This Note identifies a discrepancy in the law governing the decisionmaking that directs patient care. Seeking treatment that a third party will pay for, a patient needs not only a physician-prescribed course of treatment but also an insurer's verification that the cost is medically necessary or otherwise covered by the patient's plan. Both of these decisions directly impact the ultimate care de...

In his recent article, “Liability Rules When Injurers as Well as Victims Suffer Losses,“’ Avon Leong examines the question whether the standard liability rules-pure negligence, negligence with contributory negligence, pure strict liability and strict liability with contributory negligence-can be used to induce efficient care-taking by individuals in those circumstances where both injurers’ and ...

S | 147 A Relevant Intent Theory of Patents Saurabh Vishnubhakat Postdoctoral Associate, Duke University School of Law Durham, NC This article challenges the axiom of U.S. patent law that direct patent infringement is a strict liability tort. Even among critics of the strict liability conception in certain patent contexts, the consensus view of direct infringement remains that impermissibly pra...

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...

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...