Causal uncertainty is a wide-spread phenomenon. Courts are often unable to determine whether a defendant's tortious conduct was a factual cause of a plaintiff's harm. Yet, sometimes courts can determine the probability that the defendant caused the plaintiff's harm, although often there is considerable variance in the probability estimate based on the available evidence. The conventional way to cope with this uncertainty has been to apply the evidentiary rule of 'standard of proof'. The application of this 'all or nothing' rule can lead to unfairness by absolving defendants who acted tortiously and may also create undesirable incentives that result in greater wrongful conduct and injustice to victims. Some courts have decided that this 'no-liability' outcome is undesirable. They have adopted rules of proportional liability that compensate plaintiffs according to the probability that their harm was caused by the defendant's tortious conduct. In 2005 the Principles of European Tort Law (PETL) made a breakthrough in this regard by embracing rules of proportional liability. This project, building on PETL, endeavours to make further inquiries into the desirable scope of proportional liability and to offer a more detailed view of its meaning, implications, and ramifications.

Where products develop ever more rapidly, the law may face difficulties in responding accordingly to new security threats which may arise. In the field of product liability, an extraordinary need for legal development has thus been perceived, with legislators and judges feeling compelled to find new solutions and to look across borders for these. In the detailed reports in this book, the World Tort Law Society proves that it is in an ideal position to examine the most significant concepts. The report on North America studies the special regime for product liability from its origin in the case law of the US; the European report is centred around the EU Product Liability Directive with its merits and faults; and the influence of these two systems as well as new answers are shown in the reports on Asia, Russia and four key jurisdictions in the rest of the world. Similar questions are discussed worldwide: How can a strict liability regime for products be justified, and can it be justified in all cases? How does the special regime relate to general rules of tort law? Should services be subject to a similar regime? The Members of the Society seek to provoke thought for solutions to these pervasive problems. In this spirit, the volume's comparative conclusions invite discussion, and the book includes four responses to that call from eminent tort lawyers from different legal backgrounds.

Benedictin was prescribed to more than thirty-five million American women from its introduction in 1956 until 1983, when it was withdrawn from the market. The drug's manufacturer, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, a major U.S. pharmaceutical firm, joined a list of other companies whose product liabilities would result in precedent-setting litigation. Before it was over, the Benedictin litigation would involve 2,000 claimants over a fifteen-year period. Michael D. Green offers a comprehensive overview of the Benedictin case and highlights many of the key issues in mass toxic substances litigation, comparing individual and collective forms of litigation, and illustrating the misunderstandings between scientists and lawyers about the role of science in providing evidence for the legal system.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today?
Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. They describe hunting practices among different tribes, how some made the gradual transition to more settled, agricultural ways of life, the role of kinship and cooperation in Native societies, their varied burial rites and spiritual practices, and many other features of Native American life. Throughout the book, Perdue and Green stress the great diversity of indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages before the arrival of Europeans and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to so successfully. Most importantly, the authors stress how Native Americans have struggled to maintain their sovereignty--first with European powers and then with the United States--in order to retain their lands, govern themselves, support their people, and pursue practices that have made their lives meaningful.
Going beyond the stereotypes that so often distort our views of Native Americans, this Very Short Introduction offers a historically accurate, deeply engaging, and often inspiring account of the wide array of Native peoples in America.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Annie Heloise Abel describes the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, a bloody disaster for the Confederates but a glorious moment for Colonel Stand Watie and his Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The Indians were soon enough swept by the war into a vortex of confusion and chaos. Abel makes clear that their participation in the conflict brought only devastation to Indian Territory.

Born in England and educated in Kansas, Annie Heloise Abel (1873-1947) was a historical editor and writer of books dealing mainly with the trans-Mississippi West. They include "The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist" (1915), also reprinted as a Bison Book. Abel's distinguished career is noted in an introduction by Theda Perdue, the author of "Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society" (1979), and Michael D. Green, whose "Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis" (1982) was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

In 1841 U.S. government authorities sent Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Indian Territory to investigate numerous charges of fraud and profiteering by various contractors dealing with the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians, who had been removed from the South during the last decade. Hitchcock's report, filed after four months of travel, exposed such a high level of graft and corruption that his investigation was suppressed and never brought to the attention of Congress.

Hitchcock kept nine personal diaries of his travels and observations, however, and they reveal much historic and ethnographic information on Indian life in Indian Territory. He observes how the Indians were adjusting alter removal and includes many details on their customs, beliefs, culture, religion, ceremonies, amusements, industry, tribal councils, and government. To aid the modern reader, editor Grant Foreman provides an introduction and annotations, and Michael D. Green, in his foreword, explains the politics behind Hitchcock's mission to Indian Territory and his accomplishments in advancing ethnographic knowledge.

"[Abel's] story is a tragic one, but leaving it untold would be a greater tragedy. Native American southerners shared the experience of the Civil War with other Americans, and their involvement in that upheaval had as profound an effect on their subsequent history. Abel's was the first serious telling of that story."--Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green.
The secession of southern states in the winter and spring of 1861-62 brought about a crisis for the Five Civilzed Tribes living in present-day Oklahoma, or Indian Territory. Forced out of the South thirty years earlier and relocated there, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had maintained a relationship with the United States through treaties and resident agents. Now the civil war that threatened the Union also called into question its relationship with the southern Indians, an influential minority of whom owned black slaves. In this volume, originally published in 1915 as the first of a trilogy on slaveholding Indians, Annie Heloise Abel explores the diplomatic manuevers of the Confederacy to secure alliances with these five Indian nations.

The negotiations were an important chapter in American diplomatic history, as Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, professors of history at Dartmouth College, point out in their introduction to this Bison Book. They profile the English-born, Kansas-educated Annie Heloise Abel (1873-1947), a distinguished historical editor and writer whose works include "The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865," also a Bison Book.

In the two decades after their defeat by the United States in the Creek War in 1814, the Creek Indians of Georgia and Alabama came under increasing--ultimately irresistible--pressure from state and federal governments to abandon their homeland and retreat westward. That historic move came in 1836. This study, based heavily on a wide variety of primary sources, is distinguished for its Creek perspective on tribal affairs during a period of upheaval.