ABSTRACT
This paper was written for the annual Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Policy at DePaul Law School. The theme for this year is tort law as a response to corporate wrongdoing. The paper was part of a panel on the Boeing 737-MAX disasters.
In engineering or risk-management (not tort) terms, the root cause of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes involving 737-MAX aircraft can be understood as a failure of Boeing’s organizational culture. A certain narrative has become accepted as conventional wisdom, described in journalistic accounts, reports of House and Senate investigative committees, and the Netflix documentary Downfall. For the purposes of this paper, let’s stipulate to the story: Boeing enjoyed a well-deserved decades-long reputation as a solid, engineering-driven company in which safety concerns were always paramount …
Wendel, W Bradley, Malice or Snafu? Punitive Damages and Organizational Culture Defects (June 24, 2022). DePaul Law Review, forthcoming.
First posted 2022-07-01 13:00:50
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