Category Archives: Personal Injuries
Reviews of Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory (January 2026)
The Shame of Mass Torts (Anthony Sebok): The Pain Brokers by Prof Elizabeth Burch (Georgia) describes the terrible treatment suffered by a group of women who had a defective surgical device implanted into their bodies. Unlike the more familiar stories about products liability involving DES or asbestos, The Pain Brokers focuses not on the wrongdoing […]
Ovčak and Božič Penko, ‘The Role of the Psychiatric Expert In Tort Litigation’
ABSTRACT The paper analyses the evidentiary function of psychiatric expertise in tort proceedings, emphasizing its significance within Slovenian contractual and non-contractual liability regimes. Psychiatric experts are essential in establishing causation and assessing the extent of non-pecuniary damage, thereby shaping judicial determinations of fault and compensation. Effective adjudication requires reciprocal legal-medical literacy: judges should understand the […]
Steve Novaković, ‘Shielded from Shame: Civil Immunity for Ontario’s Long-Term Care Facilities in the Wake of COVID-19’
ABSTRACT This article critically examines the Supporting Ontario’s Recovery Act, 2020 (‘SORA’) and the civil immunity it extends, inter alia, to Ontario’s long-term care facilities (‘LTCFs’) in the wake of the novel coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic. It concludes that tort law is a necessary vehicle for accountability and systemic change and should not be proscribed. Part […]
González, Szyszko and Jouliá, ‘When Justice Meets Safety: How a Supreme Court Ruling Transformed Workplace Safety’
ABSTRACT Occupational accidents impose devastating human and economic costs worldwide, yet evidence on how judicial decisions affect workplace safety remains scarce. This study provides the first causal evidence on this relationship by examining Argentina’s landmark Aquino ruling (2004), which eliminated employers’ exemption from civil liability for workplace accidents. Using an event study design with provincial […]
Barbara von Tigerstrom, ‘Informed Consent, Causation, and the “Reasonable Patient”’
ABSTRACT In medical negligence claims involving ‘informed consent’, claimants must prove that a physician failed in their duty to provide adequate information, and that this failure caused the patient’s injury. In Canada, unlike in Australia or the UK, the common law has adopted a ‘modified objective’ test to analyze the decision component of causation in […]
Michael Palmieri, ‘Malpractice without a Baseline: Tort Liability and the Structural Paradoxes of Psychedelic-assisted Therapy’
ABSTRACT Psychedelic-assisted therapy is advancing rapidly toward clinical legitimacy in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration has granted Breakthrough Therapy designations to psilocybin and MDMA, several states have established regulated access frameworks, and major research institutions have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in psychedelic science. Yet the legal infrastructure governing malpractice liability […]
Faure and Visscher, ‘Medical liability Under Limited Resources: A Law and Economics Perspective’
ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of how limited resources in healthcare should affect medical liability. This has become a significant intellectual question in the debate on how to construct an efficient medical liability system. The question has, moreover, received a lot of attention where healthcare systems face increasing pressure from budget constraints. This was […]
Benjamin Zipursky, ‘Pragmatic Conceptualism, Public Nuisance, and the American Opioid Litigation’
ABSTRACT Public nuisance as a part of American tort law has been as high profile in the first decades of this century as products liability law was in the last several decades of the 20th century. The American opioid litigation over the past decades is a spectacular example, filling headlines and generating billions of dollars […]
Amelie Berz, ‘Medical negligence in the age of statistically superior AI’
ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly outperform human clinicians in specific diagnostic tasks, legal debates have turned to whether such statistical superiority should create new obligations in medical practice. This article proposes a two-stage transparency framework, distinguishing ‘pre-deployment transparency’ from ‘post-deployment interpretability’, to clarify when clinicians may, must, or must not use or rely […]
Lauren Hund, ‘Moving from Medical Risk to Medicolegal Causation: An Exemplar from Stroke tPA Litigation’
ABSTRACT While medical experts often opine about causation in medical malpractice lawsuits, mapping the medical literature onto the probabilistic ‘more likely than not’ legal causation standard sometimes goes beyond medical expertise. In many medical malpractice applications, experts cannot utilize the logic of differential etiology and general and specific causation that are common in toxic tort […]