Topic
Strict liability
About: Strict liability is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3995 publications have been published within this topic receiving 34998 citations.
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Book•
11 Sep 1987
TL;DR: A group of legal scholars and economists have focused on identifying the effects of accident law on people's behaviour as discussed by the authors, and Shavell's book is the definitive synthesis of research to date in this new field.
Abstract: Accident law, if properly designed, is capable of reducing the incidence of mishaps by making people act more cautiously. Scholarly writing on this branch of law traditionally has been concerned with examining the law for consistency with felt notions of right and duty. Since the 1960s, however, a group of legal scholars and economists have focused on identifying the effects of accident law on people's behaviour. Steven Shavell's book is the definitive synthesis of research to date in this new field.
804 citations
Book•
20 May 1987
TL;DR: The first full-length economic study of tort law is as discussed by the authors, which provides a comprehensive description of the major tort law and a series of formal economic models used to explore the economic properties of these doctrines.
Abstract: Written by a lawyer and an economist, this is the first full-length economic study of tort law--the body of law that governs liability for accidents and for intentional wrongs such as battery and defamation. Landes and Posner propose that tort law is best understood as a system for achieving an efficient allocation of resources to safety--that, on the whole, rules and doctrines of tort law encourage the optimal investment in safety by potential injurers and potential victims. The book contains both a comprehensive description of the major doctrines of tort law and a series of formal economic models used to explore the economic properties of these doctrines. All the formal models are translated into simple commonsense terms so that the math less reader can follow the text without difficulty; legal jargon is also avoided, for the sake of economists and other readers not trained in the law. Although the primary focus is on explaining existing doctrines rather than on exploring their implementation by juries, insurance adjusters, and other real world actors, the book has obvious pertinence to the ongoing controversies over damage awards, insurance rates and availability, and reform of tort law-in fact it is an essential prerequisite to sound reform. Among other timely topics, the authors discuss punitive damage awards in products liability cases, the evolution of products liability law, and the problem of liability for mass disaster torts, such as might be produced by a nuclear accident. More generally, this book is an important contribution to the law and economics movement, the most exciting and controversial development in modern legal education and scholarship, andwill become an obligatory reference for all who are concerned with the study of tort law.
601 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors formalized the analysis of the economic effects of liability rules and analyzed the effects of decentralizing the problem and using only liability rules to solve it in terms of a two-person non-cooperative game.
Abstract: RECENTLY there have appeared a number of important articles by both lawyers and economists analyzing the economic effects of liability rules.? This paper formalizes the analysis of these effects. When two parties, the injurer and the victim, can both take measures to reduce the likelihood of accidents, and the measures are costly for both, the standard theory of production with two inputs and one output yields the conditions for the socially optimal amount of each accident avoidance measure. The effects of decentralizing the problem and using only liability rules to solve it can then be analyzed in terms of a two-person noncooperative game. I first show that there is a complete symmetry within each of the following pairs of liability rules: no liability and strict liability; the negligence rule and strict liability with contributory negligence; and the negligence rule with contributory negligence and strict liability with what I call dual contributory negligence. An analysis of the legal standards for negligence follows. I show that there is an important ambiguity in the so-called "Learned Hand Rule" for determining the level of avoidance effort below which a party is adjudged negligent. Two of the formulations of the rule lead to inefficient results.
557 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the optimal strategy of the principal is examined in an environment where there are (ex post ) limitations on the maximum penalty that can be imposed on a risk-neutral agent.
556 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a model of the occurrence of accidents is used to examine liability and safety regulation as a means of controlling risks, and neither liability nor regulation is necessarily better than the other, and as is stressed, their joint use is generally socially advantageous.
Abstract: A model of the occurrence of accidents is used to examine liability and safety regulation as means of controlling risks. According to the model, regulation does not result in the appropriate reduction of risk--because the regulator lacks perfect information--nor does liability result in that outcome--because the incentives it creates are diluted by the chance that parties would not be sued for harm done or would not be able to pay fully for it. Thus, neither liability nor regulation is necessarily better than the other, and as is stressed, their joint use is generally socially advantageous.
493 citations