Monthly Archives: May, 2024
Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, ‘When Amazon Drivers Kill: Accidents, Agency Law, and the Contractor Economy’
ABSTRACT Amazon vans and Uber drivers frequently crash into other cars. Despite the many injuries and deaths that result from these accidents, Amazon and Uber deny responsibility for such claims because they categorize their drivers as ‘independent contractors’. But this contractor defense distorts the basic rules of agency law. Over a century ago, courts crafted […]
Mark Addey, ‘Conflict of Laws: Choice of Law Theories in Tort’
ABSTRACT Conflict of laws arises when various legal systems intersect, typically involving laws from different jurisdictions. The interactions between people in areas such as employment, trade, and marriage, spanning different countries, often require the application of legal principles and regulations that originate from jurisdictions other than the one where a particular case is being adjudicated. […]
Jason Jia-Xi Wu, ‘How Do “Bankruptcy Grifters” Destroy Value in Mass Tort Settlements? In re Purdue Pharma as a Bargaining Failure’
ABSTRACT Bankruptcy has become the endgame of mass tort litigation. Increasingly, corporate tortfeasors have resorted to bankruptcy to halt pending mass tort lawsuits and force parties to renegotiate. This creates bargaining leverage for corporate tortfeasors in settling mass tort liabilities while providing efficient means for tort victims to aggregate their claims. However, one recent development […]
Matthieu Queloz, ‘Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength’
ABSTRACT In ‘What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?’, Bernard Williams reaffirms JL Austin’s suggestion that philosophy might learn from tort law ‘the difference between practical reality and philosophical frivolity’. Yet while Austin regarded tort law as just another repository of time-tested concepts, on a par with common sense as represented by a dictionary, […]
Shelly Kreiczer-Levy, ‘The Data Crowd as a Legal Stakeholder’
ABSTRACT This article identifies a new legal stakeholder in the data economy: the data crowd. A data crowd is a collective that: (i) is unorganised, non-deliberate and unable to form an agenda; (ii) relies on productive aggregation that creates an interdependency among participants; and (iii) is subjected to an external authority. Notable examples of crowds […]
Herbert Hovenkamp, ‘Mergers of Complements’
ABSTRACT Mergers have always been divided into three categories: mergers of competitors (horizontal), mergers of actual or potential buyers and sellers (vertical), and potential competition mergers. This classification system seriously understates the role of complements in mergers. Complements are things that are produced or consumed together, and most mergers involve some complementary features. Vertical mergers […]
Duane Rudolph, ‘Dignity and the Promise of Conscience’
ABSTRACT This Article focuses on the relationship between three specific invocations of dignity in American law, whose emphases are different. The first appeared in the late eighteenth century and is concerned with the dignity of a state or sovereign. The second made its appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is devoted to […]
Robert Merges, ‘Two Patent-Related Harms, Two Remedies: Injury to Market and Uncompensated Input Use’
ABSTRACT I argue that the two types of damages described in the Patent Act are more than a menu of compensatory options. They describe two distinct types of harm caused by patent infringement. Each comes with a distinctive cluster of remedies. Harm to Product Markets (HPM) is redressed by lost profit damages, and in most […]
Robert Merges, ‘Patent Infringement, Private Law, and Liability Standards’
ABSTRACT Private law governs interactions among private parties. A large body of private law theory holds that private law is aimed at corrective justice: doing justice as between the two parties to a private interaction (the private law dyad). This in contrast to public law, the law of state-citizen interactions, whose purpose is usually said […]
Rebecca Crootof, ‘Remote Repossession’
ABSTRACT Ford’s February 2023 patent application raises a new possibility: that after a default, an internet-connected vehicle might autonomously drive itself off of the owner’s premises – to a public space, to the repossession agency, or even to a junkyard. But while this ‘remote repossession’ would minimize the risks of harm that attend in-person repossessions, […]