Use Of Liability Research Articles

A Local-First Approach for Green Smart Contracts

Shared code in blockchains, known as smart contracts , stands to replace important parts of our digital governance and financial infrastructure. The permissionless execution of smart contracts is tightly coupled to cryptocurrencies and Proof-of-Work blockchains. As a result, smart contracts inherit the environmental impact of Proof-of-Work blockchains, such as its energy consumption, carbon footprint, and electronic waste. The four concepts of relaxed consistency, strong identities, probabilistic consensus, and the use of liabilities instead of assets may change the status quo. This work explores the integration of these concepts to decouple smart contracts from Proof-of-Work blockchains. By means of a local-first approach, which may expose users to inconsistent ephemeral contract states, the architecture of smart contracts can be transformed to become green. Because such contract states may be dropped, we base the interactions between users on liabilities. We propose a novel paradigm for smart contract architectures, named Green Smart Contracts, that is based on a local-first approach. Furthermore, we present and implement a prototype solution for this paradigm. We validate the need for a mechanism to resolve consistency violations by replaying the contract calls of a real smart contract. Our simulation shows that violations occur more often (13% of contract invocations) when using liabilities than when using a traditional blockchain (3% of contract invocations). However, we additionally validate that they can be avoided using a consensus mechanism, and our experiments show that a publish-subscribe messaging pattern uses the fewest messages to do so, though it may not be applicable for use cases that disallow the inherent imbalance in the messaging between peers. Our carbon emission estimation shows that a Green Smart Contract approach lowers carbon emissions by 52.31% when compared with the messaging behavior of a typical peer-to-peer blockchain with 1000 nodes.

Joint Use of Liability and Regulation in Environmental Law

In this paper, we argue that the joint use of ex-ante regulation and ex-post liability rules is efficient when there are uncertainty surrounding causal investigations and regulatory myopia. As these conditions are generally met in environmental cases, we provide an explanation for the frequent coexistence of these two instruments to control activities that create a risk for the environment. Moreover, we suggest that a joint use of liability and regulation should more frequently be optimal at the European (Federal) level than at the Country (State) level.

Corrective Taxation versus Liability

Taxation and liability are compared as means of controlling harmful externalities, with a view toward explaining why the use of liability predominates over taxation. Taxation suffers from a disadvantage in the analysis: because taxes do not reflect all the variables affecting expected harm, inefficiency results, whereas efficiency under liability requires only assessment of actual harm. However, liability also suffers from a disadvantage: incentives are diluted because injurers escape suit. Joint use of taxation and liability is examined, and it is shown that liability should be employed fully, with taxation taking up the slack due to escape from suit.

New state liability exceptions for agritourism activities and the use of liability releases

Agritourism activities have gained importance as a mechanism for some farmers to broaden their sources of income. As businesses have pursued agritourism activities, they have been concerned about liability for personal injuries of participants. In some states, providers of agritourism activities have presented legislators with ideas for an agritourism statute to limit liability for injuries resulting from inherent risks. Four new agritourism statutes have been enacted, while six other states have adopted alternative liability provisions that may apply to some agritourism providers. The agritourism statutes provide an affirmative defense to providers to eliminate liability for inherent-risk injuries. An analysis of the statutory provisions shows legislatures making choices on the assignment of liability for accident injuries and the ability of providers to obtain releases from negligence. Because the agritourism statutes impose prerequisites and do not stop meritless lawsuits, they do not offer much assistance to agritourism providers. An evaluation of policy issues suggests that legislatures might consider additional options to address agritourism providers’ concerns.

On the Joint Use of Liability and Safety Regulation

The efficiency of two different means of controlling hazardous economic activities, namely ex post liability for harm done and ex ante safety regulation, is re-examined. Some researchers have stressed that the complementary use of these two instruments can be socially advantageous. Here it is argued that the models which have been built in order to support this view crucially depend on the assumption that there are persistent enforcement errors. It is demonstrated that such a rather unsatisfactory assumption is not needed if wealth varies among injurers.

On the joint use of liability and safety regulation

The efficiency of two different means of controlling hazardous economic activities, namely ex post liability for harm done and ex ante safety regulation, is re-examined. Some researchers have stressed that the complementary use of these two instruments can be socially advantageous. Here it is argued that the models which have been built in order to support this view crucially depend on the assumption that there are persistent enforcement errors. It is demonstrated that such a rather unsatisfactory assumption is not needed if wealth varies among injurers.

