Throughout its history, the jury has attracted both stiff criticism and unqualified praise, viewed by turns as an incompetent, naïve, and biased decision maker and as an astute repository of folk wisdom and common sense. Here, we examine how the American jury actually behaves in the tort cases that produce the majority of civil jury trials. The evidence shows that juries usually use reasonable ...

This paper considers the effect of tort liability reforms on medical malpractice and general liability insurance markets. The primary reforms analyzed were damages caps and other liability reforms. These reforms decreased premiums, reduced losses, and improved the profitability of insurance companies based on evidence using detailed individual company by state data from the National Association...

Medical liability reform has maintained a tenacious hold on the national policy agenda. During the first several years of the 21st century, a malpractice insurance “crisis” prompted vociferous demands by organized medicine and liability insurers for tort reforms to curb litigation costs.1 Many observers anticipated that once the insurance market calmed, so too would calls for reform. Instead, a...

This article examines Stapleton's view that insurance has lacked influence and been no more than a 'makeweight' argument in the development of tort liability. Looking at the wider context, the article describes the overwhelming importance of insurers to the litigation system and argues that all cases are affected by insurance practice. It distinguishes the effect of insurance upon judicial fact...

After the Chinese Tort Liability Law was enacted in 2010, many discussions focus on the liability regime of internet intermediary service providers for illegal content on the internet under the Internet Clause. An online intermediary shall bear joint civil liability with the internet user when it knew that the internet user was taking advantage of its service to commit a tortuous act on its sys...

This paper studies driving factors behind the timing of state-level tort reform enactments between 1971 and 2005. Using discrete time hazard models, we find the level of litigation activity, as measured by incurred liability insurance losses and premiums, number of lawyers at the state level, and tort cases commenced at the state level and national level, to be the most important and robust det...

A large number of states adopted tort reforms in the mid-1980s to limit the dramatic surge in insurance losses and premiums. Evidence based on liability insurance data by state indicates that these reforms substantially infiuenced general liability insurance. The levels of losses, premiums, and loss ratios (a measure of insurance profitability) all reflected the impact of the reforms. The large...

I show below that, contrary to what is widely accepted, in situations of unilateral care a rule of strict liability is not optimal. The difference between my results and previous ones follows from my consideration of the victim’s rational behavior. JEL number: K13 (Tort Law and Product Liability). * I would like to thank Dan Orr and Tom Ulen for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Of course, re...