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...

A subtle shift has taken place in the mechanics of preemption, the doctrine that determines when federal law displaces state law. In the past, Congress was the leading actor, and courts and commentators focused almost exclusively on the precise wording of its statutory directives as a clue to...

This Article focuses on public nuisance’s innovative use as a means of recovering purely financial losses between non-contracting parties (i.e., “strangers”), in particular where the economic loss rule potentially bars recovery. The Article proposes a new approach to reconciling the torts...

Conventional wisdom holds that the punitive damages class action is susceptible not only to doctrinal restraints imposed on class actions but also to constitutional due process limitations placed on punitive damages. Thus, it would seem that the prospects for punitive damages classes are even...

Part I of my review of John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky’s (GZ), Recognizing Wrongs (Harv. U. Press 2020) reframes the book as, first and foremost, a sustained critique of the law-and-economics, deterrence-focused view of tort law, rather than (as GZ set forth) the affirmative case for the...

This article describes and evaluates from a comparative perspective the approach to tort liability for pure economic loss adopted in the Restatement (Third) Torts: Liability for Economic Harm. The analysis highlights three fundamental issues: whether a claim in tort can arise concurrently with a...

This book chapter explores how common law (state or federal) tort law evolves to fill regulatory voids. Particularly in areas that pose emerging, and incompletely understood, health and safety risks, common law tort liability holds out the potential for a dynamic regulatory response, one that...