Environmental governance and private actors: enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation

Abstract Government programmes have always relied on the enrolment of intermediate actors, both public and private, in the regulatory process. An increasing recognition that the form of implementation is as important as the passing of new legislation means that these actors are increasingly the focus, rather than just the means to an end, of regulatory programmes. This is particularly the case in international maritime environmental regulation. In this paper I examine how the enrolment of private actors takes place, both discursively and through the use of incentives and sanctions. I focus in particular on the use of liability and compulsory insurance and examine the conditions necessary for an environmental insurance market to function. I then take one set of private actors—Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs which insure shipowners' third party liabilities—and look how international government institutions create (dis)incentives and discourses that encourage the P&I Clubs to act in favour of regulatory goals. The contingent nature of regulation means there is an increasing feedback in which P&I Clubs are allowed to contribute to the framing of specific government programmes in the name of practical implementation, but this must be balanced against the risk of allowing private interests to determine ultimate policy objectives.

Liability for oil spill damages: Issues, methods, and examples

Liability is an important incentive‐based instrument for preventing oil spills and provides a sustainable approach for restoring coastal resources injured by spills. However, the use of liability for environmental damages raises many challenges, including quantification of money measures of damages. In this article, case studies are used to illustrate the issues, methods, and challenges associated with assessing a range of damages, from those that can be measured relatively easily using market information to more “esoteric,”; and much more difficult, cases involving non‐market‐valued losses. Also discussed are issues raised by the new national and international regulatory focus on restoration and by the simplified, compensatory formula used by some states.

In the land of omissions: An opinionated guide

Liability for omissions has long been a controversial subject in Anglo-American legal theory. The legal and philosophical literature on omissions is so extensive, and frequently so dense, that yet another article on the topic seems painfully otiose. Nonetheless, the debate as to the nature of omissive conduct and the propriety of liability for omissions continues with little movement towards a generally satisfactory resolution or, apparently, improved understanding among theoretical adversaries.(2) One justification for a new foray into this territory is the possibility of clarifying some of the issues and lines of argument in which the theoretical discourse is presently mired. What follows, here, is an admittedly idiosyncratic tour of selected matters that contribute to this controversy, offered to help others traverse what I take to be the more boggy areas. Among these are: the relation of various levels of discourse, the ontological status of omissions as a form of conduct, the function of the requirement of actus reus for criminal liability, and certain worries about controlling liability for omissions. I Setting Out (a) Getting the Lay of the Land Perhaps the greatest impediment to fruitful movement on the 'problem of omissions' is the very number of issues and levels of investigation falling under that rubric. Issues of ontological standing, moral evaluation, social theory, political agendae, and linguistic familiarity are all pertinent and often overlap in the arguments of concerned theorists. Therefore, it is useful to begin one's journey with a sense of destination and of which matters provide direct routes, which side trips. Let us assume that metaphysics and ethics are different subjects, however salient one may be for the other. Then, an initial map of the literature on omissions reveals two primary categories of analysis and four generic positions: Metaphysical Analyses i) Affirmative Positions: Omissions are and may function causally; they are a mode/type of human conduct; and so forth. ii) Dismissive Positions: Omissions are real [not events] and/or have no causal role; they are the absence of conduct; and so forth. Normative Analyses i) Affirmative Positions: Omissions are subject to moral appraisal; there are important positive duties, some of which are legitimate legal duties [such as duties to rescue]; there is no principled basis on which to limit liability for omissions, per se; and so forth. ii) Dismissive Positions: Omissions are/usually are of less moral significance than commissions; if there are positive duties, they are of less weight than negative duties; use of liability for omissions ought to be highly circumscribed; and so forth. In truth, many theorists move easily from one level of analysis to the other, and it is common for proponentS of a position on, for example, the comparative stringency of positive and negative duties to select a metaphysical view primarily because it serves the favored socio-ethical position. (b) Designing the Itinerary However, if metaphysical and evaluative claims belong to divergent areas of discourse, one ought not board the bus for one type of destination as a direct means of arriving at the other. This admonishment does not rest on any belief that analyses of human agency are voyages of pure discovery--objectivist wanderings in a realm of brute reality untainted by human itineraries or the formative influence of human purposes. Our conceptions of agency and responsibility depend, in part, on how we see ourselves in the world, and that turns, in part, on the kind of world we wish to inhabit. Any theory of responsibility is, therefore, an interpretive construct (a truth which helps to account for the plurality of plausible conceptions of agency even within a single cultural domain).(3) Nonetheless, interpretation and refinement are not equivalent to adoption of a view for the sake of supporting a position of another character. …

