The primary functions of the tort system in resolving medical malpractice claims are to deter injuries and to compensate victims.' One reason for the high overhead of the tort system is the separation of liability and loss determinations. Calculations of damages are expected to follow general rules. 2 All injury classification schemes yield categories with some intracategory variation in actual...

According to the “standard model” of torts and moral wrongs—the model implicit in leading theories tort law—tort law imposes genuine duties that are distinct from, only roughly coincide with, our preexisting duties. A “tort,” on this model, is a distinctive kind wrong—the breach tort-generated duty. In Article, I argue should tell simpler story—one dispenses with domain distinct, what call “sim...

Annually, more than 1 million people were killed in road traffic accidents worldwide every year and an uncounted number were severe injured. In 2012 fatal injuries caused by road traffic accidents are under the top ten lists of causes of death in the world. It´s expected that in the near future road traffic accidents become one of the main causes of death in the world. Most of these fatal injur...

This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts' reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, recourse to cust...

Ongoing tort reform efforts attest to the significant burden that medical liability imposes on the health care system. General attempts to curb excesses can narrow socioeconomic disparities, but as Clark Havighurst and Barak Richman observe, such measures may leave intact some of the regressive characteristics of the framework they supplant. Therefore, it seems appropriate to question whether t...

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...

Legal historians have turned with renewed energy in recent years to the project of fleshing out the myriad rules by which the common law of the free labor employment contract structured social relations in nineteenth-century America. 1 Of course, labor relations have always been prominent in the literature. The German sociological tradition has long taught us to see in the legal protection of p...

In this paper, I connect the text of the Chinese tort law with the institutional context of lawmaking in China from a political economy perspective. Two determinants, political influence and populist pressure, were identified for the tort law legislation in China, and a simple spatial model is presented to demonstrate the mechanism through which these determinants might have affected the text o...