In this even-handed and fascinating book, two leading tort experts explain to lay readers the strengths and weaknesses of our tort law system. They discuss tort law's compensatory and deterrent functions; its delays, fortuity, and high transaction costs (mostly in lawyer's fees); and its role in discouraging harmful - as well as, on occasion, useful - activities. Bell and O'Connell conclude with an objective review of such current reform enactments and proposals as no-fault insurance, caps on damages, and contingency fee reform.

"Despite public concern with the increasing politicization of U.S. immigration courts, few people are aware of the system's fundamental flaw: the immigration courts are not really 'courts' but an office of the Department of Justice--the nation's law enforcement agency. Alison Peck's original and surprising account shows how paranoia sparked by World War II and the War on Terror drove the structure of the immigration courts. Focusing on previously unstudied decisions in the Roosevelt and Bush administrations, this book divulges both the human tragedy of our current immigration system and the human crises that led to its creation. Peck provides an accessible legal analysis of recent events to make the case for independent immigration courts, proposing that the courts be moved into an independent, Article I court system. As long as the immigration courts remain under the authority of the attorney general, the administration of immigration justice will remain a game of political football--with people's very lives on the line." -- back cover.

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

Where can I find the case Simpson v. Satterfield? What are the laws in Nevada on gun ownership? Can you help me apply for a business license? How do I copyright my name? Questions like these make a new law librarian's head spin. The truth is, all librarians are apt to get legal questions, and most struggle to respond. Collection development, too, is tricky if you seldom work with legal publishers. As the law touches more and more of our daily lives while lawyers price their services out of the average person's range, the public increasingly turns to libraries for answers. Where can librarians turn? Okay, that one's easy--to Anthony Aycock s The Accidental Law Librarian.--From publisher description.