Elizabeth Chamblee Burch and Alexandra D Lahav, ‘Information for the Common Good in Mass Torts’, 70 DePaul Law Review 345 (2021). Most believe that tort law, at its root, is about dollars and cents. The defendant pays; the plaintiff pockets a specified sum. It is through this financial transfer that tort law’s broader aims – deterrence and compensation – are achieved. Yet, in ‘Information for the Common Good in Mass Torts’, recently published as part of the twenty-sixth annual Clifford Symposium, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch and Alexandra D Lahav complicate that simple story. In the piece, Burch and Lahav argue that, besides damages, tort law very often involves the transfer of something just as valuable if less quantifiable: information. To see tort litigation as a source of information is to see tort through a different lens. Seen through this lens, in fact, much of what we know – or think we know – about what tort law does or how it works becomes subject to reexamination … (more)
[Nora Freeman Engstrom, JOTWELL, 22 March]
First posted 2022-03-28 10:15:35
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