IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v7y2005i2p523-543.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Hand Rule and United States v. Carroll Towing Co. Reconsidered

Author

Listed:
  • Allan M. Feldman
  • Jeonghyun Kim

Abstract

Judge Learned Hand's opinion in United States v. Carroll Towing Co. (1947) is canonized in the law-and-economics literature as the first use of cost-benefit analysis for determining negligence and assigning liability. This article revisits the case in which the Hand formula was born and examines whether Judge Hand's ruling in that case would provide correct incentives for efficient levels of precaution. We argue that the negligence test as used by Judge Hand is somewhat different from the Hand test as used by modern law-and-economics theorists. With a game theoretic analysis of the case, we show that Judge Hand's negligence test could in fact produce games with inefficient equilibria, or with liability determinations opposite Judge Hand's. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Allan M. Feldman & Jeonghyun Kim, 2005. "The Hand Rule and United States v. Carroll Towing Co. Reconsidered," American Law and Economics Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 7(2), pages 523-543.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:7:y:2005:i:2:p:523-543
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahi017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Allan M. Feldman & Ram Singh, 2009. "Comparative Vigilance," American Law and Economics Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(1), pages 134-161.
    2. Kim, Jeonghyun & Feldman, Allan M., 2006. "Victim or injurer, small car or SUV: Tort liability rules under role-type uncertainty," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(4), pages 455-477, December.
    3. Ashlagi, Itai & Karagözoğlu, Emin & Klaus, Bettina, 2012. "A non-cooperative support for equal division in estate division problems," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 228-233.
    4. Elisabeth Paté‐Cornell & Louis Anthony Cox, 2014. "Improving Risk Management: From Lame Excuses to Principled Practice," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 34(7), pages 1228-1239, July.
    5. Allan M Feldman & Ram Singh, 2008. "Comparative Vigilance: a Simple Guide," Working Papers 2008-11, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    6. Grady Mark F., 2009. "Unavoidable Accident," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 177-231, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:7:y:2005:i:2:p:523-543. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.