Overview

Recent high-profile lawsuits involving cigarettes, guns, breast implants, and other products have created new frictions between litigation and regulation. Increasingly, litigation is being used as a financial lever to force companies to accept negotiated regulatory policies—policies that invariably involve less public input and accountability than those arising from government regulation. The process not only usurps the traditional governmental authority for regulation, but also shifts the locus of establishing tax policy from the legislature to the parties involved in the litigation. Citizen interests are not explicitly represented and there is no mechanism to ensure that these outcomes are in society's best interests. By focusing on case studies involving the tobacco industry, guns, lead paint, breast implants, and health maintenance organizations, the contributors to this volume collectively shed light on the likely consequences of regulation through litigation for insurance markets and society at large. They analyze the ramifications of large-scale lawsuits, mass torts, and class actions for the insurance market, and advocate increased public scrutiny of attorney reimbursement and a competitive bidding process for all lawsuits involving government entities as the plaintiffs.

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9780815706090

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This high-quality, well-referenced, and very readable volume should be required reading for government officials and those entrusted with enacting and enforcing social, political, and economic policies in the U.S. --A.R. Sanderson, University of Chicago, Choice, 4/1/2003 The real question is how can we influence lawyers so that they will use their power in the right ways?...It's really more of a moral than a legal inquiry. Unfortunately, wrestling with such questions is more often left to priests, rabbis, theologians and moral philosophers. But if more lawyers dwelt on such questions more often with more serious intent, then this book of essays need not ever have been written. --Robert Monahan, Aaronson Rappaport Feinstein & Deutsch, New York Law Journal, 8/18/2003

This high-quality, well-referenced, and very readable volume should be required reading for government officials and those entrusted with enacting and enforcing social, political, and economic policies in the U.S. -A.R. Sanderson, University of Chicago, Choice, 4/1/2003 | The real question is how can we influence lawyers so that they will use their power in the right ways?...It's really more of a moral than a legal inquiry. Unfortunately, wrestling with such questions is more often left to priests, rabbis, theologians and moral philosophers. But if more lawyers dwelt on such questions more often with more serious intent, then this book of essays need not ever have been written. -Robert Monahan, Aaronson Rappaport Feinstein & Deutsch, New York Law Journal, 8/18/2003

Author Information

W. Kip Viscusi is John F. Cogan Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and director of the Program on Empirical Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

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