Category Archives: Torts

A Holy Grail for Pluralist Theory?

Nov 17, 2015 Sheila ScheuermanTorts

Sheila Scheuerman

Can pluralistic legal theories be unified around a common framework? That’s the tantalizing question that Ronen Perry tackles in his recent essay. Perry is searching for a holy grail—a unifying principle for all pluralistic theories of law. Even if the holy grail does not exist, the quest itself proves interesting and worthy of consideration.

Modern tort theorists have advanced at least three rationales for the tort system: deterrence, individualized justice, and compensation. Under a deterrence-economic perspective, the goal of the tort system is to prevent accidents in an efficient manner. On the other hand, an individualized justice theorist views the tort system as a way to remedy a wrong caused by one to another. Finally, under a compensation or distributive justice theory, tort law’s goal is to spread loss and provide compensation to victims of tortious injury. But few scholars accept these multiple theories, and instead focus on their own singular rationale. Continue reading "A Holy Grail for Pluralist Theory?"

How to Get Away with Negligence

Oct 20, 2015 John GoldbergTorts

John Goldberg

In Gatsby and Tort, Robin West engagingly argues that Fitzgerald’s famous novel highlights serious shortcomings of tort law as it has been traditionally understood, and of modern efforts to supplant or reconceptualize it.

West begins by observing that Gatsby would make for a good torts exam. In its ‘fact-pattern’ one can find bases for claims of battery, fraud, and criminal conversation. There is also a paradigmatic example of negligence—Daisy Buchanan, speeding in Gatsby’s Rolls Royce, runs down Myrtle Wilson. (Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, had darted out into the street while escaping her husband George’s efforts to cloister her.) As West further notes, the novel ends with narrator Nick Carraway condemning the despicable Buchanans on terms that sound in tort: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it is that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” (P. 3.) Continue reading "How to Get Away with Negligence"

Is Negligence Law Less Objective Than We Think?

Sep 14, 2015 Gregory KeatingTorts

Gregory Keating

Avi Dorfman, a private law scholar at Tel Aviv University, has posted a deep and provocative paper Negligence and Accommodation: On Taking Other People as They Really Are. Negligence and Accommodation is one of those rare papers that manage to say something new about familiar terrain. Here, the terrain is negligence law’s treatment of primary (other-regarding) negligence and contributory (self-regarding) negligence. Dorfman makes the case that the matter is of prime importance for our understanding of the morality of negligence law. The essential idea is simple enough. We are accustomed to thinking of the standard of reasonable care as objective. Indeed negligence law is famously objective. It holds people to the standard of conduct that an idealized normal person would achieve. Dorfman argues, however, that negligence law takes people as they are—subjectivizes by taking their individual limitations into account—more than we think, but it does so asymmetrically. Negligence law takes the traits of victims into account when they fail to exercise sufficient care for their own protection, but it is as firmly objective as the received wisdom takes it to be when it addresses the negligence of those who endanger others.

Challenging the Received Wisdom

Quite rightly, Negligence and Accommodation, takes negligence law’s treatment of physical disability as the canonical instance of the law addressing people whose capacities and competencies are less than those of the standardized “reasonable person.” The paper then marshals an impressive amount of evidence in support of two theses. The first is that the law makes allowance for physical disability and adopts a “watered-down standard of care [for] cases of contributory or comparative negligence.” (P. 12, fn. omitted.)¹ The second is that not even “one case concerning the conduct of the tort-feasor has made allowance for her physical disability. Thus, tort-feasors are required to exercise the care a non-disabled tort-feasor would have been expected to exercise.” (P. 13, fns. omitted.) Neither of these theses is either wholly new, or utterly surprising. As Dorfman notes, Fleming James stressed that the subjectivization of the standard of care found its most intense manifestation in the case of physical disabilities. Still, no one has developed as thoroughly or as persuasively the thesis that asymmetric treatment of self-regarding and other-regarding obligations of care is a deeply entrenched feature of negligence law.² In zeroing in on the asymmetric treatment of primary and contributory negligence, moreover, Dorfman is highlighting a theoretically important feature of negligence law. The two dominant tort theories of our time—economic analysis and corrective justice—both impose frameworks which suggest that primary and contributory negligence are on a par and both tend to push the actual treatment of contributory negligence by negligence law to the peripheries of their theories. They do so because the law’s asymmetric approach embarrasses both views. Continue reading "Is Negligence Law Less Objective Than We Think?"

