Law Review 4: Fatigue

I managed to finish my law review note and get it in ahead of today's deadline. Could it have been better? Sure, if I had another week. I think it is pretty good anyway.

The note case, now that the deadline has passed, was a New York case where the plaintiffs tried to sue gun manufacturers for negligent marketing of their handguns. There were a couple of interesting legal theories at play, including market share liability for the gun companies.

I surprised myself a little bit by coming down on the side of the gun companies, with whom I definitely do not sympathize. After reviewing the cases, I felt the connection between victims of gun crime and the manufacturers of guns was too attenuated. What's more, market share liability divides the plaintiff's damages among defendants by that defendant's market share, but in this case, it wasn't clear that all the defendants were equally negligent, or even that all the defendants were at least somewhat negligent.

I ended up making a "lack of judicial capacity" argument after I synthesized the material. The underlying problem is that gun manufacturers dump guns into low-regulation markets in the southeast, knowing that those excess guns will make their way to more regulated states via gun shows and illegal sales. Sounds like a problem for a uniform federal regulation, if I ever heard one.