RAWLS AND TORT LAW: A CRITIQUE OF RIPSTEIN

Automobile Accidents, Tort Law, Externalities, and Insurance: An Economist’s Critique

Preface – By Todd Litman This is a seminal article concerning traffic accident cost analysis and vehicle insurance pricing reform by Professor William Vickrey, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for economics. It describes how to determine the marginal accident costs of vehicle travel, identifies several problems associated with current insurance pricing and compensation practices, and proposes inn...

Epstein's Tort Theory: a Critique

IN three articles published in this journal between 1973 and 1975, my colleague Professor Richard Epstein set forth an ambitious normative theory of tort law.' Among the distinctive features of this theory were the author's insistence that strict liability based on causal principles should be the prima facie standard of liability, that notions of liberty rather than of economic efficiency shoul...

Modern Tort Law Demystified

Innovation , tort law , and competition

In this paper, we examine the link between innovative activity on the part of firms, the competitive pressure to introduce innovations and optimal damages awards. While innovative activity brings forth valuable new products for consumers, competitive pressure in the ensuing innovation race induces firms to launch innovations too early, thereby raising the likelihood of severe product risks abov...

Serious Tort Law Reform

Tort law is a form of collective intervention into social and economic affairs that carries with it substantial costs, both public and private. These costs include higher prices for goods and services, higher taxes, and the socially undesirable consequences that tort law has on people's behavior such as the failure of companies to develop and introduce products the public wants, the wasteful an...