Category Archives: Products liability
Edward Janger and Aaron Twerski, ‘Functional Tort Principles for Internet Platforms: Duty, Relationship, and Control’
ABSTRACT … This Article is the third in a series of articles that develop a functional, control-based approach to platform liability. It proceeds in five steps. First, we develop the general tort principles that govern liability for transactions in defective consumer products. Second, we show how Amazon, as a platform situated squarely between a third-party […]
Sadie Whittam, ‘Mind the compensation gap: towards a new European regime addressing civil liability in the age of AI’
ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence (‘AI’) becomes pervasive, it is inevitable that there will be a corresponding increase in AI disputes. However, it is often no easy task to determine liability in AI-related disputes due to the unique features of many AI systems, including their complexity, opacity, and the ability of some AI systems to self-adapt. […]
Marie-Eve Arbour, ‘The Volkswagen Scandal at the CJEU: Defeat Devices between the Conformity Guarantee and Environment Law’
ABSTRACT In July 2022, an interesting trilogy was handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal. It calls into play the intersection of contractual guarantees and environmental regulation requirements imposed by European Commission law upon the diesel car industry. The Court concludes that emission reduction […]
Luigi Alberto Franzoni, ‘Efficient Liability Law When Parties Genuinely Disagree’
ABSTRACT This article compares the classic liability rules, negligence and strict liability, under the hypothesis that injurers and victims formulate subjective beliefs about the probabilities of harm. Parties may reasonably disagree in their assessment of the precautionary measures available: a measure regarded as safe by one party may be regarded as not safe by the […]
Michelle Richards, ‘Pills, Public Nuisance, and Parens Patriae: Questioning the Propriety of the Posture of the Opioid Litigation’
ABSTRACT The opioid crisis has been in litigation for almost twenty years on various fronts, including criminal prosecutions of pharmaceutical executives, civil lawsuits by individuals against drug manufacturers and physicians, class actions by those affected by opioid abuse, and criminal actions filed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (‘DEA’). In the early 2000s, opioid litigation began […]
Hassan Mohamed, ‘The iRobo-Surgeon conundrum: comparative reflections on the legal treatment of intraoperative errors committed by autonomous surgical robots’
ABSTRACT The bridge towards fully autonomous, context-aware surgical robots is fraught with challenges, not least of which is ascribing legal responsibility in the event of inadvertent patient injury or death. Of the civil liability frameworks potentially applicable to AI-related harm, this article examines the substantive rules of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability and […]
Mihailis Diamantis, ‘Reasonable AI: A Negligence Standard’
ABSTRACT Even as artificial intelligence promises to turbocharge social and economic progress, its human costs are becoming apparent. By design, AI behaves in unexpected ways. That is how it finds unanticipated solutions to complex problems. But unpredictability also means that AI will sometimes harm us. To curtail these harms, scholars and lawmakers have proposed strict […]
Charlotte Tschider, ‘Humans Outside the Loop’
ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence is not all artificial. After all, despite the need for high-powered machines that can create complex algorithms and routinely improve them, humans are instrumental in every step used to create it. Through data selection, decisional design, training, testing, and tuning to managing AI’s developments as it is used in the human world, […]
‘Risky Speech Systems: Tort Liability For AI-Generated Illegal Speech’
Jane Bambauer, ‘Negligent AI Speech: Some Thoughts about Duty’, 3 Journal of Free Speech Law 344 (2023); Nina Brown, ‘Bots Behaving Badly: A Products Liability Approach to Chatbot-Generated Defamation’, 3 Journal of Free Speech Law 389 (2023). How should we think about liability when AI systems generate illegal speech? The Journal of Free Speech Law, […]
‘Growing AI litigation risk requires business response’
The risk businesses face from litigation is changing as artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more popular. Businesses need to recognise this and consider the different kinds of risks associated with AI technology and how they might give rise to liability. Risks associated with AI can arise with the data those systems use, with use of […]