Talk:Joint and several liability

Rewrite

I've attempted to rewrite a few parts of this article for clarity. In the process, I removed the paragraph below because I don't think that it's correct as written. Even without joint and several liability, the individuals who caused the injury do not get to avoid compensating the victim. They are still responsible for their proportion of liability. It merely changes the amount that they must pay. I suspect this was a misstatement of the principle stated lower in the article that a victim may be undercompensated if one of the defendants is insolvent. Please correct my edit if I misunderstood. I am also standardizing names used in the example to the Ann/Bob/Charlotte/... pattern typically used in mathematics and logic examples. Rossami (talk) 19:54, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Another premise of joint and several liability is that corporations, individuals and insurers who have caused an injury by violating the law should not be able to avoid compensating the injured victim simply because they were not the only party that substantially contributed to the victim's injuries or losses. The object of this legal principle is to avoid unfairly shifting to victims losses that were brought about by multiple wrongdoers.

I'm also requesting a citation on this comment: Where a financially wealthy defendant can be joined as a defendant, a plaintiff's expected damages increases. I am interpreting that statement as an observation that the damages awarded are statistically higher if there is a weathly defendant joined to the claim. I have heard anecdotes to that effect but have not yet found a reliable study demonstrating. If this statement was only attempting to say that the average compensation received is higher (because of the undercompensation when one of the defendants is insolvent), then I think the sentence is redundant and could be removed. Rossami (talk) 19:54, 27 April 2006 (UTC)