Roscoe Pound, Melvin Belli, and the Personal-Injury Bar: The Tale of an Odd Coupling

In the fourth chapter of Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, legal historian John Fabian Witt tells the story of a collaboration between storied scholar Roscoe Pound and trial virtuoso Melvin M. Belli, which he calls among the most startling and yet unremarked-upon relationships in the annals of American law. Witt argues that it both shaped and energized the efforts of personal-injury lawyers to oppose proposals that would shift to the administrative branch of government responsibility for compensating auto-accident victims. Entitled The King and the Dean, in reference to the media\u27s coronation of Belli as the King of Torts , and Pound\u27s lengthy term (1916-1936) at the helm of the Harvard Law School, the chapter advances the claim that the two men came together synergistically in the early 1950s and mobilized a campaign by personal-injury lawyers to resist the enactment of automobile no-fault plans and other proposals that would have replaced common-law tort suits with alternative compensation mechanisms. This Article will first take issue with Witt\u27s story of the Pound-Belli relationship and then offer a different version of the interaction between the Dean and the plaintiffs\u27 trial bar

Book Review: Deforming Tort Reform

The storms buffeting the tort system over the past two decades have come in three distinct waves. In the late 1960s, steep increases in the insurance costs incurred by health care providers protecting against negligence claims by patients triggered what came to be known as the medical malpractice crisis. In the mid-1970s, manufacturers whose liability insurance premiums suddenly soared raised obstreperous complaints that called public attention to the existence of a product liability crisis. Finally, other groups whose activities created risks exposing them to lawsuits found that their liability insurance rates had also risen precipitously. A full-blown torts crisis was at hand. The common law of torts attracted a major share of the blame for each of the three crises. Observers blamed the medical malpractice crisis on judicial decisions that expanded the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur by permitting juries to infer negligence from the mere occurrence of an untoward result following medical treatment, and that recognized a duty of due care by physicians to disclose the risk of treatment to patients. Members of Congress, among others, blamed the product liability crisis on state-by-state variations in rules governing the obligations of manufacturers and sellers. Working groups formed to study the issue found the across-the-board torts crisis attributable to the erosion of fault as the basis for liability and the adoption of rules and practices that were allegedly responsible for undue increases in compensatory as well as punitive damage awards. As a consequence, those adversely affected by rising insurance costs demanded, and often achieved, what they called tort reform. Responding to pressure, states enacted pro-defendant legislative adjustments to common law rules of medical malpractice, products liability, and general tort law. By equating tort reform with unidirectional statutory modification of the common law, its advocates succeeded in investing the term with a politically useful, if skewed, meaning. Until the dawn of the present age of tort-related crises, the notion of tort reform was likely to evoke images of a movement to change pro-defendant common law rules so that injured plaintiffs could more easily win judgments or recover full damages. Indeed, through the first half of the twentieth century, the tort system tended to protect the interests of defendants in general as well as particular categories of defendants. What might be called the old tort reform was partly an effort to rectify these imbalances

Book Review of Daniel G. Baldyga\u27s: How to Settle Your Own Insurance Claim

How to Settle tries to exploit the same vein mined in spectacular fashion by Norman F. Dacey, who parlayed deep dissatisfaction with the probate system and popular resentment of lawyers into a runaway best-seller. It would seem, up to this point anyway, that people more readily worry about the inevitability of death and its legal consequences than the possibility of personal injury caused by the legal fault of another. Nonetheless, How to Settle does merit some attention, at least within the confines of a specialized journal and under circumstances unlikely to promote a sales backlash, so that all its shortcomings cannot be said to have passed unnoticed

A Voice of Reason: The Products Liability Scholarship of Gary T. Schwartz

Of my many fond personal memories of Gary Schwartz, the one that stands out most vividly summons from the mists of time an evening in June 1983 at Boston\u27s Fenway Park. It was my last visit to a childhood haunt where I had seen my first professional baseball game in 1941, an occasion that marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for the national pastime. Settled into an excellent seat that faced the storied left-field wall (and brought to mind visions of the large advertisements that covered its surface before it became known as the Green Monster”,), I began to lose myself in the contest that was leisurely unfolding. But I hadn\u27t counted on my two companions, Gary Schwartz and David Owen, who in about the second inning launched into a perfervid, nonstop discussion of some problematic issue raised by the California Supreme Court\u27s holding in Barker v. Lull Engineering Co. I found myself engrossed by their earnest give-and-take and soon rendered totally oblivious to how the Red Sox were faring. It was then I truly realized how much of an academic I had become

Local Invariants Vanishing on Stationary Horizons: A Diagnostic for Locating Black Holes

Inspired by the example of Abdelqader and Lake for the Kerr metric, we construct local scalar polynomial curvature invariants that vanish on the horizon of any stationary black hole: the squared norms of the wedge products of n linearly independent gradients of scalar polynomial curvature invariants, where n is the local cohomogeneity of the spacetime.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX, additional material added, retitled at the suggestion of the Physical Review Letters editor when accepting the pape

Space education: Deriving benefits from industrial consortia

As the number of spacefaring nations of the world increases, so does the difficulty of competing in a global economy. The development of high technology products and services for space programs, and the economic exploitation of these technologies for national economic growth, requires professionals versed in both technical and commercial aspects of space. Meeting this requirement academically presents two challenges. On the technical side, enrollment in science and engineering is decreasing in some of the spacefaring nations. From the commerce perspective, very few colleges and universities offer specific courses in space business

Predictions Based on the Clustering of Heterogeneous Functions via Shape and Subject-Specific Covariates

We consider a study of players employed by teams who are members of the National Basketball Association where units of observation are functional curves that are realizations of production measurements taken through the course of one's career. The observed functional output displays large amounts of between player heterogeneity in the sense that some individuals produce curves that are fairly smooth while others are (much) more erratic. We argue that this variability in curve shape is a feature that can be exploited to guide decision making, learn about processes under study and improve prediction. In this paper we develop a methodology that takes advantage of this feature when clustering functional curves. Individual curves are flexibly modeled using Bayesian penalized B-splines while a hierarchical structure allows the clustering to be guided by the smoothness of individual curves. In a sense, the hierarchical structure balances the desire to fit individual curves well while still producing meaningful clusters that are used to guide prediction. We seamlessly incorporate available covariate information to guide the clustering of curves non-parametrically through the use of a product partition model prior for a random partition of individuals. Clustering based on curve smoothness and subject-specific covariate information is particularly important in carrying out the two types of predictions that are of interest, those that complete a partially observed curve from an active player, and those that predict the entire career curve for a player yet to play in the National Basketball Association.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-BA919 in the Bayesian Analysis (http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ba) by the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (http://bayesian.org/