In this Essay, I step back from the doctrinal details of this liability insurance litigation in order to sketch its principal characteristics and generate some insights about the way it has worked in practice. This Essay is not aimed at insurance law specialists, but at all lawyers who are interested in the manner in which new areas of law emerge, experience growing pains, and create their own new problems. Although insurance law may once have occupied a dark comer of the legal world, megacoverage litigation has now developed into a field of major legal and economic importance. Hundreds of billions of dollars may ultimately be at stake in this litigation. The story behind the development of megacoverage litigation is therefore worth understanding, because it illustrates how the unintended side effects of legal innovations such as mass tort and CERCLA liability can come to be nearly as important as, and perhaps even more troublesome than, the innovations themselves.
The per se rule against specific enforcement of personal service contracts is well established under Anglo-American contract law. At the same time...
History and precedent tell us that the just compensation requirement has been implemented by a complex network of remedies providing multiple avenues...
The glaring gap in tort theory is its failure to take adequate account of liability insurance. Much of tort theory fails to recognize the active and...
An upcoming Supreme Court case on Article III standing and disability presents critical questions about the future of litigation that promotes...
“Dignity” is a rallying cry of social and political movements worldwide. It also appears in legal doctrine and scholarship. But the meaning of dignity...
Three established torts require the defendant’s behavior to be “offensive” or “highly offensive” in order to be actionable: offensive battery, public...
This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...
It has long been said that the common law "works itself pure" But in the law of torts, not always. This Article reveals and analyzes the...
The idea of institutionalism figures prominently in today’s debates about the role of federal courts in American democracy. For example, Chief Justice...
In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the Supreme Court began adopting First Amendment restrictions on liability for defamation and other speech torts...
Long lines inside Bodo’s Bagels, congestion on Emmet Street and a seemingly endless stream of runners and scooters zooming past your car in early...
The question whether the term “set aside” in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) authorizes a federal court to vacate a rule universally—as opposed...
Contract law has one overarching goal: to advance the legitimate interests of the contracting parties. For the most part, scholars, judges, and...
Do legal concepts alter how we understand the past and present? The jurisprudence of race suggests that they do. For several decades, federal courts...
Public nuisance has lived many lives. A centuries-old doctrine defined as an unreasonable interference with a right common to the public, it is...
This project is part of ALI’s ongoing revision of the Restatement Second of Torts. The Restatement Second recognized compensatory damages, injunctions...
An important administrative law doctrine developed by the lower federal courts, called remand without vacatur, rests on a mistaken premise. Courts...
At its meeting on January 19 and 20, 2023 the Council approved Council Draft No. 2, containing §§ 5, 11, and 12 of Topic 1, General Rules for...