Workplace violence is a growing social problem. Some of this growth may be perceptual, reflecting our new awareness of what constitutes violence in the workplace. Furthermore, much of what falls under its current rubric does not correspond to the classic image of worker-on-worker or worker-on-employer mayhem. Nevertheless, the total number of incidents is alarmingly large; the problem is real. ...

A tort liability system involves two primary objectives: deterrence of unsafe behavior and compensation for resulting harms. In the U.S., where alternative methods to pay for resulting harms are not as available as in most other industrialized nations, both objectives seem equally important. In other nations where government programs are far more readily available to pay for health care and los...

We explore how the incentives of a plaintiff, when considering filing suit and bargaining over settlement, differ between suits associated with stand-alone torts cases and suits involving mass torts. We contrast ‘‘individual-based liability determination’’ (IBLD), wherein a clear description of the mechanism by which a defendant’s actions translate into a plaintiff’s harm is available, with ‘‘p...

Many psychiatrists believe that there is little or no liability associated with conducting examinations at the request of a third party or with providing testimony in civil litigation. Case law has demonstrated otherwise. Psychiatrists conducting independent medical examinations (IMEs) may be vulnerable to tort lawsuits by either the evaluee or the third party who commissions the IME. In additi...

I Much of what follows is an exercise in conceptual analysis. It is an effort to devise a test for determining which of two competitive schemes-that for acts or that for omissions should apply in analyzing a given question of responsibility for the death of another. It is significant inquiry, if only to add a word to the discussion of the ponderous legal quandaries of physicians who care for te...

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this paper, we estimate this relationship using clinically validated measures of health care treatment quality...

Abstract Volenti non fit injuria allows a negligent defendant to escape liability by showing that the claimant voluntarily and willingly accepted risk in question. This article combines theoretical limitations of volenti defence with case analysis how its application has played out “real world”, argues it is not for modern tort law. The controversial chequered history, being described as “so-ca...

Why should tort law treat claims for emotional harm as a second-class citizen? Judicial skepticism about these claims is long entrenched, justified by an amalgam of perceived problems ranging from proof difficulties for causation and the need to constrain fraudulent claims, to the ubiquity of the injury, and a concern about open-ended liability. To address this jumble of justifications, the law...