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...

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...

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,...

Tort law presents a puzzle from an information cost point of view. Like property, its duties often avail against others generally, but unlike property it is appears not to be standardized and is more subject to judicial innovation. This essay argues that torts, like property, employs modular structures to manage the complexity of interactions between actors. Both property and torts solve the in...

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...

This paper, prepared for the 2001 Washburn Torts Seminar, argues that tort law has some properties that make it superior to statute-based regulatory schemes as a system of environmental protection. In particular, two arguments, one based on enforcer-malfeasance and one based on information, suggest that tort law is preferable to statutory regulation. I sketch these arguments and apply them to n...

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...