Discussion of Alan Miller, \u27Cleaning the Air while Filling Corporate Coffers:

Alan Miller\u27s paper is interesting and fits very well with the tide and theme of this Conference-learning from our past mistakes in order to produce an improved air pollution control law for the 1990s. Miller diagnoses the problems with our recent formulation and implementation of environmental policy. and he prescribes a cure for those ills in the form of a different policy direction for the future

Four Tests for Liability in Torts

One of the reasons for the current unhappy state of tort law generally—and of products liability law especially—is that the courts have apparently had an unusual degree of difficulty in explaining the basis of liability. Product defect has never provided an illuminating starting point for analysis, and when it is defined to include design defects, it helps even less. Taken literally, product defect would seem to imply liability for any and all injuries that are causally linked to the product. What product could not have been designed so that a particular injury would have been avoided, at least if cost avoidance (including inconvenience and lack of effectiveness of the product) were paid no heed? Yet, as has often been pointed out, that is not the thrust of strict product liability

Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development

macroeconomics, industrial research and development, patent law