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Record W4414324984 · doi:10.36644/mlr.124.1.tort

Tort Law in a World of Scarce Compensatory Resources

2025· article· en· W4414324984 on OpenAlex
Mark Geistfeld

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueMichigan Law Review · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal principles and applications
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersYork University
KeywordsTortDamagesDelictStrict liabilityVicarious liabilityMass tortBankruptcyPlaintiffTort reform

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Large corporations facing extensive tort liabilities have often gone into bankruptcy, forcing tort plaintiffs to accept pennies on the dollar as compensation for their injuries. Bankruptcy painfully illustrates the social fact that the compensatory properties of tort law depend on the availability of compensatory resources. Although this feature of tort law is self-evident, no one has adequately analyzed whether it matters for substantive tort doctrine, and if so, how. Wealth would seem to be substantively irrelevant given the rule that excludes evidence concerning the defendant’s financial resources when determining breach or compensatory damages. The antecedent tort duty, however, depends on the burden it would impose on the ordinary duty-bearer across the general class of cases the duty governs. The reasonableness of this burden is affected by social facts such as per capita wealth, the replacement of debtor’s prison with bankruptcy, the availability of liability insurance, and the social meaning of monetary damages. These normatively relevant facts are largely absent from modern accounts of tort law, even though they contract or expand the scope of substantive tort duties for noncontroversial reasons grounded in widely recognized tort values. An extended historical and doctrinal analysis confirms as much, showing how the scarcity of compensatory resources has shaped the basic structure of tort law—why it employs a default rule of negligence liability, sometimes supplemented by strict liability, while also being limited for wide swaths of negligently caused harms involving economic loss and emotional distress. Accounting for the availability of compensatory resources reveals normative properties of substantive tort law that are often quite different from the ones modern tort theories depict, including the relation between tort law and criminal law and the vital role deterrence plays in a rights-based tort system. An adequate account of tort law must comprehend how the scarcity of compensatory resources alters substantive tort doctrine in principled ways.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.996
Threshold uncertainty score0.997

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.345
Teacher spread0.321 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it