Torts Commons^™

Summary Of Boorman V. Nevada Memorial Cremation Society And Clark County Coroner’S Office, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 29, David Krawczyk

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Re-Examining Acts Of God, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

For more than three centuries, tort law has included the notion of an act of God as something caused naturally, beyond both man's anticipation and control. Historically, the doctrine applied to extraordinary manifestations of the forces of nature, including floods, earthquakes, blizzards, and hurricanes. Despite the significance of the doctrine, particularly in large-scale disasters, scholars rarely engage the act of God defense critically. However, recently, the doctrine has received more substantial criticism. Denis Binder argued that the doctrine should be repudiated as merely a restatement of existing negligence principles Joel Eagle criticized the doctrine, suggesting that it should not exclude …

Summary Of Strickland V. Waymire, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 25, Keith Pickard

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court summary judgment ordering appellants’ recall elections to proceed based upon a reading of Article 2, Section 9 of the Nevada Constitution whereby any registered voter may sign the recall petition to reach the 25% numerical threshold. The Supreme Court unanimously held that only those voters who actually voted in the election which seated the officials may count toward the 25% threshold.

Summary Of Renown Health, Inc. V. Vanderford, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 24, Kristopher Milicevic

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court’s interlocutory order granting partial summary judgment to Vanderford based on the imposition of a nondelegable duty on Renown Health, Inc. The question on appeal was whether a hospital owes an absolute nondelegable duty to provide competent medical care to emergency room patients through independent contractor doctors.

Bending Nature, Bending Law, David Owen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

2009 Monsanto Lecture - Intent In Tort Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper, prepared for the 2009 Monsanto Lecture in Tort Jurisprudence, explains intent standards in tort law on the basis of the incentive effects of tort liability rules. Intent rules serve a regulatory function by internalizing costs optimally. The intent standard for battery internalizes costs in a manner that discourages socially harmful acts and at the same time avoids discouraging socially beneficial activity. The intent standard for assault is more difficult to satisfy than that for battery because it is designed to provide a subsidy of a sort to the speech that is often intermixed with potentially threatening conduct. In …

Material Contribution To Justice - Toxic Causation After Resurfice Corp. V. Hanke, Lynda M. Collins, Heather Mcleod-Kilmurray

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The vast universe of chemicals in the Canadian environment is presently understood only poorly by science. For many thousands of chemicals, important data regarding chronic toxicity are lacking. As a result, the requirement that the plaintiff in a negligence action prove causation of illness on a but-for standard has frequently been unattainable. In Resurfice Corp. v. Hanke, the Supreme Court of Canada articulated an important exception to the but-for test. In circumstances where but-for causation is unprovable due to limits in scientific knowledge, proof that a defendant materially contributed to the plaintiff's risk of incurring the type of injury that …

Chasing Reputation: The Argument For Differential Treatment Of Public Figures In Canadian Defamation Law, Bob Tarantino

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

When comparing the seminal Supreme Court of Canada defamation decisions of the 1990s and 2000s, it is apparent that the Court's view on the importance of protecting reputation has changed. Recent decisions hail the importance of using freedom of expression as a countervailing interest against the oft-criticized strictures of the common law of defamation. Fundamental alterations in the nature of mass and interactive media and in the nature of reputation are two phenomena informing this change. Increased attention to the theorizing of "reputation," the interest whose protection animates the entire tort of defamation, reveals that reputation is itself a highly …

Responsibility In Negligence: Why The Duty Of Care Is Not A Duty “To Try”, Ori J. Herstein

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Even though it offers a compelling account of the responsibility-component in the negligence standard—arguably the Holy Grail of negligence theory—it is a mistake to conceive of the duty of care in negligence as a duty to try to avert harm. My goal here is to explain why and to point to an alternative account of the responsibility-component in negligence.

The flaws in conceiving of the duty of care as a duty to try are: failing to comport with the legal doctrine of negligence and failing as a revisionary account for the law; overly burdening autonomy and restricting the liberty of …

The Story Of Us: Resolving The Face-Off Between Autobiographical Speech And Information Privacy, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

Increasingly more “ordinary” Americans are choosing to share their life experiences with a public audience. In doing so, however, they are revealing more than their own personal stories, they are exposing private information about others as well. The face-off between autobiographical speech and information privacy is coming to a head, and our legal system is not prepared to handle it.

