Increase in civil award damages in 1980s? It seems that there was a large increase in civil awards around 1980. Piper Aircraft went bankrupt in 1991 after a decade of fighting lawsuits. In 1975, there were 20 makers of football helmets. By the 1990s, there were only 2 left, the others all exiting the business due to lawsuit liability. The manufacture of small planes came to a complete halt in the United States. What changed? Obviously in the 1950s and 1960s these companies had no problem operating. What changed in the 1980s with regard to civil lawsuits that caused these large increases in awards? Background The immediate reason for the change is obvious: in Greenman vs Yuba Power Company (1962) the California Supreme Court decided that manufacturers would be held strictly liable for any "defects" in products. Since juries tended to ignore whether defects actually existed, all that really mattered was the strictly liable part and lawsuits against manufactured goods skyrocketed. At the same time, the Act of God defense, which previously had been used to routinely dismiss lawsuits against manufacturers, was essentially discarded by the courts and no longer allowed. These changes were subsequently added to state laws across the country, essentially making product manufacturers suable. This is called the "Section 402 Revolution" in legal history. Note that these changes were part of a trend, not a single event. For example before 1920 manufacturers were mostly legally immune to lawsuits (see Schwartz). Then the courts changed this and allowed lawsuits if the manufacturer was "negligent". Finally, in the 1960s this changed again, and manufacturers were held "strictly liable" and negligence was no longer necessary to be proven. So, there was a definite trend. The question is what caused this trend?
The Liability Insurance Crisis There was absolutely an increase in liability insurance premiums in the 1980s, although the cause of the liability insurance crisis in the 1980s remains disputed. During the period from 1984 to 1987, premiums for general liability increased from about $6.5 billion to approximately $19.5 billion.2 In addition to increases in premium, many insurers took the following measures to limit the number and cost of claims: 1) changed policy coverage from an occurrence to a claims-made basis; 2) expanded exclusions; 3) raised deductibles; and 4) lowered policy limits on a per-claim basis, and 5) introduced the notion of aggregate total exposure. The resulting crisis adversely affected a diverse range of organizations, including municipalities, social service providers and pharmaceutical, aircraft, sports equipment, and medical device companies. Many organizations in the nonprofit and government sector could no longer offer social, medical or recreational services due to the prohibitive cost or unavailability of liability coverage. Causes According to the same Wikipedia source linked above, some of the leading explanations for the liability insurance crisis include: Collusion: the argument that the crisis was engineered by insurance companies themselves, through price-fixing and/or manipulation of insurance reserve accounts. Losses: Decrease in interest rates and investment returns forced insurance companies to raise premiums in order to make up for the loss of profitability. Litigation: Proliferation of tort litigation and large settlements drove the cost of liability insurance premiums to excessive levels. Reinsurance: Disruption of supply in reinsurance markets cited as a contributing factor. There are also a couple of distinct questions of causation. One is why liability insurance premiums needed to rise, and another is why this happened all at once. In all likelihood, the pressures on the industry accumulated over many years, and merely exploded all at once due to a crack in competitive pressure to keep rates low, and quite possibly due to major tax law changes around that time that may have disrupted the status quo. Much of the better databases of historical data concerning tort liability were established in the 1990s, in the wake of the liability insurance crisis of the 1980s, so there isn't great retrospective data. Developments In Civil Procedure And Tort Law The major contemporaneous revolution in civil procedure was largely a pro-defendant, rather than a pro-plaintiff one. In a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions including Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317 (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court made it much easier for defendants in civil cases to avoid trials by jury by having cases dismissed by judges prior to trial pursuant to a Motion for Summary Judgment, which had previously been granted much more sparingly. Likewise, there was not really any revolution in class action procedure which had existed with only modest amendments since the 1920s. These was a major amendment of the class action rules in 1966, but it didn't really dramatically change the scope of the rule. There was a significant expansion of tort liability for defective products that began in 1963 in California and gradually spread across the nation. During the 1970s there were a variety of laws passed on subjects such as consumer protection, tenant rights, environmental protection, workplace safety regulation, and intellectual property that generally speaking expanded the scope of civil liability. Underlying Changes In Scientific Knowledge And The Economy Another important factor was a rise in scientific knowledge and contemporaneous changes in the economy. Private