeves

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Eta?" Estimated Time Of Arrival: An Analysis Of New Jersey's Remote Texting Liability, Jennifer Edelson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lights, Camera, … Injury! The Nba Needs To Ban Courtside Cameramen, Joshua D. Winneker, Philip Schultze, Sam C. Ehrlich

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

Sex, Videos, And Insurance: How Gawker Could Have Avoided Financial Responsibility For The $140 Million Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Verdict, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

On March 18, 2016, and March 22, 2016, a jury awarded Terry Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) a total of $140 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Gawker Media for posting less than two minutes of a video of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife. The award was based upon a finding that Gawker intentionally had invaded Hulk Hogan’s privacy by posting the video online. The case has been receiving extensive media coverage because it is a tawdry tale involving a celebrity, betrayal, adultery, sex, and the First Amendment. The case likely will be remembered by most …

Causation And Standard Of Proof From An Economic Perspective, Bruno Deffains, Claude Fluet, Maiva Ropaul

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Causation is a problematic notion, as explained by Ronald Coase regarding the “bilateral nature” of externalities. However, causation has played only a minor role in standard economic models of civil liability. An exception is the sub-literature on Uncertainty Over Causation and the Determination of Civil Liability, the benchmark paper written by Steven Shavell in 1985: “. . . the familiar notion that for parties to be led to reduce accident risks appropriately, they should generally face probability-discounted or ‘expected’ liability equal to the increase in expected losses that they create. This, of course, is naturally the case in the absence …

Material Contribution To Risk In The Canadian Law Of Toxic Torts, Lynda M. Collins

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Causation is acknowledged as the single biggest hurdle to recovery for plaintiffs in toxic tort actions in Canada (and elsewhere). Scientific uncertainty involving questions of both generic and specific causation has frequently precluded recovery for plaintiffs even where defendants have negligently exposed them to toxic risk. Three types of uncertainty have been identified: plaintiff indeterminacy (where we know that the defendant has harmed some proportion of a particular population but no individual can prove causation); defendant indeterminacy (where we know that a group of defendants has harmed a particular plaintiff or plaintiffs but each can escape liability by pointing the …

Causation In Cases Of Evidential Uncertainty: Juridical Techniques And Fundamental Issues, Ken Oliphant

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This paper reviews from a comparative legal perspective the range of juridical techniques that have been developed in different legal systems to address perceived problems of uncertain alternative causation. It finds that the process of development has generally proceeded in an ad hoc and unprincipled fashion, without regard for overall coherence. It argues for a more principled legal approach in which the appropriate legal response (full liability, proportional liability or no liability) is adopted on the basis of a ranking of the different categories of cases in which problems of causal uncertainty can arise, reflecting the strength (or weakness) of …

Causation In Hepatitis B. Vaccination Litigation In France: Breaking Through Scientific Uncertainty?, Jean-Sebastien Borghetti

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Vaccination against hepatitis B has been available since 1982 and is strongly recommended by most health professionals. In France, the hepatitis B vaccine is very widespread, but it has come under suspicion that it can cause demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Several epidemiological studies have been carried out to discover if there is indeed a connection between the hepatitis B vaccination and demyelinating diseases, but no such connection has been established so far. Many cases have nevertheless been brought before French courts, in which plaintiffs argue that they have developed a demyelinating disease due to the hepatitis B vaccination, …

Attribution Of Liability: An Economic Analysis Of Various Cases, Michael Faure

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In many cases liability is attributed in a different way than through the clear cut situation where one tortfeasor causes harm to one single victim. Those cases of complicated attributions in tort law are analyzed in this article from an economic perspective. After briefly sketching the economic starting points in section II, the way in which multiple tortfeasors are dealt with in the law is analyzed in section III. Section IV analyzes the perspective of multiple tortfeasors in law and economics, distinguishing between the situations of full solvency, insolvency and insurability of more particularly joint and several liability. The article …

Economic Analysis Of Liability Apportionment Among Multiple Tortfeasors: A Survey, And Perspectives In Large-Scale Risks Management, Julien Jacob, Bruno Lovat

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The economic analysis of civil liability aims to demonstrate how the civil liability system can be set to provide the potential injurers with optimal incentives to regulate the level of risk they bear. However, despite a wide range of applications, there are few studies on the apportionment of liability between several tortfeasors. In this article, we especially focus on the case of an industrial activity involving a firm, whose activity is potentially harmful for the society, and one of its input providers. They both have an impact on the level of risk through an effort in care and quality. After …

