Shareholder litigation and class action suits play a key role in protecting investors and regulating big businesses. But Directors and Officers liability insurance shields corporations and their managers from the financial consequences of many illegal acts, as evidenced by the recent Enron...

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...

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on the impact of reforms on insurers' reported incurred losses, this article examines the ultimate effects of reforms using the developed losses from a comprehensive sample of insurers writing medical malpractice insurance...

Whereas the literature evaluating the effect of tort reforms has focused on reported incurred losses, this paper examines the long run effects using a comprehensive sample by state of individual firms writing medical malpractice insurance from 1984-2003. The long run effects of reforms are...

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."