Torts Commons^™

Beyond Section 230 Liability For Facebook, Nancy S. Kim

Articles

No abstract provided.

Liability For Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Medicine, W. Nicholson Price, Sara Gerke, I. Glenn Cohen

Law & Economics Working Papers

While artificial intelligence has substantial potential to improve medical practice, errors will certainly occur, sometimes resulting in injury. Who will be liable? Questions of liability for AI-related injury raise not only immediate concerns for potentially liable parties, but also broader systemic questions about how AI will be developed and adopted. The landscape of liability is complex, involving health-care providers and institutions and the developers of AI systems. In this chapter, we consider these three principal loci of liability: individual health-care providers, focused on physicians; institutions, focused on hospitals; and developers.

A Cure Of What Ails You: How Universal Healthcare Can Help Fix Our Tort System, David Pimentel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Three Kinds Of Fault: Understanding The Purpose And Function Of Causation In Tort Law, Marin Roger Scordato

Scholarly Articles

Causation is a concept of enormous importance in the law. In just the last two years, the United States Supreme Court has explicitly considered its importance and meaning on at least three occasions, in areas of the law as diverse as specific personal jurisdiction, Title IX, and Section 1981. It has also been the subject of sustained scholarly examination and debate. In no area of the law is causation as foundational and omnipresent as in tort law, and in no sphere within tort law is it more prevalent than in its dominant cause of action, negligence. Unsurprisingly then, the causation …

Emotional Distress Recovery For Mishandling Of Human Remains: A Fifty State Survey, Christopher Ogolla

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Criminal Legal System Doesn’T Care About Your Mental Illness, Fredrick E. Vars

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Why would a beloved small-town doctor with no history of violence suddenly strangle his father to death? The Other Dr. Gilmer is a gripping account of the search for an answer to this question. It turns out the doctor has a rare neurological disorder that likely caused the killing. If only the diagnosis had come before trial, the author believes, the doctor would not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. That belief is appealing, but naïve. Jails and prisons are full of people with mental illness. Misdiagnosis is not the reason. A close examination …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreward

Putting The Bar Exam On Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, And The Public Good, Scott Johns

Seattle University Law Review

Nothing to see here. Season in and season out, bar examiners, experts, supreme courts, and bar associations seem nonplussed, trapped by what they see as the facts, namely, that the bar exam has no possible weaknesses, at least when it comes to alternative licensure mechanisms, that the bar exam is not to blame for disparate racial impacts that spring from administration of this ritualistic process, and that there are no viable alternatives in the harsh cold world of determining minimal competency for the noble purpose of protecting the public from legal harms. All a lie, of course.

But rather than …

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Third Restatement, Duty, And Foreseeability, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm (the “Third Restatement”) was adopted by the American Law Institute in 2010. The approach taken by the Third Restatement to negligence law excludes foreseeability from the duty determination and places it squarely as a relevant factor in the breach issue; it adopts the “but-for” standard for causation; and rejects proximate cause terminology, instead utilizing a scope of liability approach in which the key question is whether the harms that occurred were of the same general type that made the actor’s conduct tortious. Removal of foreseeability from the duty determination …

The Pandemic And The Public Nuisance: Judicial Intervention In The Era Of Covid-19 And The Collective Right To Public Health, Kyra Ziesk-Socolov

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Amidst the unprecedented disruption caused by COVID-19, workplace lawsuits around the country began to apply a longstanding common law theory in a novel way: employee plaintiffs argued that their employers’ noncompliance with state and federal public health guidance designed to curb the spread of the virus should be enjoined as a public nuisance. Although some of these initial public nuisance suits were dismissed, others successfully forced defendant businesses to either alter their COVID safety practices or temporarily close. This Article explores the first pandemic-era public nuisance suit, Rural Community Workers Alliance v. Smithfield Foods, brought by meatpacking plant workers …

Assuming The Risks Of Artificial Intelligence, Amy L. Stein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Tort law has long served as a remedy for those injured by products—and injuries from artificial intelligence (“AI”) are no exception. While many scholars have rightly contemplated the possible tort claims involving AI-driven technologies that cause injury, there has been little focus on the subsequent analysis of defenses. One of these defenses, assumption of risk, has been given particularly short shrift, with most scholars addressing it only in passing. This is intriguing, particularly because assumption of risk has the power to completely bar recovery for a plaintiff who knowingly and voluntarily engaged with a risk. In reality, such a defense …

Mypillow Lands Hard In Judge Wright’S Court, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

In Smartmatic USA Corp. v. Lindell, Smartmatic sued Michael Lindell and MyPillow, Inc. in Minnesota federal district court, alleging defamation and violation of Minnesota’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act based on Lindell’s claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including that Smartmatic voting machines were rigged. This post focuses on Smartmatic’s defamation claim against Lindell and MyPillow.

