How best to compensate victims of mass disasters – whether made by man or nature – is a worldwide problem. This article considers the very different approaches in three recent U.S. disasters. In the 2001 9/11 terrorist bombings, in which the wrong-doers could not reached, the government bore the brunt of the compensation. In the Katrina litigation, where the damage was from the 2005 hurricane, ...

The law of products liability in tort is designed to maintain a reasonable balance between the inevitable social costs and the benefits of innovative product technologies. Technological development must be supported not only for the best interests of the public but also the side effect namely product defect into one of the following: (1) manufacturing defect; failures to correctly implement saf...

Since 2004, 25 states have passed Commonsense Consumption Acts (CCAs) to shield the food industry from civil liability for claims arising from obesity-related health harms. These laws continue to be introduced. CCAs have generally been discussed in terms of "tort reform." For this article, we conducted a systematic analysis of the content of all 25 state laws and found that the potential impact...

Since the early 1970s, an increasing number of plaintiffs in U.S. federal civil litigation have attempted to sue anonymously to conceal their identities from the general public or defendants. To be sure, this litigation represents a tiny fraction of all civil actions, since cases where plaintiffs are permitted to proceed with a “Doe” or similar appellation remain rare due to constitutional and ...

Periods in which the costs of personal injury litigation and liability insurance have risen dramatically have often provoked calls for reform of the tort system, and medical malpractice is no exception. One proposal for fundamental reform made during several of these volatile periods has been to relocate personal injury disputes from the tort system to an alternative, administrative forum. In t...