An Analysis of Litigation Claiming Joint and Several Liability.

The purpose of the research is to aid the tort reform decision-making process by generating and analyzing a broad scope of state and federal court cases involving the use of joint and several liability from 1963 through 1988. Results indicate that the overall number of joint and several liability cases is quite small (just .41 percent in 1988). Further, as a percentage of all cases contained in LEXIS, joint and several cases showed an exponential increase from 1963 to 1988 at the federal level but not at the state level. Patterns observed in a sample of joint and several liability cases include dominance of contract cases, relatively large representations of corporate plaintiffs and individual defendants, minimal involvement of municipalities as defendants, larger damage values for corporate plaintiffs than for individual plaintiffs, and an increase in size of claimed damages over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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