Source: http://www.wildy.com/isbn/9780674753235/reforming-products-liability-hardback-harvard-university-press
Timestamp: 2017-10-23 09:59:20
Document Index: 101368624

Matched Legal Cases: ['art 1', 'art 2', 'art 3', 'art 4', 'art 5', 'art 6', 'art 7', 'art 8', 'art 9', 'art 10', 'art 11']

Wildy & Sons Ltd — The World’s Legal Bookshop Search Results for isbn: '9780674753235'
W.Kip Viscusi
ISBN13: 9780674753235
ISBN: 0674753232
The liability crisis is both familiar and puzzling: million-dollar awards for apparently frivolous claims, inadequate settlements for thousands of people with severe injuries, skyrocketing insurance premiums, an overburdened judicial system. The adverse effects of this crisis on product innovation may be particularly detrimental to the extent that they deprive consumers of newer and safer goods.;W. Kip Viscusi offers an analysis of the crisis. He employs original empirical data to diagnose the causes and to assess the merits of alternative reform policies.;Drawing on both liability insurance trends and litigation patterns, Viscusi shows that the products liability crisis is not simply a phenomenon of the 1980s but has been developing for several decades. He argues that the principal causes have been the expansion of the doctrine of design defect, the emergence of mass toxic torts, and the increase in lawsuits involving hazard warnings. This explanation differs from those of many scholars, who blame the doctrine of strict liability. Viscusi reformulates the concept of design defect, grounding it in economic analysis. He also evaluates public policy regarding hazard warnings and proposes a new national approach.;More generally, the author sketches a comprehensive social risk policy, in which tort liability interacts with government health and safety regulation to foster a coherent set of institutional responses to health and safety risks.;""Reforming Products Liability"" should be of special interest to lawyers, judges, policymakers, economists and all those interested in legal policy and health and safety issues.
Part 1 Diagnosing the liability crisis: perpsectives on liability reform; recent trends in products liability; proposals for reform.
Part 2 The dimensions of the liability crisis: accident rates decline, but litigation soars; the surge in asbestos litigation; insurance industry trends; roots of the insurance crisis, 1980-1984; other economic effects of products liability; the design defect doctrine and hazard warnings.
Part 3 The litigation process: the overall structure of produts liability litigation; court verdicts; claims settled out of court; cases that are dropped; using economic models to assess reform proposals.
Part 4 The design defect test: a case study of risk-utility tradeoffs; risk-utility analysis; the producer as insurer; alternative risk-utility measures; on the threshold of marketability; who decides?; proposals for restructuring the product defect test.
Part 5 The explosive mathematics of damages: the insurance value and the deterrence value of damages; inflation and the increase in verdict awards; noneconomic damages; has voodoo economics come to the courts?; applying the value of life - the Ford Pinto case; proposals for setting damages.
Part 6 Regulation of product safety: the adequacy of incentives; regulatory violations and products liability litigation; restructuring the institutional interactions.
Part 7 Hazard warnings: the objectives of hazard warnings; assessing the quality of warnings; warnings and the risk-utility test; regulatory compliance; toward a national warnings policy.
Part 8 Environmental and mass toxic torts: the market paradigm and why it fails; products liability - an inadequate remedy; agent orange and the economic stakes of mass toxic torts; compensation funds; strategies for mass toxic torts.
Part 9 Workers' compensation: lessons from the workers' compensation experience; job-related products liability claims and workers' compensation.
Part 10 Will products liability reform matter?: insurance availability; products liability definitions; state-of-the-art defenses; statutes of limitation; collateral source rules and damage rules; effects on premiums.
Part 11 A strategy for principled products liability reform. Appendices: products liability costs in different industries; the litigation of job-related claims.