In his landmark 1961 article, Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts, Judge Calabresi provides a theoretical framework for analyzing tort liability as a risk-spreading device that functions in a manner similar to insurance. In our article, we examine the insurance objective of tort liability from the standpoint of modern tort law. Since Calabresi’s foundational article, there h...

It is common to hear claims that tort law is undermining the ability of America to grow economically. Tort liability imposes costs on businesses, who complain about its detrimental effects on investment and innovation. While many of these reports are anecdotal, or even false, there is growing evidence on the economic effect of tort law. Tort reform proposals are pressed, and often passed, on th...

The conception of tort privacy developed by Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser sits at the heart of American understandings of privacy law. Rooted in protection of private information against unwanted collection, use, and disclosure, tort privacy protects against emotional injury and was directed by design against disclosures of true, embarrassing facts by the media. In this essay, I argue that as c...

This Article considers the broad range of "tort experiments" states have undertaken in recent years, as well as the changing attitudes of Congress and the Supreme Court toward state tort law. Notably, while states have limited tort rights and remedies in the products liability and personal injury areas in recent years, they have at the same time increased tort rights and remedies to address new...

Losers and Losers: Some Demographics of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms Our research examines individual differences in the effects of medical malpractice tort reforms on pre-trial settlement speed and settlement amounts by age and most likely settlement size. Findings of note include that, unlike previously assumed, both absolute and percentage losses from tort reform are small for infants in...

Introduction The formal legal rules governing tortious behaviors in post-Mao China can be traced back to the General Principles of the Civil Law (Minfa Tongze, hereinafter as “General Principles”) promulgated in 1986. Since then, tort disputes have become a main type of cases litigated in courts. In 2007, the number of tort cases accepted by Chinese courts totaled to about 863,000, and in 2008,...

The Portuguese Constitution, in article 22, instituted the general principle of tort liability of the State and other public law entities. Consequently, ordinary legislation established the tort liability of the State into the Portuguese Legal Order, by means of Decree-Law 48051, of 1967. This decree, which was criticised extensively, was amended by virtue of Law 67/2007, of 31 December, establ...

Mass tort scholars, practitioners, and judges struggle with determining the most efficient approach to adjudicate sometimes tens of thousands of cases. Favoring class actions, mass tort scholars and judges have assumed that litigating any issue once is best. But while litigating any one issue could conceivably save attorneys’ fees and court resources, a single adjudication of thousands of mass ...

This article highlights two contrasting sets of images of tort that are dominant in UK culture. The first set reflects various aspects of the traditional portrayal of justice, which depicts tort as an independent ‘natural’ system of rules of universal application forming the foundation of a just society. The second group of images is more recent and relates to the perceived development of a dam...