In a new article, a scholar advocates for modification of tort law so that the negligence-action goal of providing compensation to tort victims can be better realized. See Christopher J. Robinette, Harmonizing Wrongs and Compensation, 80 Maryland Law Review
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Pennsylvania (and Universal?) Medicare Set-Aside Development: In Open Meds/MSA Option C&R Approach, Claimant Held to his Promise of Future Cooperation
Parties under the Pennsylvania practice may compromise and release (C&R) any liability claimed to exist under the law. The statute (enacted in 1996) was, notably, patterned after the California Act provision. Currently, the majority of (though by…
UCLA Professor’s Socio-Historical Account of Fatigue Touches on Workers’ Compensation Themes
UCLA public health professor Emily Abel has written a brief but wide-ranging social history of the phenomenon of fatigue. Abel, herself a breast cancer survivor who suffered from years of fatigue following chemotherapy, combines her sober historical analysis…
New Republic Article by Zaitchik Discusses COVID Long-Haulers … and Their Disability Remedy
Many in the workers’ compensation insurance industry have been trying to predict what costs COVID-19 will ultimately impose. One line of thought is that most claims will be of short duration, with those found…
New Scholarship: Tort Liability for Aggressive Anti-Maskers
In a timely article, a father and son pair of Philadelphia-area authors theorize about the tort suits that might be filed by victims (mostly workers are hypothesized) of the aggressive behavior of that supremely uncivil and churlish breed of…
Larson Treatise “Emerging Issues Analysis” (2020): An Anthology Delivering Complete Immersion in the Field
The editor of the Larson treatise, North Carolina lawyer Thomas Robinson, has again published his anthology, Workers’ Compensation Emerging Issues Analysis (LexisNexis/Matthew Bender. 2020. 233 pp.). This book, though expensive, continues to provide the reader with full…
A Disguised Vaccination Mandate: Submit to Vaccination or Forego the Workers’ Compensation Causation Presumption
A workers’ compensation bill filed in the Illinois House on February 19 provides, “no compensation shall be awarded to a claimant for death or disability arising out of an exposure to COVID-19 if the employee has refused a vaccination.” 820…
Locking Down Nonliability—An Accidentally Close Reading of an Arkansas Covid-19 Bill
Today, I accidentally bumped into a recent Covid-related bill offered in the Arkansas House within the last couple of weeks that looked at first blush employee-friendly. It would exempt Covid-19 from the otherwise categorical exclusion of “ordinary diseases of life,”…
John Burton & Mike Duff on Workers’ Compensation Covid Presumptions
Back on January 22 Professor Burton and I presented at a webinar conducted by the Workers’ Injury Law and Advocacy Group (WILG) and titled “COVID as an Occupational Disease: How Do Various States Handle these Claims?” In this report, published…
Is the Accident Element of Workers’ Compensation Itself an Historical Accident?
As I commence another semester teaching workers’ compensation law, blissfully if artificially abstracted from Covid contexts, I find myself befuddled by a fundamental and, I naïvely had imagined, simple question: why did state workers’ compensation statutes ever include an accident…