This chapter describes how liability insurance has contributed to the transparency of the civil justice system. The chapter makes three main points. First, much of what we know about the empirics of the civil justice system comes from access to liability insurance data and personnel. Second, as...

This essay explores how liability insurance mediates the boundary between torts and crime. Liability insurance sometimes separates these two legal fields, for example through the application of standard insurance contract provisions that exclude insurance coverage for some crimes that are also...

This essay explores the new social contract of healthcare solidarity through private ownership, markets, choice, and individual responsibility embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This essay first explains the four main health care risk distribution institutions affected...

Young adults ages 18-29 have the lowest insurance rate of any age group in the United States. Part of the reason for this is that many young adults underestimate their risk of facing high medical costs - the risk is low, but not as low as these “young invincibles” believe. To address this,...

This essay extends to adverse selection the critical attention provided in prior work to moral hazard. Like moral hazard, adverse selection is an old insurance concept that was adopted, formalized and generalized by economists developing the economics of information. As with moral hazard,...

Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical...

Using the best publicly available data on lawyers' liability claims and insurance – from the largest insurer of large law firms in the U.S., the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Professional Liability, and a summary of large claims from a leading insurance broker – this...

In liability insurance, the duty to defend is broader than the duty to cover. Thus it is possible that an insurer that has a duty to defend a suit may not have the duty to cover the policyholder's liabilities in the suit. However, if the penalty for a breach of the duty to defend is limited to...