Damages

About: Damages is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9365 publications have been published within this topic receiving 89750 citations. The topic is also known as: compensation award.

Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform

Abstract: U.S. copyright law gives successful plaintiffs who promptly registered their works the ability to elect to receive an award of statutory damages, which can be granted in any amount between $750 and $150,000 per infringed work. This provision gives scant guidance about where in that range awards should be made, other than to say that the award should be in amount the court “considers just,” and that the upper end of the spectrum, from $30,000 to $150,000 per infringed work, is reserved for awards against “willful” infringers. Courts have largely failed to develop a jurisprudence to guide decision-making about compensatory statutory damage awards in ordinary infringement cases or about strong deterrent or punitive damage awards in willful infringement cases. As a result, awards of statutory damages are frequently arbitrary, inconsistent, unprincipled, and sometimes grossly excessive. This Article argues that such awards are not only inconsistent with Congressional intent in establishing the statutory damage regime, but also with principles of due process articulated in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on punitive damage awards. Drawing upon some cases in which statutory damage awards have been consistent with Congressional intent and with the due process jurisprudence, this Article articulates principles upon which a sound jurisprudence for copyright statutory damage awards could be built. Nevertheless, legislative reform of the U.S. statutory damage rules may be desirable.

Defamation and Freedom of Speech

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The Right to Reputation 3. Freedom of Expression and Freedom of the Media 4. Public Speech 5. The Presumption of Falsity 6. Fault and Defamation Liability 7. Aspects of Damages and Costs 8. Alternative Remedies 9. Conclusion

Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment

Abstract: This paper offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated damages clause. The moral obligations entailed by a contractual promise implicate unusually robust moral intuitions, which may deter parties from breaching even when there is an economic incentive to do so. However, those intuitions are not immutable. Decision researchers have found experimental evidence that, when social norms are in conflict with efficiency incentives, a more explicit incentive structure leads to more self-interested behavior. Liquidated damages are a means of making the sanction for breach explicit within a contract. The hypothesis of this research is that parties will be less resistant to breaching a contract that includes a liquidated damages clause. In a series of web-based questionnaires, subjects read contracts scenarios involving efficient breach opportunities. Subjects were asked to imagine themselves in the position of the promisor, and to indicate in each case the lowest offer that they would accept (from a hypothetical third-party offeror) to breach each contract. Subjects were randomly assigned to read either that their contract had a liquidated damages clause specifying damages for breach, or they were assigned to read an identical scenario in which the same damages were said to be "required by the law of contracts." Subjects in the liquidated damages condition gave much lower willingness-to-accept responses; they were willing to breach for less money. This was true even when the liquidated damages clause included a slight penalty on top of the promisee's expected loss. I argue that a liquidated damages clause clarifies the respective normative expectations of the parties, permitting efficient breach without repudiation of the mutual understanding.

Should Plaintiffs Win What Defendants Lose?: Litigation Stakes, Litigation Effort, and the Benefits of 'Decoupling'

Abstract: In a 1991 paper, Polinsky and Che argue that lowering plaintiffs’ recovery and raising defendants’ damages can deliver the same level of deterrence with fewer filed suits. A subsequent paper by Kahan and Tuckman provisionally corroborates Polinsky and Che’s analysis in an extended model that accounts for the effect of litigation states on litigation effort levels. In contrast, we show that when litigation effort is endogenous, Polinsky and Che’s proposal to lower recovery and raise damages may no longer improve social welfare. We then characterize the kinds of suits where it is in fact suboptimal to set recovery below damages. Of significance for the current policy debate, we find that such suits share many of the empirical premises about litigation that ground conventional arguments in favor of making recovery less than damages. Our findings are robust to the possibility of out‐of‐court settlement, plaintiffs’ employment of contingent‐fee lawyers, and alternative fee‐shifting rules.

First Do No Harm?: Tort Reform and Birth Outcomes

Abstract: We examine the impact of tort reforms using US birth records for 1989-2001 We make four contributions: First, we develop a model that analyzes the incentives created by specific tort reforms Second, we assemble new data on tort reform Third, we examine a range of outcomes Finally, we allow for differential effects by demographic/risk group We find that reforms of the "deep pockets rule" reduce complications of labor and C-sections, while caps on noneconomic damages increase them Our results demonstrate there are important interactions between incentives created by tort law and other incentives facing physicians