''The Costs of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis'' by

Guido Calabresi Guido Calabresi (born October 18, 1932) is an Italian-born American legal scholar and Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is a former Dean of Yale Law School, where he has been a pr ...

is a work in the

law and economics Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law, which emerged primarily from scholars of the Chicago school of economics. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of law ...

tradition because it provides an economic efficiency analysis of the rules of

tort law A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with criminal wrongs that are punishabl ...

. The text was initially published in 1970 by

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universi ...

Overview

The central aim of tort law is not the absolute minimization of losses from individual accidents because the total accident cost of any economically fruitful activity/industry includes both the expected cost of the accidents that happen to occur and the actual costs expended in avoiding the accidents. For expenditures to prevent accidents, there must be associated levels of expected accidents and expected losses. Unfortunately, there is a serious underregistration of the most common accidents that have only a small cost per accident but may be important in the total cost of accidents. Only few studies have accurately quantified the entire cost of accidents. The whole cost at a given level of precaution is the net of the precautionary expenditures in addition to the losses accrued from the accidents that were not prevented. If the goal is to minimize the total costs of accidents, the costs of precaution should be included.

References

1970 non-fiction books Economics books Law books Law and economics {{law-book-stub Yale University Press books