Fee Shifting in Litigation: Survey and Assessment

Forensic economics experts (FE) working with attorneys engaged in litigation, whether consulting, preparing a report, or testifying at deposition or trial, generally are expected to have some knowledge (1) of the state’s statutory and case law regarding allowable damages and methods; and (2) that certain topics (e.g., taxes, collateral sources) should not be mentioned or considered at certain times since a mistrial could result. This situation creates a tension: forensic economics experts are economics experts and are not attorneys, but nonetheless must have a reasonable understanding of the relevant state law. In this vein, the Journal of Forensic Economics (JFE) continues to publish a series of articles on the ways such damages are calculated in different state jurisdictions, one state at a time.2 The state of South Dakota is included in this issue and this paper adds Illinois to the list. Following the format of previous articles in this JFE series, Section II provides a listing of the controlling statutes, general case law, and court rules. Section III discusses the concept of earning capacity which appears throughout PI and WD case law in Illinois. Section IV discusses discounting to present value. Fringe benefits are discussed in Section V, while Section

Predicting winner and estimating margin of victory in elections using sampling

It is rare that science owes a debt to law. To lawmakers, surely, such as those who regularly make generous appropriations to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes...

2 - The American Legal System

Social Justice and Deposit Return Calculations: A Study of Success and Failure in Commercial Law Reform

Price transparency regulations aim to help patients make informed decisions about medical care, but enforcing these rules is a policy challenge. There may be an association between financial penalties and hospital compliance for enforcing price transparency regulations. To evaluate the association between financial penalties and acute care hospital compliance with the 2021 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Price Transparency Rule. This cohort study uses an instrumental variable design to evaluate the responses of 4377 acute care hospitals in the US operating in 2021 and 2022 to changes in financial penalties in the context of a federal rule requiring hospitals to disclose privately negotiated prices. Changes in noncompliance penalties between 2021 and 2022 based on a nonlinear function of bed counts. Whether hospitals publicly posted a machine-readable file with private, payer-specific negotiated prices at the service-code level. Negative controls were used to address confounding. The final sample included 4377 hospitals. Compliance increased from 70.4% (n = 3082) in 2021 to 87.7% (n = 3841) in 2022, with 90.2% of hospitals (n = 3948) reporting prices in at least 1 year. Noncompliance penalties increased from $109 500/y in 2021 to a mean (SD) of $510 976 ($534 149)/y in 2022. Penalties in 2022 were substantial, averaging 0.49% of total hospital revenue, 0.53% of total hospital costs, and 1.3% of total employee wages. Compliance increases were significantly positively correlated with penalty increases: a $500 000 increase in penalty was associated with a 2.9-percentage point (95% CI, 1.7-4.2 percentage points; P < .001) increase in compliance. Results were robust to controlling for observable hospital characteristics. No associations were found for preperiod (2021) compliance or ranges of bed counts where penalties do not vary. In this cohort study of 4377 hospitals, compliance with the CMS Price Transparency Rule was associated with increased financial penalties. These findings are relevant for the enforcement of other regulations designed to promote transparency in health care.

This pioneering Handbook contains specially-commissioned chapters on tort law from leading experts in the field. This volume evaluates issues of vital importance to those seeking to understand and reform the tort law and the litigation process, taking a multi-disciplinary approach, including theoretical economic analysis, empirical analysis, socio-economic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Topics discussed include products liability, medical malpractice, causation, proximate cause, joint and several liability, class actions, mass torts, vicarious liability, settlement, damage rules, juries, tort reform, and potential alternatives to the tort system. Scholars, students, legal practitioners, regulators, and judges with an interest in tort law, litigation, damages, and reform will find this seminal Handbook an invaluable addition to their libraries.

This pioneering Handbook contains specially-commissioned chapters on tort law from leading experts in the field. This volume evaluates issues of vital importance to those seeking to understand and reform the tort law and the litigation process, taking a multi-disciplinary approach, including theoretical economic analysis, empirical analysis, socio-economic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Topics discussed include products liability, medical malpractice, causation, proximate cause, joint and several liability, class actions, mass torts, vicarious liability, settlement, damage rules, juries, tort reform, and potential alternatives to the tort system. Scholars, students, legal practitioners, regulators, and judges with an interest in tort law, litigation, damages, and reform will find this seminal Handbook an invaluable addition to their libraries.

This pioneering Handbook contains specially-commissioned chapters on tort law from leading experts in the field. This volume evaluates issues of vital importance to those seeking to understand and reform the tort law and the litigation process, taking a multi-disciplinary approach, including theoretical economic analysis, empirical analysis, socio-economic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Topics discussed include products liability, medical malpractice, causation, proximate cause, joint and several liability, class actions, mass torts, vicarious liability, settlement, damage rules, juries, tort reform, and potential alternatives to the tort system. Scholars, students, legal practitioners, regulators, and judges with an interest in tort law, litigation, damages, and reform will find this seminal Handbook an invaluable addition to their libraries.