In a prior article, I established that autobiographical speech is a unique and important category of speech that is at risk of being undervalued under current law. This article builds on my earlier work by addressing the emerging conflict between …

Voices From The Field: An Inter-Professional Approach To Managing Critical Information

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Coordinating Sanctions In Tort, Kyle D. Logue

Cardozo Law Review

This Article begins with the standard Law and Economics account of tort law as a regulatory tool or system of deterrence, that is, as a means of giving regulated parties the optimal ex ante incentives to minimize the costs of accidents. Building on this fairly standard (albeit not universally accepted) picture of tort law, the Article asks the question how tort law should adjust, if at all, to coordinate with already existing non-tort systems of regulation. Thus, if a particular activity is already subject to extensive agency-based regulation (whether in the form of command-and-control requirements or in the form of …

Putting The Brakes On Libel Tourism: Examining The Effects Test As A Basis For Personal Jurisdiction Under New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act, Michelle Feldman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tort Law, Kumaralingam Amirthalingam, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The three cases on conversion relate to the following issues: the distinction between the tort of conversion and the choice of remedy for purposes of determining the appropriate limitation period, the underlying rationale for conversion that is based essentially on possession of a chattel and finally, the question of whether a temporary certificate of entitlement for the purchase of a car in Singapore may be converted.

Summary Of Betsinger V. D.R. Horton, Inc., Et Al., 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 17, Mark Hesiak

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal and cross appeal from a jury verdict in favor of prospective home buyer who prevailed in a deceptive trade practice action against a home builder and its financing division.

Risk, Everyday Intutions, And The Institutional Value Of Tort Law, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Note offers a normative critique of cost-benefit analysis, one informed by deontological moral theory, in the context of the debate over whether tort litigation or a non-tort approach is the appropriate response to mass harm. The first Part argues that the difference between lay and expert intuitions about risk and harm often reflects a difference in normative judgments about the existing facts, rather than a difference in belief about what facts exist, which makes the lay intuitions more defensible. The second Part considers how tort has dealt with this divergence between lay and expert perspectives. It also evaluates how …

Aggregation, Community, And The Line Between, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

As class-action theorists, we sometimes focus so heavily on the class certification threshold that we neglect to reassess the line itself. The current line asks whether procedurally aggregated individuals form a sufficiently cohesive group before the decision to sue. Given this symposium’s topic - the state of aggregate litigation and the boundaries of class actions in the decade after Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp. - the time is ripe to challenge our assumptions about this line in non-class aggregation. Accordingly, this Article examines group cohesion and asks whether the current line is the only dividing …

Summary Of Posas V. Horton, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 12, Amy C. Ma

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court judgment entering a jury verdict in favor of the defendant, where the district court gave the jury sudden-emergency instruction for an automobile collision case.

Clarifying Causation In Tort, Erik S. Knutsen

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article argues that there is nothing overly confusing about the law ofcausation in negligence. It attempts to define the current state of causation in Canadian negligence law with a simple goal in mind: to have a clearer more productive conversation about the law with the fundamental concepts clearly on the table. The author argues that while the leading decisions on causation are often couched in broad-based, universal terminology to refrain from inhibiting conceptual portability,the cases can be read as a sustained continuum of conversations about causation. A cohesive framework for the law is offered by taking a longitudinal perspective …

Political Prediction Markets: A Better Way To Conduct Campaigns And Run Government, Andrew S. Goldberg

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The note advocates for the federal government to create an exception to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) specifically for political prediction markets and proposes that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulate these markets under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). It argues that political prediction markets, such as Intrade and the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), offer significant benefits, including improved information aggregation, accurate election predictions, and potential improvements in campaign strategy and policymaking. The note also highlights the potential for these markets to reduce corruption in campaign finance and provide individuals with a financial hedge against political outcomes.