This paper evaluates the impact of six different types of tort reforms on the frequency, size, and number of total annual settlements in medical malpractice cases between 1991 and 1998. Medical malpractice data come from the National Practitioner Data Bank, which contains more than 100,000 malpractice settlement payments in the study time frame. Of the six tort reforms examined, two reforms (ca...

Private enforcement, or litigation, has played a historic role in protecting public health in the United States. Litigation is often employed as a means to protect public health when government regulation is absent or ineffectual. Litigation has been successfully employed to control both asbestos and tobacco and is poised for success in combating the obesity epidemic. Litigation is effective be...

Periods in which the costs of personal injury litigation and liability insurance have risen dramatically have often provoked calls for reform of the tort system, and medical malpractice is no exception. One proposal for fundamental reform made during several of these volatile periods has been to relocate personal injury disputes from the tort system to an alternative, administrative forum. In t...

The law of products liability in tort is designed to maintain a reasonable balance between the inevitable social costs and the benefits of innovative product technologies. Technological development must be supported not only for the best interests of the public but also the side effect namely product defect into one of the following: (1) manufacturing defect; failures to correctly implement saf...

Since 2004, 25 states have passed Commonsense Consumption Acts (CCAs) to shield the food industry from civil liability for claims arising from obesity-related health harms. These laws continue to be introduced. CCAs have generally been discussed in terms of "tort reform." For this article, we conducted a systematic analysis of the content of all 25 state laws and found that the potential impact...