Courts assessing compensatory damages awards often lack adequate information to determine the value of a victim's loss. A central reason for this problem, which the literature has thus far overlooked, is that courts face a dilemma when applying their standard information-forcing tool to the...

Legal systems differ markedly on how they treat the emotional harm suffered by close family members of crime or accident victims. This paper reports the results of two empirical studies examining how citizens whose child, partner, or parent was killed or seriously injured as a result of violent...

Bullying affects from fifteen percent to thirty percent of all students in the United States. It results in serious emotional problems for its victims and is a consistent predictor of later criminal behavior among its perpetrators. It is a major force behind dropout rates and absences, and for...

Laws governing relations between spouses have undergone profound changes that continue to revolutionize the standards and procedures for dissolutions of marriage. The most dramatic changes in divorce law have come from the advent of no-fault divorce, the decline in spousal maintenance awards,...

Alternative litigation financing (ALF) is a term that refers to the funding of litigation or arbitration activities by third parties, such as indemnitors or liability insurers, who have a contractual relationship with one of the parties to litigation. Third-party funders pay the plaintiff's...

At its 2018 Annual Meeting, The American Law Institute completed nearly a decade's worth of work on the Restatement of the Law, Liability Insurance. The Restatement's approval was deferred for a year from the 2017 Annual Meeting, largely because of opposition from insurance industry interests....

This article is based on my keynote address at the American Academy of Economic and Financial Experts conference in which I examined some of the implications for legal contexts of my book, Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society. The value of a statistical life (VSL) provides an economic...

On paper, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure apply equally to billion-dollar opioid allegations and small-stakes claims for $75,000.01. In practice, however, judges and attorneys in high-stakes multidistrict proceedings like those over opioids have invented a smattering of procedures that...

This lecture for the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, addresses the cost to society of pharmaceutical mass tort litigation, nearly 15 years after the withdrawal by Merck & Co., Inc. of Vioxx® (rofecoxib) from markets worldwide.When Merck...

Imagine that I commit a civil wrong against you. For example, imagine that I trespass over your property or carelessly injure you. What is the legal effect of my wrong? In particular, how does the wrong change my legal position? More specifically yet, does the wrong give rise to new duties or...