Update to Assessing Economic Damages in Personal Injury andWrongful Death Litigation: The State of Utah
Abstract Current changes to personal injury and wrongful death litigation in the state of Utah.
THE ECONOMICS AND PERPLEXING UTAH LAW OF PREJUDGMENT INTEREST
The law has long recognized that some grasp of economic principles is required to properly fashion damage rules that accurately compensate injured plaintiffs. Economists are typically qualified to provide judges and juries with expert testimony on this topic, and economic analysis, often filtered through law review commentaries, has long guided the jurisprudence in this area. Moreover, the conceptual issues that arise in damage analysis have many parallels with problems with which economists have grappled for a long time. The issue of delay between an event and a later payment is precisely one of these long-studied economic issues. Accordingly, our analysis of how Utah law deals with delay is informed by substantive economic understanding and methodologies. In Part I, we discuss the role of time in the calculation of damages and set forth three simple economic principles that inform our subsequent analysis of Utah law. Part II describes the determination and application of prejudgment interest that would be consistent with these economic principles. Part III outlines how Utah courts award prejudgment interest. We show that Utah’s approach violates basic economic principles and undermines the well-defined purposes for awarding prejudgment interest. A short conclusion follows as Part IV.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.