sector economic production came to a near standstill from the stock market crash of 1929 that began the Great Depression until the end of World War II in 1945, it took time for the economy to return to normal after World War II, and the Korean War again put the economy on something of a wartime footing in the 1950s. While automobiles had been around since before World War I, public transit was much more robust until the post-World War II economic recovery and interstate highway system made automobile ownership (which was one of the areas where product liability laws were first expanded) much more common. Another industry which rapidly surged in this time period was general aviation. The economic prosperity of the 1960 to 1980s (driven in significant part by rampant labor unrest and perennial strikes from the end of World War II into the 1960s, assisted by labor shortages and pent up demand for consumer goods at home and abroad where industry had been wiped out by World War II), and the growing scope of manufacturing enterprises, meant that in general, people were buying more durable goods made by fewer companies. People who don't buy much and buy very simple, locally produced goods are rarely injured by the products they buy. Many new pharmaceuticals and chemical products (think "The Graduate" and "Plastics") were being invented, but without the careful regulatory trials before they were introduced. This caused a great deal of harm when the new chemical products had unintended toxic side effects. New technologies often have unintended side effects and insufficient attention to safety (dams that would fail, industrial revolution factories, myriad litigation in the wake of the introduction of the railroad), but a lot of that had been forgotten after decades of technological and economic stagnation in the private sector. In the 1920s, a particular product might be made by hundreds of manufacturers, mostly fairly local, each with their own particular defects. By the 1970s, just a handful of companies in the nation would make a particular product, so if it was defective, one particular defect would harm far more people. New government agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board (1967), the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (1971), the Consumer Products Safety Commission (1972), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1975), the Mining Health and Safety Administration (1977) and so on, began compiling that kind of data that made it possible to identify safety risks with common causes on a national scale that made it possible to prove that individual injuries were caused common defects traceable to large national companies or industries. Municipalities started to take building code enforcement more seriously and scientifically after decades in which this was irrelevant because nobody was building anything. These agencies and judicially created tort doctrines expanding liability were driven by increasing faith in science and technology. Also, an increasingly prosperous and better educated population was more able to worry about health and safety now that its more urgent priorities like securing food and shelter had been addressed satisfactorily, and it understood how the modern economy worked better than it had in the past. For example, at Love Canal, in Western New York, toxic pollution had been accumulating for decades (since well before the 1940s), but average citizens only started to understand that it was putting them at risk in the 1960s, and the true extent of the environmental disaster was not recognized until a New York State agency organized a large scale scientific investigation in 1977 using newly developed forensic chemistry techniques to quantify the extent to which people were exposed to toxic chemicals. Until then, many people suspected that pollution wasn't good, but nobody had the capacity to link pollution to negative health outcomes in individuals and communities. Litigation and one of the nation's first Superfund sites followed in the early 1980s. The incredibly complex litigation that followed was still going strong at my first job after I graduated from law school in 1995 when I worked on the Love Canal case as a lawyer, representing some of the insurance companies on that risk. The Rise of Big Law Another innovation that changed how the legal system worked was the rise of the large law firm. When Abraham Lincoln was practicing law, the biggest law firm in the United States probably had no more than twenty lawyers. Law firms with as many as 50 lawyers were extremely rare into the 1950s. Large law firms bloomed everywhere as economies of scale caused their clients to consolidate into large national and multinational companies in need of lawyers with a wide variety of regulatory and technical legal specialties. These law firms were a reaction to the rise in Plaintiff's law firms retooled to gather the technical information and expertise (often gathered by government agencies and burgeoning universities fueled by GI Bill enrollment) that was needed to prosecute product liability cases and mass torts and to manage massive amounts of discovery and class action lawsuit in this complex litigation. Conclusion I don't think that there is one neat consensus answer that even a very informed analysis can provide for the liability insurance crisis. And, like most great moments in economic and social history, there were almost certainly multiple significant causes that all converged at once. But, this answer, at least, touches on some of the relevant considerations.