Causation: Linguistic, Philosophical, Legal And Economic, Richard W. Wright, Ingeborg Puppe

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Causation plays an essential role in attributions of legal responsibility. How-ever, considerable confusion has been generated in philosophy, law and economics by the use of causal language to refer not merely to causation in its basic (actual/factual/natural) sense, which refers to the operation of the laws of nature, but also to the quite different normative issue of appropriate legal responsibility. To reduce such confusion, we argue that causal language in these disciplines should be used to refer solely to causation in its basic sense. While it is often said that the law need not and should not concern itself with …

Overdetermined Causation Cases, Contribution And The Shapley Value, Samuel Ferey, Pierre Dehez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The overdetermined causation cases (duplicative causation, concurrent causes, etc.) challenge the consistency and relevance of the but for test in torts. A strict application of the but for criterion to these cases leads to paradoxes and solutions that violate common sense. This explains why a large amount of literature has been developed in philosophy and jurisprudence to provide more accurate causation criteria. This paper adds to this literature by considering over-determination cases from an economic and mathematical point of view. Following Martin van Hees and Matthew Braham in their 2009 article Degrees of Causation, we consider over-determined cases through cooperative …

Online Defamation: Do Hyperlinks Constitute Republication For Florida Defamation And Trade Libel Claims?, Donna L. Eng, Roy E. Fitzgerald Iii, Gregory S. Weiss

UF Law Faculty Publications

These days businesses are at least equally associated with their websites as with their "brick and mortar" stores. Every Fortune 500 company has a website. The use of hyperlinks on websites is commonplace. In fact, adding hyperlinks to a website is a primary method of increasing the website's exposure and thereby traffic through search engine optimization. But what if the hyperlink refers an Internet user to information that is purportedly defamatory or libelous? Is there a Florida cause of action for defamation or libel when a hyperlink refers the Internet user to previously published defamatory or libelous information?

Because no …

Finding Common Law Duty Of Care From Statutory Duties: All Within The Anns Framework, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper examines the relationship between statutory duties and the common law duty of care in the tort of negligence. There are apparently divergent judicial statements on the general approach towards duty of care to be owed by persons under a statutory duty. One central question arises: should the courts treat the common law duty of care as subsisting generally unless it is excluded by the statute or must the plaintiff show that the Parliament intended to confer a private right of action or impose a common law duty? This paper argues that the two approaches may be properly accommodated …

The Treatment For Malpractice – Physician, Enhance Thyself: The Impact Of Neuroenhancements For Medical Malpractice, Harvey L. Fiser

Pace Law Review

This article will introduce some of the issues and offer some possible guidelines which may eventually guide cases of medical malpractice and medical care in the face of neurointerventions. First, I will briefly address the standard of care in medical malpractice cases in general. Second, I will discuss some of the existing and potential physical and neurological enhancements available for physicians. Finally, I will explore how these neurointerventions could alter the standards for medical malpractice for both the enhanced doctors and the entire medical profession.

Newsroom: Goldstein On Fossil Fuel Fraud Liability 04-12-2016, Edward Fitzpatrick, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Overtreatment And Informed Consent: A Fraud-Based Solution To Unwanted And Unnecessary Care, Isaac D. Buck

Florida State University Law Review

According to multiple accounts, the administration of American health care results in as much as $800 billion in wasted spending due largely to the provision of overly expensive, inefficient, and unnecessary services. Beyond inflicting fiscal pain on the nation’s pocketbook, this waste has no clinical benefit—and often results in unnecessary hospital stays, cascading follow-up procedures, and time-wasting inconvenience for American patients. But aside from the mere annoyance of unnecessary care, the administration of overtreatment—that is, unnecessary care in and of itself—causes harm to the patient. Excessive care is deficient care. Unnecessary care risks potential medical error and infection, and often …

Military Mothers And Claims Under The Federal Tort Claims Act For Injuries That Occur Pre-Birth, Tara Willke

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In order to right a longstanding wrong perpetrated against military mothers and their children, the Court should grant review in Ortiz v. United States ex rel. Evans Army Community Hospital. Part I of this Essay provides a brief discussion of the FTCA and the Feres doctrine. Part II discusses the facts and holding in Ortiz and its rejection of the approaches taken in other circuits involving pregnant service members and pre-birth injuries, which has caused a clear split in the circuits. Part III argues that these types of claims are not subject to the Feres doctrine because pregnancy and …

"Should" Or "Must"?: Distinguishing Mandates From Guidlines In Tort Claims Contexts, A. G. Harmon

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.