(University of Oregon School of Law, 2024-05-20) Bregant, Jessica; Dillof, Anthony M.
Is torts ready for a revolution? Momentous changes in law are exceedingly rare. In torts, one such change was the advent of comparative fault. Originally codified in the early twentieth century, comparative fault represented a revolutionary shift away from all-or-nothing recovery. For the first time, a plaintiff’s recovery need not be either her full damages or zero—it might be somewhere in between. This Article presents a pair of large-scale public opinion surveys we conducted in 2022. These surveys polled over 1,300 persons and collected approximately 4,000 individual survey responses. The surveys illuminate people’s judgments about the relative fairness of Single Most Likely Scenario Recovery (SMSR) and Probabilistic-Proportional Recovery (PPR) and related topics.