Civil claims have statutes of limitations too Usually shorter than 10 years. Therefore, Bob cannot sue anyone for recovery and therefore does not practically own the bike. In some jurisdictions, limitations acts make it explicit that Bob loses title to the goods meaning he doesn’t own the bike de jure as well as de facto. It’s not possible to say what a “typical” limitation period is but periods above 10 years typically only apply to actions on real property (land) not personal property (bike). However, that just begs the question. The criminal limitation is irrelevant to the civil action They are completely independent so whether a criminal action has happened, is in progress or can’t happen doesn’t affect the civil action. Bob doesn’t need the information The person who has the bike may or may not be the one who converted it: Bob doesn’t care because they are presently the one detaining it. So Bob sues for detinue: you have it, it’s mine, give it back, or, give me monetary compensation. Whether the person who has it acquired it lawfully or not is a matter of complete indifference to Bob. If they did acquire it lawfully then they have a breach of contract cause of action against the person who sold them goods without good title. But that’s their problem, not Bob’s.
Several scholars have addressed this issue. Here's a quick bibliography. It appears that the most relevant "experiments" are the imposition of loser pays in medical malpractice suits in Florida for the first half of the 1980s, and Alaska's loser pays system. The Gryphon article below includes and discusses a decent amount of empirical data; the Di Pietro et al report is very extensive and has a lot of data. The Florida experiment resulted in a significant increase in suits dropped without settlement or trial, a significant decrease in the number of trials, and, apparently, one spectacular fee award in favor of a plaintiff, which impelled the Florida medical establishment to torpedo the law. Susanne Di Pietro et al, Alaska's English Rule: Attorney's Fee Shifting in Civil Cases (1995), http://www.ajc.state.ak.us/reports/atyfee.pdf. Marie Gryphon, Assessing the Effects of a "Loser Pays" Rule on the American Legal System: An Economic Analysis and Proposal for Reform, 8 Rutgers J. L. &amp; Pub. Pol'y 567 (2011). Douglas C. Rennie, Rule 82 &amp; Tort Reform: An Empirical Study of the Impact of Alaska's English Rule on Federal Civil Case Filings, 29 Alaska L. Rev. 1 (2012). David A. Root, Attorney Fee-Shifting in America: Comparing, Contrasting, and Combining the "American Rule" and "English Rule", 15 Ind. Int'l &amp; Comp. L. Rev. 583 (2005) (student article) (not available online). James R. Maxeiner, Cost and Fee Allocation in Civil Procedure, 58 Am. J. Comp. L. 195 (2010) (not available online).
There is currently no direct limit. First, under the Space Liability Convention, a nation bears responsibility for an object launched from its territory. Accordingly, the Soviet Union was billed for $3M because of the crash of Kosmos 954 in Canada. A thing is not "space junk" initially, so "space junk" is not a thing that is produced in the normal sense (cars and computers are produced). Any restrictions on space debris would therefore have to be either in terms of the number of items a country could launch (there is no provision for such a limit), or requirements regarding what must be done when something becomes "space junk". The existing liability law is a country-to-country liability law, and if a Virgin Moon ship lands on your house or on Russia, neither you nor Russia can sue Virgin Moon. Russia might sue the US, if it was launched from the US. In the case of such a suit, the respondent nation has to have been negligent, and there are no standards for determining negligence. Also, actually proving the origin of a bolt is not trivial, plus, the recourse is via damage caused by the bolt, not the simple fact of there being a bolt. There is some law in the US (SPACE Act of 2015) which addresses private launches (the bill is here).