Theorizing Damage Through Reproductive Torts

Jul 29, 2015 Martha ChamallasTorts

Martha Chamallas

Of the five basic elements of the negligence cause of action (duty, breach, cause-in-fact, proximate cause, damage), the concept of “damage” (sometimes referred to as “injury” or “harm”) has probably received the least attention from torts scholars and certainly commands less time in the classroom. Indeed, the comparative lack of discussion likely exacerbates the common tendency to confuse the concept of actionable damage with the related topic of recoverable damages, i.e., those specific items of loss (such as medical expenses or sums paid for pain and suffering) that are a consequence of an actionable injury. In the U.S., controversial claims for negligent infliction of emotional distress and for reproductive injuries, especially wrongful conception and wrongful birth claims, have triggered debates under the headings of duty, proximate cause, or recoverable damages. Recently, however, Gregory Keating has argued that the concept of harm “can do more work than it is presently being made to do,”¹  inviting more theorizing about what lies beneath the largely intuitive concept of harm or damage.

This ambitious article by British tort theorist Nicky Priaulx aims to fill the void by theorizing about the normative dimensions of the concept of damage. Although she doesn’t use the f-word (feminism) until the end of the piece when she discusses just whose injuries tend to be addressed by tort law, her approach is clearly informed by feminist scholarship, as is evident by her starting point that the concept of damage is “imbued with ideals of social justice and equality [and] directed towards treating like cases alike.” (P. 2.) But Priaulx’s legal feminism is of a newer stripe: it is as much about harm to men as it is about harm to women and is interwoven into a universal theory about how to shape tort law to fit the social experience of injury. Continue reading "Theorizing Damage Through Reproductive Torts"

What’s Missing in New Zealand?

Jul 1, 2015 Scott HershovitzTorts

Scott Hershovitz

“What’s missing in New Zealand?” That’s the question David Enoch poses in his thought-provoking essay, Tort Liability and Taking Responsibility. As every tort scholar knows, New Zealand has abandoned tort law, at least for injuries caused by accidents. Instead of filing a tort suit, a person injured in an accident files a claim with the Accident Compensation Corporation, which quickly determines whether she suffered a qualifying injury and, if so, provides compensation for it. The money paid out is funded through levies on risk-generating activities. So the New Zealand scheme provides compensation and (at least some) deterrence. It also puts the costs of accidents on the people who risk causing them. And it does all that at a lower cost than maintaining a system of private lawsuits, like tort. That sounds pretty good to Enoch—so good, in fact, that he wonders what is to be said for tort law in face of the New Zealand alternative.

Perhaps there is nothing to be said on behalf of tort. That’s what Enoch wants us to ponder. But he offers a tentative suggestion about what’s missing in New Zealand, and a rather surprising one at that. “What’s missing in New Zealand,” he says, “is the tortfeasor taking responsibility for her actions.” (P. 252) Now, we should pause here to acknowledge how odd that sounds. Many tortfeasors never take responsibility for their actions; they contest liability to the bitter end. Tort cannot ensure that tortfeasors take responsibility. What it can do, and does do, is assign responsibility, whether or not tortfeasors wish to take it. Continue reading "What’s Missing in New Zealand?"

Does Tort Law Stifle Innovative Medical Treatments?

Jun 2, 2015 Mark GeistfeldTorts

Mark Geistfeld

The interaction between medical malpractice law and the provision of health care is the subject of an ongoing policy debate. Do physicians practice “defensive medicine” to avoid being sued? Does the high cost of liability insurance or the looming threat of unfounded malpractice claims drive physicians from particular specialties or regions of the country? These issues have dominated the debate for years. Recently, another issue has gained prominence. Does malpractice law deter physicians from adopting innovative procedures? This is probably more important than the question of whether tort law induces the practice of “defensive medicine.” Whereas “defensive medicine” ordinarily increases the cost of health care via the provision of unnecessary medical treatments, the deterrence of medical innovations has a direct impact on health outcomes.

Gideon Parchomovsky and Alex Stein argued in 2008 that tort law deters medical innovations because the legal standard of required or reasonable care is defined by customary medical practices. A physician who innovates necessarily departs from custom. When her innovations cause harm, she faces the prospect of incurring malpractice liability for her apparently “unreasonable” behavior. That physicians might forego non-customary treatments in order to shield themselves from potential tort liability has been confirmed by a series of empirical studies conducted by Michael Frakes and others. Frakes and his colleagues have found that after a state has rejected local customs in favor of national standards for defining the required care, local surgery rates converge toward the national rate. When the standard of reasonable care was defined by local customs, physicians who followed these practices could avoid the threat of liability that they would face if they instead followed national norms. When jurisdictions shifted the legal measure of proper care from local to national customs, a significant number of physicians began to comply with the national practices. Apparently, this change in behavior was motivated by the change in tort law’s test of reasonable care, not by any independent medical evaluation of whether compliance with the local or national custom was in the best interests of the patient. Continue reading "Does Tort Law Stifle Innovative Medical Treatments?"

