The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 tackles many health care-related issues, but medical malpractice liability reform is not one of them. Despite being a perennial target of health care reform -- with accompanying assertions that a medical malpractice liability crisis is...

There is an interesting exception to businesses’, employers’, and service providers’ seemingly universal embrace of arbitration processes, particularly mandatory pre-dispute arbitration. Although it may be difficult to believe given arbitration’s current popularity, not everyone requires...

Many U.S. states are now in their fifth year of a medical malpractice "crisis", a period of volatility in the malpractice insurance market characterized by above average increases in premiums, contractions in the supply of insurance and deterioration in the financial health of carriers....

In this paper, we explore the sensitivity in the clinical decisions of physicians to the standards of care expected of them under the law, drawing on the abandonment by states over time of rules holding physicians to standards determined by local customs and the contemporaneous adoption of...

Reasons for the joint use of ex ante regulation and ex post liability to cope with environmental accidents have been a longstanding issue in law and economics literature. This article, which includes the first empirical study of the French environmental legal system, analyzes courts’ decisions...

The key question in this paper is to determine whether regulation and regulators information can help solving causal uncertainty problems in liability. A widely held view among Law & Economics scholars is that civil liability alone is not well-suited to cope with environmental accidents,...

Attorney advertising routinely targets tort victims. This paper reviews legal services advertising restrictions in the United States and abroad. A theoretical model is developed which incorporates advertising intensity, litigation costs, and an endogenous number of lawsuits. Since advertising...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

This chapter — to be included in Research Handbook on the Economics of Torts (Arlen ed., Kluwer, forthcoming 2012) — assesses economic rationales for punitive damages in light of contemporary empirics and doctrine. The primary economic rationale for supra-compensatory damages is optimal...

Background. This study is the first to quantify physicians' malpractice insurance limits. It also examines the connection between policy size and payments on claims, including the frequency of settlement at the policy limits and the frequency of out-of-pocket payments. Methods. Statistical...