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The Liability Maze : The Impact of Liability Law on Safety and Innovation, PDF eBook

The Liability Maze : The Impact of Liability Law on Safety and Innovation PDF

Edited by Peter W. Huber, Robert E. Litan

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

With an ever-increasing number of liability lawsuits, are corporations electing to play it safe rather than risk the uncertainties accompanying innovation? In The Liability Maze experts address the issues surrounding safety and innovation and present the most detailed and comprehensive study to date on the actual impact of U.S. liability law. In recent decades it has been widely assumed that liability laws promote safety by significantly raising the price companies must pay for negligence, product defects and accidents. More recently, others have suggested that the broad and unpredictable sweep of these laws actually deters innovation. The risks of lawsuits are so great that corporations are showing more caution in product innovation than ever before. The contributors focus on five sectors of the economy where the liability system appears to have had the greatest effects, positive or negative: the private aircraft, automobile, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, and the medical profession. They suggest that in many sectors liability law has hampered innovation. In others it has stimulated safety improvements, although perhaps not so much as vigilant safety regulations.