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What Is a Life Worth in North Carolina? A Look at Wrongful-Death Awards
Get PDFThis Article examines the amounts recovered in 123 wrongful-death cases filed in North Carolina over a five-year period. The dataset is unique in that it includes both jury verdicts and settlements. Although the injury - death - was the same in each of these cases, the amounts recovered varied greatly. Several patterns emerge from the data. First, there is a strong negative correlation between age and the amount recovered. Second, the manner in which the decedent died seems to make a difference. Violent deaths, for example, led to larger recoveries than did nonviolent deaths. Third, jury verdicts produced much larger recoveries than did settlements. Finally, the results underscore the critical role of insurance in wrongful death cases
Judicial Doctrine as Risk Regulation
Get PDFMuch of the literature on risk regulation concerns first-order risks--e.g., those addressed by environmental law or workplace safety rules. But scholars recently have suggested that risk regulation can provide a helpful framework for thinking about second-order, or political, risks arising from allocations of power and institutional design. Although a few commentators have utilized this perspective to suggest connections between risk regulation and particular areas of constitutional law, in this essay we take a broader view. Building on the existing literature, we argue that the selection of constitutional decision rules is a judicial effort to regulate the political risk that government officials will violate constitutional principles.
After making the case that it is helpful to view judicial doctrinal formation as a species of political risk regulation, we discuss some implications of this risk regulation model and pose some questions for future research. We conclude that the risk regulation model reinforces the notion that the formation of doctrine is a temporally extended process, rather than a one-time event, and it provides a metric by which that doctrine can be evaluated. Additionally, the risk regulation model helps explain some of the more commonly critiqued features of constitutional law. Finally, the risk regulation model raises important questions that merit further investigation: (1) Should we trust judicial perceptions of and responses to political risk? (2) What influences risk assessment among judges, and are those influences (and resulting assessments) normatively defensible? (3) What connection, if any, exists between judicial risk assessment and the myriad doctrinal formulae employed by the Supreme Court
Us Got The Bestest Teachers in The Everywhere: North Carolina Public School Teacher Employment Problems, Interests, and Potential Solutions
Get PDFWeakening the “Ripeness Trap” for Federal Takings Claims: Sansotta v. Town of Nags Head and Town of Nags Head v. Toloczko
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