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Blood Money, New Money, and the Moral Economy of Tort Law in Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Tom Baker
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Abstract

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This article reports the results of a qualitative study of personal injury lawyers in Connecticut. Building on the results of an earlier study of lawyers in Florida, “Transforming Punishment Into Compensation: In the Shadow of Punitive Damages” (Baker 1998), the Connecticut study describes and explores the implications of professional norms and practices that govern tort settlement behavior. In particular, it examines the moral and practical barriers to collecting “blood money” (money from individual defendants, as opposed to liability insurance companies), as well as explanations for victims' apparent ability to partially trump the claims of subrogating workers' compensation and health insurance carriers. The results pose a challenge to the conventional understanding that tort law in action is a simpler, more streamlined version of tort law on the books. In addition, the results suggest that compensation and retribution figure far more prominently in tort law in action than does the deterrence emphasized in much of the theoretical and doctrinal literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , 2001 , pp. 275 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Thank you to Leslie Levin and Jim Stark for insightful comments and discussion over the course of this research project, and to Kenneth Abraham, Marc Galanter, Kyle Logue, Francis Mootz, Jeremy Paul, and Peter Siegelman for comments on an earlier draft. Thank you to Marianne Sadowski and Jonathan Shapiro for valuable research assistance.

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