Final Report Of The Tennessee State Senate Special Committee On Liability Insurance And Tort Reform

Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin have analyzed patterns in jury verdicts in a number of substantive legal areas, including medical malpractice, products liability, and punitive damages, against the background of the larger political and academic debate over tort reform. Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform brings together and summarizes the authors' extensive empirical research on civil jury verdicts in the context of that debate. Some commentators are arguing that there is a substantial gap between the image of juries and civil justice that is driving tort reform and what is known of the reality of the civil justice system. The authors use their discussion of juries not simply to help inform the policy debate but to analyze tort reform as a public policy issue for what it tells about the policy process itself.

This collection of essays investigates the way in which modern private law apportions responsibility between multiple parties who are (or may be) responsible for the same legal event. It examines both doctrines and principles that share responsibility between plaintiffs and defendants, on the one hand, and between multiple defendants, on the other. The doctrines examined include those 'originating' doctrines which operate to create shared liabilities in the first place (such as vicarious and accessorial liability); and, more centrally, those doctrines that operate to distribute the liabilities and responsibilities so created. These include the doctrine of contributory (comparative) negligence, joint and several (solidary) liability, contribution, reimbursement, and 'proportionate' liability, as well as defences and principles of equitable 'allowance' that permit both losses and gains to be shared between parties to civil proceedings. The work also considers the principles which apportion liability between multiple defendants and insurers in cases in which the cause, or timing, of a particular loss is hard to determine. The contributions to this volume offer important perspectives on the law in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as a number of civilian jurisdictions. They explicate the main rules and trends and offer critical insights on the growth and distribution of shared responsibilities from a number of different perspectives – historical, comparative, empirical, doctrinal and philosophical.

Includes minutes of the association's Board of Trustees.

Distributed to some depository libraries in microfiche.