Medical malpractice law and tort reform are contentious issues. In this paper we focus on Italy as an example of a civil law jurisdiction. Italian medical malpractice law is essentially judge-made law. However, its effectiveness is likely to be curtailed by excessive delays in litigation....

In this paper, we make three central arguments. The first important argument questions the implicit assumption of the activity-level effect literature that there is a monotonically increasing relationship between the probability of an accident's occurring and the quantity of the underlying risky...