In the opening essay in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, Jonathan Simon and I assert that western society is engaged in a transformation from a dominant paradigm of spreading risks to a paradigm that involves embracing risk. (Baker & Simon, eds. 2002) The...

Insurance, we all know, transfers risk. Yet, what we usually think of as a transfer of risk is also a transfer of responsibility. The promise of insurance and other forms of risk management is gaining a measure of control over an uncertain world. Reaching out to insurance institutions for...

This article describes and compares two forms of moral regulation employed in connection with insurance institutions. The first governs through moralized personal attributes or pressures like "temptation" and "character." The second governs through moralized institutional or system attributes...

This manuscript reports the results of a qualitative study of personal injury lawyers in Connecticut. Building on the results of an earlier study of lawyers in Florida (Transforming Punishment Into Compensation: In the Shadow of Punitive Damages, 1998 WIS. L. REV. 211), the study describes and...

This essay was prepared for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas symposium on "My Favorite Insurance Case."

Insurance may be uniquely tied up with the law. Social insurance and other public sector insurance arrangements are creatures of statute, governed through administrative law. Private sector insurance arrangements depend upon a well-functioning contract law and a regulated market. Insurance...

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,...