Abstract

Conventional wisdom in the economic analysis of tort law holds that legal errors distort incentives, causing behavior to depart from the optimum. If potential injurers know that courts err, they may engage in less or more than optimal precaution. This article revisits the effect of judicial error on the incentives of potential injurers by identifying a heretofore-neglected filtering effect of uncertainty in settings of imperfect judicial decision-making. We show that when courts make errors in the application of the liability standards, uncertainty about erroneous decision-making filters out the most harmful torts but leaves unaffected less harmful accidents. Our insight applies to various procedural and institutional aspects of legal adjudication, including the randomization of case assignment, the strength of precedent, and the use of standards versus rules.

中文翻译：

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过滤侵权事故

摘要

侵权法经济学分析中的传统观点认为，法律错误会扭曲诱因，导致行为偏离最佳做法。如果潜在的伤害者知道法院犯了错，他们可能会采取或多或少采取最佳预防措施。本文通过确定迄今不完善的司法决策环境中不确定性的过滤效应，重新审视了司法错误对潜在伤害诱因的影响。我们表明，当法院在责任标准的适用中出现错误时，错误决策的不确定性会滤除最有害的侵权行为，但不会造成危害较小的事故。我们的见解适用于法律裁决的各种程序和制度方面，包括案件分配的随机性，先例的优势，