In recent years critics have assailed the cost, inefficiency, and unfairness of American tort law, including products liability and medical malpractice. Yet victims of accidental injury who look to the tort system for deserved compensation often find it a formidable obstacle. Those who seek to reform tort law find legislatures, particularly the United States Congress, paralyzed by the clash of powerful special interest groups. Understanding Enterprise Liability sheds new light on the raging tort reform debate by challenging its fundamental assumptions. Offering historical insights and fresh perspectives on the politics and possibilities for sensible reform, Virginia Nolan and Edmund Ursin pragmatically assess alternative routes to a workable, balanced, and equitable system of compensation for personal injury. They offer a specific proposal, based on the precedent of strict products liability that incorporates the insights of no-fault compensation plan scholarship to create an enterprise liability doctrine that should appeal to courts and to tort reformers.

Theories of enterprise liability have, historically, had a significant influence on the development of various aspects of the law of torts. Enterprise liability has impacted upon both statutory and common law rules. Prime examples would include laws on workmen's compensation and products liability. Of late, in a number of jurisdictions, enterprise liability has been a powerful catalyst for change in the employer's responsibilities towards third parties by prompting changes to the law on vicarious liability. The results have been seen most dramatically where the employer's responsibility for the intentional torts of employees is concerned. Recent common law reforms have not been without controversy and have raised difficult and challenging questions about the appropriate scope of an employer's responsibility. In response to this, Douglas Brodie offers a critique of the employer's common law obligations, both in tort and under the law of contract of employment.

The proposed Restatement Third, Torts: General Principles takes the position that there is no general conception of strict liability, only special instances of such liability. This paper argues that there is indeed a general conception of strict liability, namely, enterprise liability, and that enterprise liability is a conception of responsibility for harm done equal to and competitive with the fault principle. Enterprise liability emerges early in the 1900's and expands in influence throughout most of the twentieth century. At the very moment when fault theorists like Ames and Jeremiah Smith were proclaiming the triumph of the fault principle in the common law of torts, enterprise liability burst full-blown on the legal landscape, with the enactment of the first Worker's Compensation Acts. These Acts, as Jeremiah Smith saw, were "founded largely upon a theory inconsistent with the common law of torts." That theory - the theory of enterprise liability - went on to spread throughout the tort law of accidents, reshaping preexisting forms of strict and vicarious liability and blossoming in the products liability regime inaugurated by Section 402A of the Second Restatement. Enterprise liability played an important role in tort accident law throughout the twentieth century, expanding the domain of strict liability relative to negligence and increasing the strictness with which certain doctrines (such as res ipsa loquitur) were interpreted. Even during the current renaissance of negligence liability, enterprise liability continues to exert a powerful subterranean influence on the way negligence doctrine is formulated in such disparate areas as medical malpractice, special relationships and duty. The proposed Restatement, Third's portrayal of strict liability as a set of isolated exceptions to a general regime of fault liability is thus untrue to the history and theory of the tort law of accidents as it has come down to us at the start of this century. More disturbingly, this slighting of enterprise liability and celebration of fault liability covertly contributes to its own realization. By writing enterprise liability out of our law and treating all instances of strict liability as special cases with particular histories and peculiar rationales, the proposed Restatement, Third fosters the triumph of negligence over strict liability, a triumph it purports merely to find.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

The theory and practice of enterprise liability are oddly disjoined. On the one hand, case rhetoric insists that considerations of fairness are among the primary justifications for imposing enterprise liability. On the other hand, normatively inclined and theoretically ambitious scholarship on enterprise liability is overwhelmingly economic in cast. Economically inclined scholars have flocked to the field, while other kinds of tort theorists have shunned it, implicitly or explicitly conceding it to economic analysis. This paper argues that, contrary to this consensus, there is a powerful and important fairness case to be made for enterprise liability. This case fits the rhetoric of the decisions and the structure of the doctrines, and draws philosophical support from Kantian social contract theory. When enterprises are in a position to spread the costs of nonnegligent accidents across the class of those who benefit from the risks that inevitably issue in such accidents, enterprise liability is more reasonable than negligence liability. Under these circumstances, enterprise liability reconciles the competing claims of liberty and security more fairly, and more favorably, than negligence liability.

The modern corporation has become central to our society. The key feature of the corporation that makes it such an attractive form of human collaboration is its limited liability. This book explores how, by allowing those who form the corporation to limit their downside risk and personal liability to only the amount they invest, there is the opportunity for more risks taken at a lower cost.

This Research Handbook considers many aspects of corporate liability, beginning with a fundamental explanation of what the company is, through depictions of corporate liability in theory, to the key areas of liability in practice. Interdisciplinary in nature, the contributions cover corporate and participant liability under statutory law, tort and criminal law, and corporate fiduciary and securities law. Specific perspectives include those on vicarious liability in tort and its application to corporations, and accountability for AI labour.

Medical malpractice attorneys, take note: this landmark work by an experienced attorney physician shows you in detail how to direct medical malpractice litigation against the parties who are actually responsible for patient injury. Clearly-written & easy to use, Healthcare Enterprise Liability provides the background information & instructional materials you need to win these difficult malpractice cases. The book examines enterprise liability as it relates to hospitals, nursing homes, the insurance industry, & managed care, & provides an in-depth analysis of ERISA preemption.

This book conducts an interdisciplinary and comparative examination of tort liabilities of multinational enterprises (MNEs). It examines the social, economic, managerial and legal characteristics of MNEs and compares the findings of this examination to the current understanding of MNEs in the way that tort liability is applied to them. Existing laws and principles related to liability of MNEs are explored from a variety of jurisdictions with the aim of assessing whether these laws are adequate for the challenges that modern MNEs create. Muzaffer Eroglu also proposes solutions to the problems of tort liability of MNEs. Comparing the theory of control in existing laws and the theory of control in business management structure, Multinational Enterprises and Tort Liabilities will be of great interest to academics, researchers, students and practitioners. It will also appeal to NGOs particularly interested with the liabilities of MNEs for their human rights breaches.