Hb 1150: Freedom To Farm Act, Wyatt Bazrod, Sarah Page

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act protects agricultural facilities, agricultural operations, and forest landowners from nuisance lawsuits after two years of operation. If a facility converts to a confined animal feeding operation, the two-year time period restarts.

Fifty More Years Of Ineffable Quo? Workers’ Compensation And The Right To Personal Security, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

During the days of Covid-19, OSHA has been much in the news as contests surface over the boundaries of what risks of workplace harm are properly regulable by the federal government. Yet the original statute that created OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970—was not exclusively concerned with front-end regulation of workplace harm. Just over fifty years ago, the same Act mandated an investigation of the American workers’ compensation system, which consists of a loose network of independent state workers’ compensation systems. The National Commission created by the Act to carry out the investigation issued a report of its …

The Color Of Pain: Racial Bias In Pain And Suffering Damages, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

For more than half a century, our legal system has formally eschewed race-based discrimination, and nearly every field of law has evolved to increase protections for minority groups historically burdened by racial prejudice. Yet, even today, juries in tort actions routinely consider a plaintiff’s race when calculating compensatory tort damages, and they do so in a manner that systematically results in lower awards to Black plaintiffs than to White. This Article examines this problem, zeroing in on the specific issue of racial bias in calculations of tort damages for pain and suffering.

The severity of a plaintiff’s injury is commonly …

The Limits Of Regulation By Insurance, Kenneth S. Abraham, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

Indiana Law Journal

Insurance is an enormously powerful and beneficial method of spreading risk and compensating for loss. But even insurance has its limits. A new and misleading aspiration for insurance—that it also can and often does substitute for or significantly complement health and safety regulation—is increasingly in vogue. This vision starts from the uncontroversial recognition that insurers typically adopt measures designed to counteract “moral hazard,” the tendency of insurance to blunt policyholders’ incentives to take care. But proponents of this vision go on to contend that the risk-reducing potential of insurance is significantly more extensive than is traditionally imagined, because insurers are …

Patient Decision Aids Improve Patient Safety And Reduce Medical Liability Risk, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Tort-based doctrines of informed consent have utterly failed to assure that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the healthcare they receive. Fifty years of experience with the doctrine of informed consent have shown it to be an abject catastrophe. Most patients lack an even minimal understanding of their treatment options. But there is hope. Substantial evidence shows that patient decision aids (PDAs) and shared decision making can bridge the gap between the theory and practice of informed consent. These evidence-based educational tools empower patients to make decisions with significantly more knowledge and less decisional conflict than clinician-patient discussions …

Can Environmental Law Solve The "Forever Chemical" Problem?, Mark P. Nevitt, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Articles

Although federal environmental law purports to provide the public with comprehensive protection against chemical risks, the U.S. chemical industry is characterized by self­ regulation. This self-regulation is exemplified by the dangers posed by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (''PFAS'')­ broad classes of persistent toxic substances that have now entered nearly every American's bloodstream and hundreds of public drinking water systems. Despite data linking exposure to these "forever chemicals" to cancer, infertility, and a host of other public health harms, environmental law has failed to safeguard the American people from PFAS' toxic legacy. How did this occur? And what should be done …

The Other Hand Formula, Maytal Gilboa, Yotam Kaplan

Lewis & Clark Law Review

A defendant who obtained an undeserved benefit at the plaintiff’s expense must make restitution of that benefit. This is the fundamental maxim of the law of unjust enrichment, allowing recovery based on the defendant’s gain rather than on the plaintiff’s loss. Unfortunately, liability in unjust enrichment is notoriously unprincipled. The key problem is that scholars and courts cannot agree on the correct manner for distinguishing meritorious claims from non-meritorious ones in this important area of the law.

To correct this deficiency, the present Essay provides a simple mathematical formula explaining when plaintiffs should be able to recover the defendant’s gain …