This pioneering Handbook contains specially-commissioned chapters on tort law from leading experts in the field. This volume evaluates issues of vital importance to those seeking to understand and reform the tort law and the litigation process, taking a multi-disciplinary approach, including theoretical economic analysis, empirical analysis, socio-economic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Topics discussed include products liability, medical malpractice, causation, proximate cause, joint and several liability, class actions, mass torts, vicarious liability, settlement, damage rules, juries, tort reform, and potential alternatives to the tort system. Scholars, students, legal practitioners, regulators, and judges with an interest in tort law, litigation, damages, and reform will find this seminal Handbook an invaluable addition to their libraries.

Governments’ party identifications can indicate the types of economic policies they are likely to pursue. A common rule of thumb is that left-party governments are expected to pursue policies for lower unemployment, but which may cause inflation. Right-party governments are expected to pursue lower inflation policies. How do these expectations shape the inflation forecasts of monetary policy bureaucrats? If there is a mismatch between the policies, bureaucratsexpectgovernments to implement, and those that theyactuallydo, forecasts will be systematically biased. Using US Federal Reserve Staff’s forecasts we test for executive partisan biases. We find that irrespective of actual policy and economic conditions forecasters systematically overestimate future inflation during left-party presidencies and underestimate future inflation during right-party ones. Our findings suggest that partisan heuristics play an important part in monetary policy bureaucrats’ inflation expectations.

Professional liability/risk management: A manual forsurgeons

Unity, divergence and convergence in the common law of obligations / Andrew Robertson and Michael Tilbury -- The influence of comparative law on the English law of obligations / Andrew Burrows -- Unity, then divergence : the Privy Council, the common law of England and the common law of Canada, Australia and New Zealand / Paul Finn -- A conscious effort to develop a "different" common law of obligations : a possible endeavour? / Goh Yihan -- A common law of tort : is there a European rift in the common law family? / Paula Giliker -- A judicial perspective on the development of common law doctrine in the light of statute law / Anthony Mason -- Public actors and private obligations : a judicial perspective / Sian Elias -- The tort liability of public authorities : a comparative analysis / Peter Cane -- We'll meet again : convergence in the private law treatment of public bodies / Niamh Connolly -- How to have a common private law : the presuppositions of legal conversation / Allan Beever -- The philosophies of the common law and their implications : common law divergences, public authority liability and the future of a common law world / Dan Priel -- Obligations, governance and society : bringing the state back in / TT Arvind -- Divergent evolution in the law of torts : jurisdictional isolation, jurisprudential divergence and explanatory theories / James Gouldkamp and John Murphy -- Common law values : the role of party autonomy in private law / Sarah Worthington

In few areas have legal scholars focused more closely on the sources of law than in the study of corporate governance. Questions of institutional design thus pervade the literature of corporate law. Most prominent among these questions have been ones surrounding the allocation of law-making authority as between federal and state authorities: What is the dynamic by which corporate law will be generated at the state level, absent federal intervention? What is the normative quality of the resulting rules? When might a federal role be advisable, if not essential, in the regulation of public corporations? What form ought any such intervention take, and what distortions might it be expected to introduce into our traditionally state-based regime of corporate law? There has been much debate over these questions, to which the literature of law and economics has contributed mightily. To a striking degree, however, scholars have come to embrace – at least in broad terms – a common view on these questions. In this standard account, sub-national rules of corporate governance are to be preferred. State law – and the dynamic of state competition that arises from it – generates (at least some) efficiency gains, helping to reduce agency costs, as between shareholders and managers. For these and other reasons, the law and economics literature admonishes, the scope of federal law in an optimal regime of corporate governance should be limited. Federal rules may have a role in imposing mandatory disclosure obligations, regulating aspects of the issuance and trading of corporate securities, and in selected other circumstances, but not more generally. In this chapter, I suggest that this account of corporate law, widely accepted as it has become in the law and economics literature, deserves a closer look. As to what might be thought of as its horizontal and vertical axes – the perception of (horizontal) state competition as beneficial for shareholder-managerial relations, and the notion of (vertical) federal preemption as properly limited – the meaning and implications of the conventional account turn out to be more ambiguous. A careful analysis thus highlights critical limitations of each of these claims, and offers a more complex picture of the optimal sources of corporate law. Ultimately, a closer analysis of the horizontal dimension of state-to-state interaction and the vertical dimension of potential federal intervention points us to the same result in institutional design: a more mixed architecture of corporate law-making.

The Corpus Delicti Rule prohibits the introduction of the defendant's confession to a crime to count as evidence against the defendant in the absence of independent evidence of the crime in question. The common law rule, designed to protect the defendant who confesses to the commission of a fictitious crime, has fallen out of favor with federal courts and a number of state courts. Moreover, the rule has its academic detractors. This essay is an attempt to investigate the value of the rule, the academic criticisms of the rule and to analyze the federal substitute for the rule. If the analysis is not completely astray, the rule serves a most admirable social purpose. The academic arguments are not so telling as to justify jettisoning the rule. Finally, the federal rule is argued to be either completely inadequate a protection or an adequate protection only to the extent that the federal substitute is coextensive with the rule it is designed to replace, namely, the original Corpus Delicti Rule.