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...

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on the law and economics of liability insurance. The canonical Shavell model predicts that, despite the presence of some ex ante moral hazard (care-reduction by insureds), liability insurance will generally raise welfare because its...

Liability insurers use a variety of tools to address adverse selection and moral hazard in insurance relationships. These tools can act on insureds in a manner that can be understood as regulation. We identify seven categories of such regulatory activities: risk-based pricing, underwriting,...

Persistently high profits on “insurance” for small value losses sold as an add-on to other products or services (such as extended warranties sold with consumer electronics, loss damage waivers sold with a car rental, and credit life insurance sold with a loan) pose a twofold challenge to the...

Insurance ideas inform legal thought: from tort law, to health law, to theories of distributive justice. Within legal thought, insurance is often conceived as an ideal type in which insurers distribute determinable risks through contracts that fix the parties' obligations in advance. This ideal...

Lost in the recent efforts to take political advantage of (or explain away) the rapid rise in liability insurance premiums is any real attempt to understand the underwriting cycle, why it is so severe in medical malpractice insurance, and what it might mean for the ability of malpractice...

Prepared for an edited volume on gun litigation (Suing the Firearms Industry, T. Lytton, ed.), this working paper examines the topic of gun risks as a case study of liability insurance as a form of regulation. The paper identifies the following broad categories of 'regulation by insurance': loss...

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...

Top law firms are notoriously competitive, fighting for prime clients and matters. But some of the most elite firms are also deeply cooperative, willingly sharing key details about their finances and strategy with their rivals. More surprisingly, they pay handsomely to do so. Nearly half of the...