LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP
presents
Professor Francesco Parisi
University of Minnesota Law School
Double-Edged Torts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
4:10 – 6:00
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Traditional economic models of tort law assign determinate roles to parties, modeling their behavior as if parties knew in advance whether fate would cast them in the roles of “tortfeasor” or “victim.” However, for a large class of activities, individuals must take precautions ignorant of whether they will be tortfeasors or victims, or indeed whether they will be involved in an accident at all. Further complicating the issue, there exists a category of precautions, which courts have not hitherto recognized as distinct, and which we call “hybrid precautions,” that affect both tortfeasor and victim probabilities. In this paper, we extend the standard model to account for such cases of role-uncertainty and hybrid precaution, finding that incentives are not, as previously assumed, simply additive. We analyze and reassess the standard tort regimes under this new framework. From a policy perspective, we find that the traditional formulation of negligence fails to incentivize efficient care levels. We argue instead for a modification that does effect efficient precaution efforts.
Francesco Parisi is the Oppenheimer Wolff and Donnelly Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, Law School and a Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna, Department of Economics. From 2002 to 2006 he held a Chair in Private Law at the University of Milan (Statale), where he was appointed Professore Ordinario per Chiara Fama. From 1993 to 2006 he taught at George Mason University where he served as Professor of Law & Director of the Law and Economics Program and as an Associate Director of the J.M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy. Professor Parisi received his D.Jur. degree from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", an LL.M. and a J.S.D. and an M.A. degree in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D in Economics from George Mason University. He is the author of 10 books and approximately 200 papers in the field of law and economics. Professor Parisi is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Law and Economics and served as Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2002 to 2008. He is a member of the board of editors of the International Review of Law and Economics, the Journal of Public Choice, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and he serves on the Board of Advisors of the Social Sciences Research Network.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
