Torts Commons^™

Hb 1 - Space Flight, Malissa Caroline Barger, Ethan L. Smith

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act limits the civil and criminal liability of a space flight entity for injuries sustained by space flight participants arising from ordinary negligence. The Act defines new terms and provides a statutory waiver form that participants with informed consent must sign. The Act mandates space flight participants sign the waiver before participating in any space flight activity. The Act does not limit the liability of space flight entities for gross negligence or intentional acts, nor does it prevent suits from anyone other than the space flight participant.

Allocating Liability Among Multiple Responsible Causes: Principles, Rhetoric And Power - Chapter 2, Richard Wright

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Where To From Here For The Catholic Church- Recommendations 94 And 95 Of The Redress And Civil Litigation Report, Jane Power

The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse handed down its Final Report in December 2017. In 2015 it presented its interim Redress and Civil Litigation Report which contained final recommendations in relation to reform in civil litigation. Recommendations 94 and 95 of the Redress and Civil Litigation Report both directly and indirectly address the lack of legal entity for the Catholic Church in Australia and the problems this causes litigants seeking legal recompense. This paper considers the current legal status of the Catholic Church in Australia in light of the Recommendations.

Recovering Wagner V. International Railway Company, Kenneth S. Abraham, G. Edward White

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Through The Smoke: Do Current Civil Liability Laws Address The Unique Issues Presented By The Recreational Marijuana Industry?, Thomas Stufano

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cardozo And The Civil Jury, Michael D. Green, Ashley Dimuzio

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Whole Wide World: Recognizing Jus Cogens Violations Under The Alien Tort Statute, Ursula Tracy Doyle

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sexual Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Those who wish to control and expose the identities of women and people from marginalized communities routinely do so by invading their privacy. People are secretly recorded in bedrooms and public bathrooms, and “up their skirts.” They are coerced into sharing nude photographs and filming sex acts under the threat of public disclosure of their nude images. People’s nude images are posted online without permission. Machine-learning technology is used to create digitally manipulated “deep fake” sex videos that swap people’s faces into pornography.

At the heart of these abuses is an invasion of sexual privacy—the behaviors and expectations that manage …

Liability For Unintentional Nuisances: How The Restatement Of Torts Almost Negligently Killed The Right To Exclude In Property Law, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

This article argues that nuisance was historically unique in tort law because of its special role in protecting property rights.' In other words, nuisance historically had distinct features addressed to the special situation of land. Most importantly, nuisance protected the right to exclude in a way that no other cause of action did. The Second Restatement's change then diminished our rights to private property to the extent that it has been adopted. The majority of courts retain the more logical and defensible position--that property rights are special and nuisance encompasses something more than the idea of negligence.

Trouble Counting To Three: Circuit Splits And Confusion In Interpreting The Prison Litigation Reform Act's 'Three Strikes Rule,' 28 U.S.C. § 1915(G), Molly Guptill Manning

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

In 1892, Congress enacted an in forma pauperis statute that waived filing fees for indigent litigants so that anyone, regardless of their financial ability to pay court fees and costs, could bring a federal action. Seventy years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that, so long as a case was "not clearly frivolous," in forma pauperis status should be granted, as "it is our duty to assure to the greatest degree possible . . . equal treatment for every litigant before the bar." Yet, by the 1990s, federal courts faced a staggering increase in filings. Civil rights litigation, alone, experienced a …

Should We Use A Class Action's Impact On Stock Price To Gauge The Reasonableness Of Class Counsel's Fee?, John Fitzgerald Ready

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

If a deterrence rationale fuels the engine that is class action litigation, then its principles should inform our efforts to cure the imperfections in class counsel compensation schemes. Class action defendants are deterred from wrongdoing when it becomes economically unwise to act as such. For publicly-traded companies, the economic prudence of their conduct depends on shareholder perception. Class actions are bad news for shareholders of the named defendant public company. In response, the market reacts, a company’s share price decreases, and a message is sent to the company about the imprudence of its conduct. A question then arises: should we …

2017 Annual Survey: Recent Developments In Sports Law, Jordan Lysiak, Katherine Hampel

Marquette Sports Law Review

None

Negligent Entrustment In Gun Industry Litigation: A Primer, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

Deep pocket jurisprudence, where plaintiffs name corporations as codefendants of less wealthy individual tortfeasors, is not uncommon in tort litigation. When the plaintiffs are victims of gun violence and the corporate defendants are firearms manufacturers, however, these suits are particularly controversial. Instead of aiming to make the victims whole, these suits are opposed (or supported) as attempts to regulate the firearms industry on a widespread basis. This article explores some of the resources available to understand the recent history of suits against firearms manufacturers.