This is called a qui tam action. It's a concept that's been around a long time in the English legal system (predating the US), to encourage people to help the government enforce its laws. The more contemporary system is to give private parties the right to sue on their own behalf for some wrong (known as a "private attorney general" system), which is how things like civil rights claims tend to work; the difference with qui tam is that the government is the plaintiff (source) It's possible when the law says that a claim under some section may be filed by a private person on behalf of the government; at the time the article was written, the false marking statute (35 USC 292) stated that "Any person may sue for the penalty, in which event one-half shall go to the person suing and the other to the use of the United States." In a qui tam action, the government is the plaintiff; it's just that instead of a public attorney handling the case, it's handled by a private party. There were three active qui tam statutes in US federal law as of 2009 (source: CRS): the False Claims Act (31 USC 3730), the patent marking claim, and an Indian protection statute (25 USC 201). The patent marking qui tam provision has been repealed, leaving just the two. For the Indian protection statute, I can't find any reference to any special procedure; for the False Claims Act, there is a special procedure included in the law. In the False Claims Act, when an action is submitted, the government is notified and the complaint kept sealed for 60 days while the US government decides what to do. If the government wants to take over the case itself, it can do that; if it wants the private party to run the case, it can do that too; if it wants to dismiss or settle the case it can do that as well. It can also ask for the time to be extended, or for discovery to be delayed to gather evidence or prosecute a separate criminal or civil case. If the government lets the private party run the case, they can still intervene later if they have a good reason. After the case finishes, the private party gets 15-25% of the judgment or settlement (if the government took over the case) or 25-30% (if the private party ran the case), plus attorney fees. If the facts the case was brought under were publicly known when it was filed, the amount shrinks to 0-10% if the person supplied information to the government that wasn't publicly known when it was supplied, and the case is dismissed if the person just learned about it from public sources. For the false marking statute, a district court actually found it unconstitutional in part because of the lack of the extensive procedure found in the False Claims Act. There, the procedure was just to file the case like normal; the clerk had to tell the Patent Office that a claim had been filed within a month, but one issue was that a settlement could have happened in that time and bound the government. It's possible higher courts would have ruled had that section not been repealed later that year. As for other countries, the idea came to the US from England, but the Common Informers Act 1951 eliminated it there. However, private prosecutions (which do exist in England) are similar in that the case is on behalf of the Crown, but handled by a private party; they're different in that the private party doesn't get any part of the judgment. While it's hard to prove a negative, I can't find any evidence of qui tam provisions outside the US.
There has been lots of U.S. Supreme Court action in patent law, which has collectively mostly weakened patent law, with some exceptions, although there has been little major patent legislation since 2011. (A background report for Congress from the Congressional research service can be found here.) Sandoz Inc. v. Amgen Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffs the Federal Circuit on a patent law issue related to patent claims in products (basically drugs) biologically similar to products subject to an existing patent making it harder to &quot;puppy guard&quot; such a patent. Impressions Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc. Reversing the Federal Circuit to weaken the rights of patent holders, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the first sale doctrine terminates all patent rights in an item, both in the case of sales in the U.S. and sales outside the U.S., even if the contract of sale purports to reserve patent rights in that particular item produces using the patent. TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC In 1990, the Federal Circuit held that due to an amendment to the general venue statute that patent lawsuits could be brought in any district that has personal jurisdiction over the defendant. This gave rise to extreme forum shopping by patent trolls with the Eastern District of Texas arising as a very plaintiff friendly venue in which many patent infringement cases were brought, despite it having only minimal contacts with the patent holder. This 8-0 decision overrules the 1990 decision of the Federal Circuit and holds that the 1957 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that patent lawsuits may be brought only in the state where a defendant is incorporated remains good law. SCA Hygiene Products Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Products, LLC the equitable doctrine of laches cannot be used to bar the recovery of patent infringement damages incurred within the six year statute of limitations; this follows another recent ruling that laches does not bar the recovery of damages for patent infringement incurred within the three year statute of limitations. Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, Inc. In the case of a multicomponent product, the relevant “article of manufacture” for arriving at a [35 U.S.C.] §289 damages award need not be the end product sold to the consumer but may be only a component of that product. Alice v. CLS Bank, Int'l., prohibited software that generically applied an abstract idea that is not otherwise patentable, have made it dramatically more difficult to obtain patents, particularly the subset of patents called &quot;business method patents&quot; which include most software patents. In January of 2004, only a little more than 2% of patent applications were rejected (on Section 101 grounds which governs what is patentable). By July of 2015, that percentage is about 15%. Before Alice in July of 2014, about 31% of business method patent applications were rejected on Section 101 grounds (already a major increase from 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a more expensive definition of &quot;obviousness&quot; under Section 101 for patent law purposes in KSR International v. Teleflex (see below), and 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court in Bilski v. Kappos (see below) articulated a new (and functionally more restrictive) legal standard for granting software patents (although not as restrictive as the federal circuit case it reviewed which is linked), while affirming that software patents could still be obtained). After Alice, 82% of business method patent applications were rejected. Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies liability for inducing infringement could not exist when there was no direct infringement (the conduct in question involved part of a patented process being carried out by one party, who allegedly urged customers to carry out the balance of the patented process themselves, so that no one person infringed) Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments the Court rebuked a standard for what kind of patent description was excessively vague that was absurdly indulgent to the patent applicant. Octane Fitness, LLC v. Icon Health &amp; Fitness, Inc. (2014) (unanimous) and Highmark Inc. v. Allcare Management Systems (2014) (unanimous) (the Federal Circuit had set too high a standard for the recovery of attorneys' fees for frivolous patent prosecutions) Medtronic v. Mirowski (2014) (unanimous) (burden of proof wrongly placed on someone other than the patent holder) Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics (2013) (unanimous) (invalidated patents on naturally occurring DNA sequences) Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. (2012) (unanimous) (district court's factual findings made clear that drug monitoring device patent merely restated a law of nature and was invalid) Caraco v. Novo (2012) (unanimous) (alleged infringers right to bring counterclaims expanded) Global-Tech v. SEB (2011) (8-1) (added knowledge of infringement element in claim for induced patent infringement) Bilski v. Kappos (2009) (unanimous to reverse, complicated holding as to extent of new law) (analysis to determine validity of business method patents tightened, dramatically narrowing their availability) Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. (2008) (unanimous) (disavows Federal Circuit doctrines allowing patent holders to limit use of patented device after a first sale) KSR v. Teleflex (2007) (unanimous) (tightened standard for obviousness in order to qualify for patent protection) MedImmune v. Genentech (2007) (8-1) (allows for contests of patent validity without risking liability by infringing patent prior to legal ruling on question) Microsoft v. AT&amp;T (2007) (7-1) (U.S. patents laws don't have extraterritorial application; U.S. patent law doesn't apply to software copied abroad and not repatriated.) eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. (2006) (unanimous) (sets higher standard for obtaining injunctions once infringement is established) Merck KGaA v. Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd. (2005) (unanimous) (exemption from patent infringement applies to use of patented drugs for narrow purposes of research associated with FDA drug approval process) Bowman v. Monsanto Co. (2012) (unanimous) (first sale doctrine does not invalidate ban on reproducing crops grown with patented GMO seeds) Kappos v. Hyatt (2012) (unanimous)(expanding ability of applicant denied a patent to challenge the denial with additional evidence) Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Ltd. Partnership (2011) (unanimous) (presumption of validity of patent continues to apply during patent re-examination process conducted by PTO). Stanford v. Roche (2011) (a case over who is entitled to a patent between two potential patent holders) Gunn v. Minton (2013) (unanimous) (overruling Federal Circuit precedents which had held that federal courts have broad jurisdiction over claims of malpractice in attorney malpractice cases where the underlying malpractice involved patent law, while reviewing a Texas Supreme Court ruling). Thryv, Inc. v. Click-to-Call Technologies, LP (2020) (7-2), the Court disagreed with the Federal Circuit and held that the PTAB’s decision on whether a petition for inter partes review is timely is not judicially reviewable replying on Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee, 136 S. Ct. 2131 (2016) SAS Institute, Inc. v. Iancu, the United States Supreme Court decided an important aspect of procedure in IPR cases holding that once an inter partes review is instituted by the Director of the USPTO, the PTAB must decide the patentability of all of the claims challenged. A major case deciding the constitutionality of part of the AIA and the remedy if it is unconstitutional is pending in Arthrex which has had oral arguments but not decision on the merits yet. The AIA eliminated tax strategy patents (a case to resolve the issue had been pending when the legislative fix arrived).
It's a gray area. You won't know for certain until a case is tried by a court. Regulatory bodies are notoriously assertive on the matter of jurisdiction. If there is a gray area, they often assert jurisdiction first, then let the judiciary limit their authority. Also, if you try to ask the regulatory body for an opinion or "permission" in advance (as a prudent person might think to do), they might offer you one if you are lucky. But they will most likely qualify it as "non-binding." In other words, they give themselves wiggle room to change their mind at a later time to file an action against you. The long and short of it is, the scenario you describe is likely to at least cost John Smith a fortune in legal fees to litigate the matter with the California authorities. So it would be prudent not to give the advice in the first place. Even if he were to ultimately eventually prevail on the action.
As a lawsuit, it doesn't make sense in U.S. law unless you have suffered significant injuries. Your damages are likely to be, at most, nominal ($1) if you discovered it before you were hurt, so you'd only lose the money spent replacing the jar of peanut butter with a non-defective one and the nominal $1 damages. You would not generally have a right to any of your attorneys' fees and personal time spent on a lawsuit like that which would likely cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on an hourly basis (no attorney would take a case like that on a contingency basis), and would take hundreds of hours of your own personal time.