Simmons on Tort Liability on Campus

Omari Scott Simmons (Wake Forest) has posted to SSRN Muted Deterrence:  The Enhanced Attribution of Tort Liability to U.S. Higher Education Institutions for Student Safety.  The abstract provides:

A key challenge facing modern universities is ensuring student safety. This task inevitably involves deterring risky behavior. The existing law on campus safety, however, inadequately addresses this challenge. This essay argues that an overemphasis on tort litigation fails to (i) adequately deter risky individual and institutional behaviors; (ii) provide incentives to higher education institutions to create safe campuses; and (iii) provide higher education institutions with the resources, know-how, and overall capacity to improve campus safety. Recognising the limitations of adversarial tort litigation in the student safety context, this essay, proposes a more collaborative, less adversarial, regulatory framework for making US campuses safer learning environments.