Tort Law and Probabilistic Litigation: How to Apply Multipliers to Address the Problem of Negative Value Suits

Abstract

This Article advances a proposal that brings to life valuable lawsuits that litigation costs currently discourage. Our proposal converts claims with negative expected values into positive expected value claims by implementing a novel system involving flexible conditional multipliers. Our proposal has two components. First, under the proposed system a plaintiff is allowed to select a damage multiplier that determines the amount of damages the plaintiff will receive if the litigation is successful. Second, courts select cases for litigation randomly with a probability inverse to the multiplier the plaintiff selected.

Keywords: litigation, procedure, tort law

JEL Classification: D72, F02, K34