Your Bank May Be An International Terrorist: The Inconsistent Application Of Tort Law Principles To Financial Services Under The Anti-Terrorism Act, Elizabeth Walsh Pittman

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Group Defamation, Power, And A New Test For Determining Plaintiff Eligibility, Jeffrey Greenwood

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

In the fall of 2014, Rolling Stone Magazine published an article describing the rape of a woman at a University of Virginia fraternity house. The story turned out to be false, and members of the fraternity sued for defamation. The suit raises an interesting question: under what circumstances may anonymous individual members of the fraternity recover? This Note describes the case, related common and constitutional law, as well as differences in group defamation doctrine across jurisdictions. After detailing problems with the existing paradigm, the Note proposes a new method for performing the analysis.

How The U.S. Supreme Court Deemed The Workers' Compensation Grand Bargain 'Adequate' Without Defining Adequacy, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

During the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a handful of opinions rejecting 14th Amendment constitutional challenges by employers to implementation of workers’ compensation statutes in the United States. Unknown to many, the statutes were largely the fruit of privately-sponsored investigations, principally by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Association of Manufacturers, of European workers’ compensation systems during the first decade of the twentieth century. Some of those systems had been in existence since the 1870s and 1880s, and many employers preferred them to newly-emerging American employer liability statutes that retained …

Duty, Foreseeability, And Montemayor V. Sebright Products, Inc., Mike Steenson

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Revisionist Municipal Liability, Avidan Y. Cover

Georgia Law Review

The current constitutional torts system under 42
U.S.C. § 1983 affords little relief to victims of
government wrongdoing. Victims of police brutality
seeking accountability and compensation from local
police departments find their remedies severely limited
because the municipal liability doctrine demands
plaintiffs meet near-impossible standards of proof
relating to policies and causation.
This Article provides a revisionist historical account
of the origin of the Supreme Court's municipal liability
doctrine. Most private claims for damages against
cities or police departments do not implicate the
doctrine's early federalism concerns over protracted
federal judicial interference with local governance.
Meanwhile, the federal government imposes …

The Impropriety Of Punitive Damages In Mass Torts, James A. Henderson Jr.

Georgia Law Review

Punitive damages have been around for centuries in classic
one-on-one tort actions and are here to stay. Mass torts, of
more recent origin, have matured to the point that this article
is comfortable referring to most of them as traditional.
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of both institutions when
employed separately, loud warning signals should sound
when, as with drinking and driving, they are combined.
Potentially destructive mixes of punitive damages and mass
torts have, unfortunately, been prevalent in traditional,fault-
based mass tort actions. The difficulties are mostly
administrative.Although punitive damages are conceptually
compatible with fault-based mass torts, courts administer
punitive awards …

A Single Symbolic Dollar: How Nominal Damages Can Keep Lawsuits Alive, Megan E. Cambre

Georgia Law Review

The Eleventh Circuit's August 2017 opinion in
Flanigan's Enterprises v. City of Sandy Springs
deepened a circuit split regarding the role of
nominal damages in the justiciabilityanalysis. The
critical question is whether, in cases involving
constitutional violations, a claim for nominal
damages alone suffices to confer standing or to
defeat mootness when other forms of relief are
unavailable or moot. The Second, Fifth, and Ninth
Circuits have all held that nominal damages alone
are enough, but not without contention from
dissenting judges. The First, Third, Fourth,
Seventh, Eighth, and D.C. Circuitshave considered
the question-but have not conclusively decided its
answer. …

