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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.

Public reports of provider-specific patient outcomes aim to help consumers select suppliers of medical services. Yet, in an environment of rapidly changing medical technology and increasingly heterogeneous patient populations, and because they necessarily reflect the experience of other patients who received care in the past, such reports may be of limited value in helping patients forecast the probability of an adverse outcome for each provider they are considering. I propose that providers underwrite insurance policies that promptly pay patients a predetermined sum after an adverse outcome. Patients can use such outcome warranties to infer quality differences among providers easily and reliably. In addition, outcome warranties efficiently reward both providers and patients for reducing the risk of adverse outcomes and thereby improve the safety and affordability of health care. As such, outcome warranties help advance four important goals of health care management: reduction of financial risk, recruitment and retention of physicians, remediation of adverse outcomes, and raising the provider's reputation.

This article aims to highlight the importance of a complete and accurate medical record as it pertains to potential risk exposure in the outpatient physical therapy profession.

Basic charting rules, correction and alteration recommendations, documentation of telephone conversations, informed consent, exculpatory release forms and incident reports are discussed. Basic risk management strategies are reviewed that may reduce outpatient physical therapy practitioners' malpractice exposure.

The authors contend that quality and thorough documentation is as important as the quality of the care that is delivered to patients, since medical records are legal documents and serve as valuable evidence as to what transpired between patients and the healthcare providers.

Practical documentation strategies are described in a manner that will inform physical therapists of their legal obligations relating to patient care.

To explore from an ethical paradigm the current research in support of and opposition to imposing caps on non‐economic damages as a means of addressing the healthcare crisis.

A review of peer‐ and non‐peer‐reviewed articles primarily covering the period from 2001‐2004, which addresses the rationale articulated in support of and in opposition to imposing caps on non‐economic damages. The articles are sorted into sections and critiqued: rationale for imposing caps, arguments against caps, ethical paradigms impacting caps, and conclusions.

Provides information from the various sources. Addresses the biases that may have shaped the authors' conclusions and some of the ethical paradigms that may have impacted positions. Also demonstrates that the unbiased research seems to establish a minimal nexus between caps and the proposed impact.

Focus is exclusively on the US healthcare and judicial system. However, findings may still have implications outside the USA in countries that have similar tort laws for addressing private wrongs.

A useful source of information for graduate students in public policy or healthcare management courses, or legislators looking for a quick reference to research regarding this topic area.

This paper fulfills an identified resource for non‐biased assessment of the problem presented and provides a critical review of the reasons articulated in support of this public policy.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship among jurors’ attribution of responsibility of the error, patient styles and juror decisions (e.g. acquittal of the physician). Specifically, this research examines the influence of an individual’s approach to their healthcare (active vs. passive), and decisions to acquit in malpractice cases.

In total, 459 individuals were surveyed using a commercial call center for participation in a corresponding mail survey. Surveys were also distributed to undergraduate business students at a Midwestern university.

Cluster analysis revealed two categories of patient styles: “active patients” (39.4 per cent) and “passive patients” (60.6 per cent). Regardless of patient style, this research found all respondents viewed medical error disclosure as important. However, respondents in the passive group were more likely to acquit the physician and the hospital nursing staff as compared with those classified as active.

The safety of patients in the healthcare system and prevention of errors is a critical issue. However, when errors occur, medical providers should disclose information to the patient and take responsibility to attenuate their negative impact. Further, this research reveals that patients who rely more on their physicians, trust their recommendations and question physicians less are more likely to acquit. Medical providers can use this information as motivation to continue to build this type of trust with their patients.

Medical errors are costly for all parties involved. This research provides insight for not only members of the legal profession involved in medical malpractice cases, but also risk managers and hospital administrators and healthcare providers regarding the decision-making process used by individuals serving on a jury.

The coming use of autonomous vehicles has kindled an extensive debate over the choice of a desirable liability regime. This article contributes to that debate by explaining how rules for liability and damages ought to be constructed to deal first with stranger (including highway) cases and then with consensual cases (like medical malpractice). It concludes that an output regime based on events as they unfold is applicable in the former but not in the latter. It then argues that this legal regime carries over without a hitch to autonomous vehicles. It then further notes that in private disputes there are no fixed rules for deciding how to mix rules for injunctions and liabilities for threatened harms, and further notes that the regulatory regime for IoT will face those same difficulties, which are best solved by trying to minimize the sum of Type I and Type II errors, as in other cases.

Legal reasoning/analysis.

One salient point is that the rules of the road should change in response to technical innovation, but liability rules should not. The sound approach for dealing with damages for past incidents ought to be constructed to deal first with stranger (including highway) cases in which there is a dichotomous decision on compliance or not. That regime is based on events as they unfold, and carries over without a hitch to autonomous vehicles. For dealing with the prevention of future harms from violation of these rules, by contrast, there are no fixed rules for deciding how to mix damages with injunction, and the substitution of a system of direct state enforcement faces the same difficulties of implementation. In both settings, the rules of the road should be held constant, after which the ideal remedial mix follows the traditional approach of trying to minimize the sum of Type I and Type II errors, relating to over and underenforcement. The basic rules of tort liability stand in contrast to the different standards of liability that arise in consensual situations, and in all cases, they must necessarily be supplemented by rules of vicarious and product liability. Overall, the bottom line is this: autonomous vehicle innovations are relevant to designing regulations for future and uncertain harms, but irrelevant to liability for past harms.

This is an original legal analysis on the topic of Autonomous Vehicles.

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 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.

Our legal system has a well-established set of laws and procedures for injured people to seek redress for their injuries. Over the years universalised legal injury narratives have developed. In other words, repeated applications of the law have generated standard, abstract, generalised versions of individual injury narratives. Accordingly, from any particular injury narrative, there can be distilled an “essential or abstract” legal injury narrative which is the same universal narrative that can be distilled from other like cases (Klinck, 1992). It seems likely that there are different versions of the legal injury narrative that have developed due to an accumulation of a large number of similar cases. For example, there is likely to be a version of the legal injury narrative for injuries arising out of each of motor vehicle accidents, workplace incidents, occupier’s liability, medical malpractice or defective products. However, this paper will demonstrate that underlying all of these versions is the generic legal injury narrative with particular and common characteristics. This paper develops the idea of the universal “legal injury narrative” – that is, a legally idealised narrative about injury, based on a number of implicit rules about the way injuries occur and their consequences. The legal injury narrative is the framework by which other injury narratives are judged.