An economic analysis of waiver of tort in negligence actions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legal status, scope, and policy implications of the waiver of tort doctrine have been a prominent, controversial, and unresolved feature of many recent class action proceedings in Canada, especially in products liability cases, where plaintiffs have sought to claim disgorgement of profits or revenues as an alternative to proof of damage or injury. The doctrine in recent years has been invoked frequently by plaintiffs in negligence class actions, though its legal status in such a context remains uncertain, as it has not been judicially decided. The article assesses the waiver of tort doctrine from an economic perspective. It argues that decoupling remedies from actual damages in negligence cases generally, or in products liability cases in particular, is not well founded from an economic perspective. Theory and evidence suggests that the deterrence and insurance aspects of negligence law are best achieved by linking remedies to losses actually suffered. In many contexts, disgorgement of gains from activities entailing negligent conduct may induce socially wasteful forms of over-deterrence. Economic analysis does not support the waiver of tort doctrine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".