A Cure From Rome For Montreal’S Illness: Article 5 Of The Rome I Regulation And Filling The Void In The 1999 Montreal Convention’S Regulation Of Carrier’S Liability For Personal Injury, Yehya I. Ibrahim Badr

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

An examination of the 1999 Montreal Convention shows that the drafters did not intend to lay down a comprehensive treaty that would organize a carrier’s liability for personal injury to passengers. They opted to achieve a certain level of uniformity through enacting a set of rules that tackled several key issues such as the grounds for a carrier’s liability, the available defenses, and the limits on the recoverable damages. Consequently, some unaddressed issues created a void in the Montreal Convention and were then left without a clear remedy. In this article, a distinction is made between two types of voids: …

Jesner V. Arab Bank, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The exclusion of transnational human rights litigation from U.S. federal courts is, for most practical purposes, now complete. On April 24, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 5–4 ruling in Jesner v. Arab Bank, deciding that foreign corporations cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

Opioid Addiction Litigation And The Wrongful Conduct Rule, Samuel Fresher

University of Colorado Law Review

The United States is facing an opioid addiction crisis. Can our civil courts help? This Comment explores obstacles to recovery for plaintiffs in tort suits against health care institutions and practitioners in opioid addiction litigation. It argues that defenses based on plaintiffs' wrongful conduct, which deny plaintiffs access to civil remedies due to their immoral or illegal conduct, should be eliminated or avoided in suits arising out of addiction. This Comment concludes that comparative fault principles adequately protect the interests of plaintiffs and defendants in drug addiction suits and advance important public policy goals. Finally, this Comment suggests that irrespective …

The Failure Of “Sorry”: An Empirical Evaluation Of Apology Laws, Health Care, And Medical Malpractice, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

Lewis & Clark Law Review

As part of the effort to contain the size and frequency of medical malpractice claims, many states have adopted apology laws. These laws make apologies from physicians to patients inadmissible in any subsequent court proceedings. The basic rationale behind apology laws is that meritless malpractice claims are less likely to be filed when a physician can apologize to his or her patient without risking those statements being used in court. Through the use of a unique dataset, this Article corrects several misunderstandings concerning this new generation of tort reform.

First, it shows that while apology laws may reduce the frequency …

Engineering Standards In Highway Design Litigation, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Highway engineers sometimes believe that if they redesign streets to improve pedestrian safety (for example, by introducing traffic calming techniques) they might be successfully sued for negligent design by motorists. This chapter suggests that in such situations, governments are likely to be protected by discretionary function immunity. In addition, the chapter discusses a variety of technical issues.

Devalued Liberty And Undue Deference: The Tort Of False Imprisonment And The Law Of Solitary Confinement, Efrat Arbel

All Faculty Publications

Despite numerous calls for reform and restraint, solitary confinement continues to be both misused and overused in Canadian prisons. This paper charts a path through which to address such misuse, but analyzing solitary confinement through the tort of false imprisonment. This analysis is new: while some scholars have examined how other branches of tort law can address harms caused by solitary confinement, none have examined the application of this tort. I argue that the tort of false imprisonment provides segregated prisoners with an effective means through which to seek compensation for individual harm. As an intentional tort that is actionable …

The Admissibility Of Sampling Evidence To Prove Individual Damages In Class Actions, Hillel J. Bavli, John Kenneth Felter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The 2016 Supreme Court decision in Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo revived the use of “representative” or sampling evidence in class actions. Federal courts are now more receptive to class plaintiffs’ efforts to prove classwide liability and, occasionally, aggregate damages, with sampling evidence. However, federal courts still routinely deny motions for class certification because they find that calculations of class members’ individual damages defeat the predominance prerequisite of Rule 23(b)(3). As a result, meritorious classwide claims founder. In this paper, we combine legal and statistical analyses and propose a novel solution to this dilemma that adheres to the Tysondecision …

Palsgraf V. Long Island R.R.: Its Historical Context, William E. Nelson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conflicts Between Kentucky's New Tort Reform And The Jural Rights Doctrine, Christopher N. Jacovitch

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Defamation And Privacy In The Social Media Age: What Would Justice Brennan Think?, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.