Response to Modern Tort Law: Preventing Harms, Not Recognizing Wrongs
Vol. 134 No. 4 Funny what passes for “modern.” It was around 1967 that the phrase “cheapest cost avoider” first appeared in the work of then-Professor Guido Calabresi....
Vol. 125 No. 7 The standard One-L curriculum remains heavy on Torts, Contracts, and Property, presumably on the theory that these subjects will help students learn “to think like lawyers.” Ironically, however, these are the subjects in which leading scholars are most attracted to the opposite approach: they want to think like economists, philosophers, political scientists, and historians, not like lawyers. And so it is that a basic common law subject like Torts has turned into a battleground for “law-and-” scholars, with scholars of law and economics pushing efficiency theories on one side and legal philosophers pushing corrective justice theory on the other.
Vol. 123 No. 8 The Uneasy Case for Product Liability, authored by Professors A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell, cannot sustain the burden it has set for itself. The evidence it marshals is surprisingly scant, consisting of anecdotes about products that suffered declining sales after being linked to certain injuries, observations about consumer’s improved access to safety information, a brief review of inconclusive studies of whether a rule of strict liability better deters the sale of unsafe products than a negligence rule, reminders of the high costs of civil litigation, and a smattering of microeconomic theory. These observations are nowhere near sufficient. In essence, Uneasy argues for the elimination of an entire body of law based on the absence of social scientific evidence of a certain sort demonstrating the significance of its contribution to the goals of deterrence and compensation.