Although personal injury law has been much criticized--by legal groups, insurers, health care providers, the business community, legislators, victims, and others--no concrete legal reforms have been enacted that would create a more equitable compensation system for accident victims of all sorts. In this volume, Sugarman offers both a penetrating critique of current personal injury law and a pioneering proposal for new compensation arrangements and new mechanisms for controlling unreasonably dangerous conduct. Sugarman argues persuasively that personal injury law as it is currently constructed generates more perverse behavior than desired safety, that it is an intolerably expensive and unfair system of compensating victims, and that in practice it fails to serve any commonsense notion of justice. His solution is the abolition of personal injury law and the institution of reforms based on social insurance and employee benefits.

Sugarman begins by examining the justifications advanced in support of existing personal injury law, demonstrating that these goals are either unachieved or inefficiently pursued. He argues that current tort law discourages business innovation, undermines our health care system, diverts the time and attention of engineers, executives, and others from their main tasks, leaves many victims uncompensated while allowing others inappropriate punitive damages, artificially inflates insurance costs, and more. In the second section, Sugarman criticizes already proposed reforms, arguing that they do not go nearly far enough to address the serious short falls of the current system. Finally, Sugarman delineates his own three-part reform proposal: eliminate tort remedies for accidental injuries; build on existing social insurance and employee benefit plans to assure generous, yet fair compensation to all accident victims; and build on existing regulatory schemes to promote accident avoidance and to provide effective outlets for public complaints. Practicing attorneys, lobbyists, policymakers and business, consumer, and insurance leaders will find "Doing Away with Personal Injury LaW" a provocative contribution to the continuing debate on the best means of reforming the victim compensation system.

In this important new volume, distinguished legal and public policy scholars address issues that are critical to the successful drafting and implementation of school choice programs, yet are usually overlooked in the choice debate. They explore whether school choice is a threat or an opportunity to the many children who are largely deprived of choice today and they offer a variety of perspectives, with some authors enthusiastic, others more skeptical. The book begins with a discussion of the types and extent of school choice, what is known about its consequences, and how politics has influenced its development. It then focuses on three important public policy issues: how school choice can revolutionize the way schools are financed, what policy interventions are necessary to increase the supply of choice schools, and how choice programs can be held accountable to parents and the state without undermining institutional autonomy. The book addresses legal issues, including whether public and private choice schools will be required to observe student and teacher rights generally recognized in traditional public schools, how the religion and speech clauses of the First Amendment may affect the participation of religious schools in school choice programs, whether school choice will enhance or aggravate opportunities for racial justice, what the implications of school choice are for teacher unions and collective bargaining, and whether children with disabilities will be accommodated in school choice programs under federal disability law. Throughout the book, the authors offer recommendations for public policy development. The contributors are Jeffrey Henig, Robert Bulman and David L. Kirp, Paul T. Hill, Robert M. O'Neil, Jesse H. Choper, Betsy Levin, William G. Buss, and Laura F. Rothstein. Stephen D. Sugarman is Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Frank R. Kemerer is Regents Professor and director of the Center for the Study of Education Reform at the University of North Texas.

This collection includes essays by eleven leading public health experts, economists, physicians, political scientists, and lawyers, whose activities encompass Congressional testimonies, Surgeon General's reports on youth smoking, and clinical trials for drugs for smoking cessation. They analyze specific strategies that have been used to influence tobacco use, including taxation, regulation of advertising and promotion, regulation of indoor smoking, control of youth access to cigarettes and other tobacco products, litigation, and subsidies of smoking cessation, and set them against the latest scientific findings about tobacco and the changing cultural and political setting against which policy decisions are being made.

All Our Families, a project of the Berkeley Forum on the Family, takes a hard look at contemporary families and family structure. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the American family is disintegrating. Its essays argue that comparing today's family to an imagined typical family of the past - stable, middle class, working father, stay-at-home mother, is dishonest and wrongheaded. Most American families are not, and never were, like that. In contrast, All Our Families considers seriously all of today's types of families, not just the "ideal" ones or the "failures". For the second edition, all essays have been revised and updated, and two new essays - one on immigrated families and one on ambiguous-father families - have been added.

This collection includes essays by eleven leading public health experts, economists, physicians, political scientists, and lawyers, whose activities encompass Congressional testimonies, Surgeon General's reports on youth smoking, and clinical trials for drugs for smoking cessation. They analyze specific strategies that have been used to influence tobacco use, including taxation, regulation of advertising and promotion, regulation of indoor smoking, control of youth access to cigarettes and other tobacco products, litigation, and subsidies of smoking cessation, and set them against the latest scientific findings about tobacco and the changing cultural and political setting against which policy decisions are being made.

During the past 25 years there has been a dramatic transformation in public policy towards smoking. This book is an interdisciplinary collection of research essays which examine various aspects of smoking policy. Topics include tort cases against tobacco companies, how the political culture of different countries shapes smoking policy, the enforcement of anti-smoking regulations, comparing cigarette policy with the policies for illicit drugs, and the regulation of tobacco advertising.