Market Share Liability and Economic Efficiency

In recent history, the trend in U.S. liability law has been to shift the burden of products liability from the consumer to the producer, with strict (producer) liability being the extreme case. One of the key economic rationales for the use of strict liability as opposed to the rules of no liability or negligence is that producers have knowledge of the riskiness of their products, while buyers do not have this knowledge. Given this information asymmetry, strict liability achieves economic efficiency, while the use of no liability or negligence will result in inefficiency. The crux of this well-known argument is that with strict liability producers are able to correctly internalize expected liability expenses to their costs, while buyers can not correctly internalize these costs to their willingness to pay.' Let us call this information problem the product evaluation problem. Imagine now a second type of information problem where in addition to the lack of ability to evaluate the riskiness of a product, buyers (and sellers) are unable to identify ex post the particular producer of the product causing harm. There are a number of instances in which the producer identification problem is present. One example is provided by the case where a consumer uses a variety of generically similar drugs produced by many different producers. A similar example is provided by the case of a carcinogenic food additive entering many different foods produced by multiple producers. A third set of examples concerns products doing harm through exposure rather than ingestion. A single individual may come into contact with several different brands of asbestos, each brand containing the same fibers harmful to the lungs. Likewise, an individual may be exposed to several different brands of pesticides or herbicides each containing the same harmful chemical compound. In all of these cases, it is possible that the victim of harm would know the type of product doing damage but not the specific producer(s) of the product(s). In fact, for many of these cases, it is unreasonable to expect the consumer to be able to identify the producer causing harm. While strict liability provides a solution to the product evaluation problem, it can not similarly perform in the case of the producer identification problem. A fairly recent California Supreme Court case, Sindel versus Abbott Laboratories [7], has used market shares to apportion the total damages among firms as a remedy for what we call

Monopoly, Liability and Regulation

Our society regulates the quality and safety characteristics of a large number of products destined for consumer use. In many of these cases, our legal system holds the producers of such regulated products liable for harm which is inflicted in the course of consumption. Examples of the joint use of liability and safety regulation include the cases of drugs, foods, pesticides, herbicides, and some aspects of consumer product design. This paper is concerned with cases where it is socially beneficial to regulate safety characteristics of products (or simply cases where we do regulate for whatever reason) and asks whether or not it is in addition socially desirable to impose liability on producers. As an alternative, we consider the rule of no liability and specifically ask whether in a regulated setting it makes economic sense to release producers of liability for harm done. In our analysis, the key determinants in the answer to this question are what we term with respect to the marginal probability of the product causing harm and the degree of ignorance on the part of the consumers of the risky product. The economic environment is that of a regulated monopoly producer of a risky product (e.g., the producer of a patented drug). While the regulator and the firm correctly perceive expected damages associated with the product, the consumer may underestimate risk. The regulatory authority controls the of the product but does not regulate the level of the firm's output. Both care level and output level affect the probability of the product harming a typical consumer. In addition, the firm's output level affects the marginal probability of the product causing harm with respect to output, and we term this phenomenon a scale effect. The provision for scale effects is an extension of previous work on products liability, [1; 2; 3] and [5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11], which assumes that the marginal probability of harm is a constant function of output. Scale effects can take the form of a locally rising or falling marginal probability of harm with respect to output. The former case corresponds to a product which does cumulative damage as more units are consumed. The latter case corresponds to a product to which a tolerance can be developed. Our principle findings are divided into two cases depending on whether or not the consumer misperceives expected damages. For the case in which consumers correctly perceive expected damages from the product, the desirability of strict liability in combination with regulation versus regulation with release of liability depends on the direction of the consumption scale effects. For the case in which the consumer underestimates the expected damages from the risky product, the

Risk-Sharing and Liability in the Control of Stochastic Externalities

This paper analyzes alternative policies for controlling stochastic externalities, considering both the incentive and the risk-sharing effects of each. When polluter actions are unobservable so that regulation is not possible, alternative liability rules including zero, partial, and full liability are compared. When actions are observable, then regulation is possible, and the use of regulation is compared to the use of liability. The principal-agent paradigm provides the analytical approach used to determine the efficient policy choice. The effect of the availability of insurance is also addressed. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for the control of stochastic marine pollution.

A Model of the Optimal Use of Liability and Safety Regulation

A model of the occurrence of accidents is used to examine liability and safety regulation as means of controlling risks. According to the model, regulation does not result in the appropriate reduction of risk--because the regulator lacks perfect information--nor does liability result in that outcome--because the incentives it creates are diluted by the chance that parties would not be sued for harm done or would not be able to pay fully for it. Thus, neither liability nor regulation is necessarily better than the other, and as is stressed, their joint use is generally socially advantageous.