The average physician spends nearly 11 percent of an assumed forty-year career with an unresolved, open malpractice claim. The long time it takes for a case is resolved is distressing for both doctor and patient.
In this survey of six state mental health telephone consultation program directors, we report the annual number of children referred for consultation and the number of lawsuits against consultant clinicians.
In this Response, the author sketches two problems with Professor Doug Kysar's argument regarding climate change litigation and effect on tort law.
The authors assessed the appropriateness of recommendations for hysterectomies done for nonemergency and nononcologic indications for 497 California women. Seventy percent of the hysterectomies were judged to have been recommended inappropriately.
New electronic clinical decision support (CDS) systems are intended to reduce medical errors but sometimes have the unexpected and perverse effect of overwhelming physicians with potential warnings about trivial events, particularly regarding drug-drug interactions.
The risk of medical malpractice varies substantially according to physician specialty.
The likelihood of malpractice suits and the size of indemnity payments vary across specialties, but by age 65, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties.
Clinical decision support (CDS) refers to electronic technology used to enhance clinical decision making. The basic challenge for policymakers interested in promoting adoption of CDS is to ensure that liability concerns do not derail the clinical value of new CDS technology.
n the United States, drugs are jointly regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which oversees premarket clinical trials designed to ensure drug safety and efficacy, and the liability system, which allows patients to sue manufacturers for unsafe drugs. In this paper, the authors examine the potential welfare effects of this dual system to ensure the safety of medical products, and conclude that product liability exemptions for FDA regulated activities could raise economic efficiency.
While a class action such as one brought under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 23 is certainly the most well-known mechanism for aggregating large numbers of similar claims, other approaches include mass joinder of parties, mass consolidation of separate cases, or multidistrict litigation transfer of federal cases from across the country into a single action for pretrial processing; corporate reorganizations under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code; large-scale inventories of clients controlled by a single attorney; government-initiated enforcement actions; and private attorneys general litigation brought on behalf of the general public.
The authors use variation in the generosity of local juries to identify the causal impact of malpractice liability on medical costs, mortality, and social welfare.
Analyzes effects of noneconomic damages caps and attorney fee limits on the ability of people injured by negligent physicians to retain qualified lawyers to represent them
Some states use physicians' histories of medical malpractice payments to try to reduce the incidence of medical malpractice (and for other reasons).
Easily gathered physician characteristics can be helpful in designing targeted quality of care improvement policies.
The Article argues that the economic analysis of tort law has yet to satisfactorily answer a critical threshold question: which of the many inputs that lead to an accident should be included in a court's liability analysis?
The Article argues that the economic analysis of tort law has yet to satisfactorily answer a critical threshold question: which of the many inputs that lead to an accident should be included in a court's liability analysis?
Past studies on civil juries have been hampered by lack of data on verdicts spanning a sufficiently long period. Average jury awards tend to be highly variable from year to year, making it difficult to distinguish trends over relatively short periods of time. The authors use the longest time series of data on jury verdicts ever assembled: 40 years of data on tort cases in San Francisco County, CA and Cook County, IL collected by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice.
Fashioning a National Resolution of Asbestos Personal Injury Litigation: A Reply to Professor Brickman
Framing the Compensation Inquiry
The authors addressed research questions regarding the efficacy of herbal ephedra and ephedrine for weight loss and athletic performance.
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