Contractualism and Tort Law

Apr 6, 2015 Benjamin C. ZipurskyTorts

Benjamin C. Zipursky

In addition to serving as the editor of Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts (OUP 2014), John Oberdiek has provided his own contribution, an excellent and penetrating chapter entitled Structure and Justification in Contractualist Tort Theory. (Full disclosure: John Goldberg and I have a co-authored chapter in the volume.) In it, Oberdiek offers a careful, original, and important analysis that brings together tort theory and the moral and political theory of contractualism, especially as developed by today’s leading contractualist, Thomas M. (“Tim”) Scanlon.

Economic theories of tort law derive from a roughly utilitarian framework for thinking about normative questions and numerous corrective justice accounts derive from a broadly-speaking Kantian framework. If one felt stuck between economic accounts that were too reductive and corrective justice accounts that were too focused upon abstract Kantian rights, one might ask whether social contract theory has anything to offer tort theory. George Fletcher’s Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory answered “yes,” and famously contributed Rawlsian ideas to tort theory. As Oberdiek helpfully explains, Gregory Keating’s work over the past twenty years has developed strong Rawlsian themes in tort theory in a more extensive and defensible manner than Fletcher’s evocative but concededly underdeveloped article. In negligence, products liability, and the law of nuisance, for example, Keating has admirably constructed a tort theory based on Rawlsian themes of fairness and reciprocity.¹ Continue reading "Contractualism and Tort Law"

Big Data and Deterrence

Mar 4, 2015 Nora EngstromTorts

Nora Engstrom

In a provocative new piece, Zenon Zabinski and Bernard Black address one of the most stubborn questions within all of tort law: Does tort law deter? The idea of deterrence is so deeply embedded within tort law that it seems absurd that the answer isn’t clear cut. But alas, a full four decades after the law and economics movement propelled tort’s deterrent function onto center stage, the answer to the question has, so far, remained maddeningly inconclusive.

This is not for lack of effort or investigation. Indeed, over the past few decades, scholars have tried to assess tort’s deterrent function in a wide variety of contexts, using any number of methodologies, from interviews with organizational insiders, to targeted case studies, to experimental vignettes, to surveys to assess the behavior and motivations of everyone from physicians and corporate managers to in-house counsel and CEOs.

In addition, empirically-minded scholars have contributed to this sprawling literature, most notably by exploiting natural experiments. Thus, they’ve amassed data to evaluate external shocks to liability risk in “treated” environments to see whether accident rates go up when liability risk (for whatever reason) goes down. Continue reading "Big Data and Deterrence"

Making Courts Attractive to Plaintiffs

Feb 3, 2015 Keith HyltonTorts

Keith Hylton

Have you read Supreme Court cases on personal jurisdiction and wondered about the utilitarian basis for restricting the power of a court to assert jurisdiction over the parties in a case? The court opinions have often left me wondering what problem jurisdictional restrictions are designed to address. Finally, someone has provided an answer.  Dan Klerman (USC Law School) and Greg Reilly (California Western Law School), in their recent working paper, “Forum Selling,” provide a theory of inefficient jurisdiction grabbing by courts. If courts have a tendency to grab jurisdiction excessively under certain conditions, as Klerman and Reilly argue, then society’s welfare could be enhanced by restricting their power to assert jurisdiction.

The authors note that limitations on jurisdiction would probably not be necessary if all legal disputes arose out of contracts. The parties to contracts have incentives to choose the courts that optimize the value of their contracts, provided both sides to the contract are reasonably sophisticated. An accurate, fair, and efficient court enhances the joint value of the contract, leaving more surplus to be divided between the parties. To be more specific, sophisticated contract parties will choose the court that maximizes the difference between the joint governance benefits of the contract and the dispute resolution costs. Thus, there is little basis on social welfare grounds for preventing sophisticated parties from forum shopping through contract. The same can be said when the parties jointly agree on the dispute resolution forum, because if a forum gets a reputation for being too one-sided in favor of plaintiffs or defendants, few parties will jointly choose it as a place to resolve disputes. Continue reading "Making Courts Attractive to Plaintiffs"

Does Tort Law Empower?

Dec 19, 2014 Anthony SebokTorts

Anthony Sebok

Ori Herstein’s How Tort Law Empowers takes on the question of whether and how tort law empowers victims. Herstein presents himself as a friendly critic of civil recourse theory, and offers an amendment that he claims makes the theory both more plausible and less interesting. Like many friendly amendments, it is an offer that must be carefully examined before it is accepted.

Herstein begins by noting that one of the most important and interesting contributions by civil recourse theory is the idea that tort law empowers tort victims. This contribution comes from the work of John Goldberg and Ben Zipursky, and has been embraced by others as well, either within tort law or in other parts of private law, such as contract theory (see, for example, the work of Nate Oman and Andrew Gold). Continue reading "Does Tort Law Empower?"