CONTEXT Proponents of restrictions on malpractice lawsuits claim that tort reform will improve access to medical care. OBJECTIVE To estimate the effects of changes in state malpractice law on the supply of physicians. DESIGN Differences-in-differences regression analysis that matched data on the number of physicians in each state between 1985 and 2001 from the American Medical Association's...

While various liability rules of tort law provide efficient incentives to invest, breach remedies of contract law are claimed to be distortive. Since, at least in Germany, obligations law provides general rules for both contractual and tort relationships such discrepancy seems puzzling. The paper identifies a saddle point property as the driving force behind most efficiency results and it estab...

“It’s a Wonderful Life,” the title of Frank Capra’s classic 1946 movie, seems to encapsulate a fundamental all-American conviction. Unsurprisingly, several courts and jurists have applied the movie-title maxim as the ultimate retort to one of the most intriguing questions in modern tort discourse: Is it possible to say that a severely disabled child has been harmed by the mere fact of being bor...

Throughout its history, the jury has attracted both stiff criticism and unqualified praise, viewed by turns as an incompetent, naïve, and biased decision maker and as an astute repository of folk wisdom and common sense. Here, we examine how the American jury actually behaves in the tort cases that produce the majority of civil jury trials. The evidence shows that juries usually use reasonable ...

In a large number of products liability lawsuits, sellers assert that plaintiffs’ claims should be rejected because their products fall under some federal regulatory regime, and that the regulatory statute takes precedence over or “preempts” state tort law. This paper is an attempt to set out a positive theory of the doctrine on preemption of products liability claims. The federal case law is l...