In the traditional model of the law and economics of torts, harm accrues proportional to use. This has the remarkable implication for products-generated torts that product performance concerns (e.g., issues of care and of liability for harm) can be considered independently of market performance concerns (e.g., market structure and competition). Moreover, the classical analysis finds that all li...

This paper shows that polluters who underestimate environmental harm might invest excessively in promoting technological change in pollution control under environmental liability law. Neither strict liability nor negligence can prevent such a distortion. However, we define a second best due care standard under negligence that induces a welfare superior R&D equilibrium. If, on the other hand, po...

The purpose of this chapter is to compare negligence rules and strict liability rules and to examine the allocative effects resulting from the application of different liability regimes. It first discusses unilateral accidents, while the more complicated bilateral cases follow afterwards. Each section starts with a discussion of the rule of no liability before moving on to various forms of negl...

Here we set out the European product liability regime as it applies to medical devices and examine key cases that indicate how the legislation is likely to be interpreted. Despite the fact that the strict liability regime has been in existence for many years, numerous issues have yet to be resolved and there continues to be a lack of harmonisation between the EU member states. We highlight a nu...

Barriers in parallel languages may be used to schedule parallel activities, control memory usage and ensure proper sequentialization of side-eeects. In this paper we present operational semantics of barriers in Id and pH, which are non-strict, implicitly-parallel, functional languages extended with side-eeects. The semantics are presented as a translation from a source language with barriers in...