This article assesses the relation between punitive and compensatory damages in a data set, gathered by Hersch and Viscusi (H-V), consisting of all known punitive damages awards in excess of $100 million from 1985 through 2003. It shows that a strong, statistically significant relation exists...

Impact assessment (IA) has gone from an innocuous technical tool typically used in the pre-legislative phase to an instrument at the heart of the European institutional machinery. However – in deviation from its roots as a tool governing delegated rulemaking in the US – most experience with...

Courts are rarely asked to judge beauty. Such a subjective practice would normally be anathema to the ideal of objective legal standards. However, one area of federal law has a long tradition of explicitly requiring courts to make aesthetic decisions: the law of design. New designs may be...

The Internet threatens many right holders who consistently battle against technologies that enable people to use their copyrighted materials without their consent. While copyright holders have succeeded in some cases, their main battle against peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing has yet to be...

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure generally provide only the “rules of the road” on which litigation is conducted. However, in some areas the Rules step outside of this role and attempt to overtly encourage cooperation. One such rule is Rule 68, which allows a defendant to make an offer...

Courts and commentators are sharply divided about how to assess “reverse payment” patent settlements under antitrust law. The essential problem is that a PTO-issued patent provides only a probabilistic indication that courts would hold that the patent is actually valid and infringed, and...

This article explores the “Squeaky Wheel System” (“SWS”) in business-to-consumer (“B2C”) contexts, referring to merchants’ reservation of purchase remedies and other contract benefits for only the relatively few “squeaky wheel” consumers who have the requisite information and...

Mass harm situations caused by corporate misbehaviour (e.g. anticompetitive practices, misleading market information), defective products, harmful pharmaceuticals, accidents or environmental disasters nowadays tend to multiply and create new challenges not only for legal actors, but also for...

Major crises like the ongoing and future one connected to the SARS-CoV-2 virus have a way of exposing current public-policy approaches as being woefully inefficient and insufficient at accomplishing their stated aims. While programs connected to public health and the economy will receive the...

The phrase ‘access to justice’ is growing more common in contemporary debates about the Australian civil justice system. This article examines the concept of access to civil justice, why it is important, and the obstacles to achieving it, before reporting the results of an empirical survey...