Pharmaceutical Class Actions and Effective Behaviour Modification: Avoiding Ford <i>Pintos</i> Through Punitive Damages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author argues that a liberal application of punitive damages may be required in certain pharmaceutical class actions to ensure effective deterrence of reprehensible behaviour by drug manufacturers. The infamous American civil case regarding the Ford Pinto is used to illustrate the danger of failed deterrence and is compared to pharmaceutical class actions in Canada. First, the deterrent role of class actions and punitive damages is examined, considering class action theory and the approaches to class actions and punitive damages set out by the Supreme Court of Canada. Second, the problem of failed deterrence in pharmaceutical class actions is discussed and an expanded application of punitive damages is proposed as a potential solution. Third, the proposed approach is assessed in light of the current Canadian law regarding punitive damages. Fourth, the pharmaceutical regulatory regime in Canada is discussed and the argument for a regulatory compliance defence to punitive damages is addressed. Finally, the author addresses potential objections to the proposed application of punitive damages, including the need for innovation and the deterrent effect of negative media coverage.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".