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It is unclear from Canadian case law what the appropriate legal standards of care and regulation should be in athlete injury cases. This chapter provides an overview of existing legal standards and explores the question of participant liability in sport, especially ice hockey. It reviews the applicability of tort law, including both intentional torts and unintentional torts, and considers the applicability and impact of the notion of ‘volenti non fit injuria’ (or voluntary assumption of risk).

The chapter is based on a review of Canadian case law.

Canadian courts have adopted varying standards whereby it is seemingly easier to prove negligence in certain provinces than others. We discuss the implications of these conflicting jurisdictional standards and the need for clearer and more consistent legal guidelines. Further, we show why appropriate legal standards should extend beyond purely objective and legalistic interpretations to more subjective and sociological factors that place sports violence and sports injury in social context.

This chapter sets out a descriptive account of the various legal claims for reparations, including the theories involved and the history of reparations lawsuits. It describes the major reparations cases, the arguments used in these cases, and the court decisions. It also discusses the evolution of legal theories for reparations as well as other attempts to secure compensation.

I examine the case law and the significant court rulings, as well as the discussion within secondary literature regarding these legal claims. I also examine other reparations advocacy approaches, including H.R. 40 and official apologies.

Reparations lawsuits have been brought against both government and private defendants, employing both tort and unjust enrichment theories. However, these suits have failed due to a variety of legal hurdles, including statutes of limitations, standing, and causation. The failure of reparations lawsuits illustrates the limitations of the legal system in addressing mass harms.

This chapter summarizes in relatively brief and generalist-accessible form the history and current status of legal claims for reparations.

All of the above proposals are realities in Western Europe, and it is suggested that the adoption of such “reforms” would substantially reduce the transaction costs of providing compensation to deserving plaintiffs, improve the efficiency of the tort system, and provide manufacturers and service providers with greater predictability and “fairness” in potential tort damages in the United States.

This chapter examines the legal and scientific approaches taken in the United States for computing economic damages due to personal injury and wrongful death. The U.S. law of tort damages conforms to a general economic valuation of reduced or lost productivity due to injury under the goal of assigning tort damages optimally so that harm in the society is minimized. Today, “economic damages” are defined in every U.S. jurisdiction, and the field of forensic economics has produced a body of literature concerned with accurately measuring them.

Who is ultimately responsible for the harms that befall us? Corporations who make dangerous products, or the consumers who use them? The answer to this question has a profound impact on how personal injury lawyers screen products liability cases. In this chapter, I analyze results from an experimental vignette study in which 83 lawyers were asked to evaluate a hypothetical products liability case. Half of the lawyers practice in states considered to be difficult jurisdictions for the practice of personal injury law due to tort reform and conservative political climates (Texas and Colorado), while the other half work in states that have been relatively unaffected by tort reform and are considered to be more “plaintiff friendly” (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). While lawyers in reform states and non-reform states were equally likely to accept the hypothetical case with which they were presented, they approached the case in different ways, used different theories, and made different arguments in order to justify their acceptance of the case. Lawyers in states with tort reform were most likely to accept the case when they focused on the issue of corporate social responsibility – that is, what the defendant did wrong, how they violated the rules, and how they could have prevented the injury in question. Lawyers in non-reform states, however, were most likely to accept the case when they believed that jurors would feel sorry for the injured child and not find their client at fault for the injury.

In healthcare, overuse and underuse of medical treatments represent equally dangerous deviations from an optimal use equilibrium and arouse concerns about possible implications for patients’ health, and for the healthcare system in terms of both costs and access to medical care. Medical liability plays a dominant role among the elements that can affect these deviations. Therefore, a remarkable economic literature studies how medical decisions are influenced by different levels of liability. In particular, identifying the relation between liability and treatments selection, as well as disentangling the effect of liability from other incentives that might be in place, is a task for sound empirical research. Several studies have already tried to tackle this issue, but much more needs to be done. In this chapter, we offer an overview of the state of the art in the study of the relation between liability and treatments selection. First, we reason on the theoretical mechanisms underpinning the relationship under investigation by presenting the main empirical predictions of the related literature. Second, we provide a comprehensive summary of the existing empirical evidence and its main weaknesses. Finally, we conclude by offering guidelines for further research.

A balance between environmental protection and sustainable development of the energy industry is fostered in the majority of nations. China’s economic growth has been rapid in the past few decades, with the unfortunate side effect of environmental pollution and ecological deterioration in the country. In this chapter, we provide a study of Chinese legal rules about civil liability for environmental damages in the light of objectives of sustainable development of the energy industry.

The research approach is based on the Regulatory Impact Assessment.

International funds and private investors, especially those working in FDI, have to cope with the legal framework more or less favorable to investment and innovation deriving from experimentation and development of new energy products and processes. In each jurisdiction, the mechanism of civil liability is crucial in determining such a legal framework.

The real functioning of civil liability as applied by the doctrinal and judicial interpretation has to be taken into account for minimizing the mass damages for the environment and individuals.

Different from other assumptions based on administrative rules or policy issues, the balance between environmental protection and sustainable development is considered in this chapter under a view that emphasizes the role of legal rules from a civil law perspective.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) creates rights for covered employees, defines conduct that violates those rights, and deems that conduct an unfair labor practice. But while given broad remedial powers under the Act, the Board's options were curtailed by the Supreme Court's limit on the use of deterrence as an express remedial justification. The Board was left with a strongly make-whole, i.e., ex-post, focus to undo the consequences of a violation.

Put differently, the current NLRA remedies reflect a pay-or-play philosophy. The goal is restoration after the fact, using ex-post remedies to give parties the benefit or status quo that they expected. An actor willing to pay may use a cost–benefit analysis and strategically choose to violate the Act, accepting the make-whole remedies later. But the Act created ex-ante statutory rights, not agreed-upon contractual terms. By statutory enactment, employees are given something of value deemed worthy of protection. Assigning value to compliance with the law in the first instance not only prevents sometimes irreparable harm but also reaffirms the inherent value of the right itself.

The impact of the Board's limited remedies is therefore a broad value-driven one. Without ex-ante deterrence, the available ex-post make-whole remedial options make a normative statement about individuals' rights under the Act: those rights may not be inherently worth enough to incentivize legal compliance. The make-whole focus can imply that financial compensation for the portion of harm that can be calculated and “undoing” some nonfinancial effects is sufficient. There is little drive to deter infringement before the fact. By examining the remedial philosophy behind contrasting approaches in the common law of torts and contract, this Article asserts that the current remedial strictures and framework undermine both the Act and the worth of its rights in the eyes of the public and the employees who hold them.

In Chapter 10 in this volume, Comandé (2009) has proposed that American courts adapt “scheduling” for use by juries in awarding nonpecuniary damages in personal injury and wrongful death cases. Comandé suggests that American courts can develop schedules for awarding damages for nonpecuniary losses on the basis of the severity of the injury and the age of the injured party, based on data on prior awards by particular courts in specific jurisdictions. Comandé's proposal is shaped by the experiences of European jurisdictions that have developed scheduling for awarding nonpecuniary damages.