August 18, 2005

As students of tort law know, New Zealand is the home of perhaps the most ambitious attempt made in any advanced country to develop a systematic administrative alternative to tort litigation. Its government-backed Accident Compensation Commission provides no-fault compensation for accidents not only on the highway but generally, and its payments serve as a substitute for conventional tort litigation, which is disallowed in a wide range of circumstances where it would be available in more or less every other advanced country. Tyler Cowen has been visiting New Zealand and rounds up various useful links on the ACC, its origins and operations, and the scholarly assessments that have been made of its record.