Yoon Examines Tort Reform, Youth Sentencing

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Albert Yoon

Newly appointed IPR Faculty Fellow Albert Yoon’s research stands at the intersection of law and policy to ask the questions: How does tort reform affect a patient’s ability to recover damages in malpractice cases? What does adult sentencing do to juvenile offenders? What does non-resident voting do to local government tax rates and services?

Yoon plans to write a book on tort reform incorporating his published research on the impact of malpractice damage caps in Alabama with new work on malpractice arbitration laws and offer-of-settlement rules in automotive insurance disputes. Yoon’s investigation compares the speed and efficacy of out-of-court proceedings under Nevada’s mandatory arbitration laws with the same sort of disagreements in neighboring states. Are plaintiffs and defendants better off taking this out-of-court route?

The last part of his planned tort-reform “trilogy” will move away from medical malpractice to test empirically the oft-made claim that offer-of-settlement rules shorten costly litigation in automotive insurance disputes.

Moving beyond his current work on torts, Yoon proposes research into juvenile sentencing and the emergence of non-resident voting as a force in local elections.

Laws governing the sentencing of juveniles have evolved in the last decade and the rate of incarceration in state prisons for offenses by minors has increased significantly. Yoon plans to delve into the issue by examining the changes in sentencing that followed New York State’s switch to a non-discretionary waiver process (one that doesn’t allow prosecutors to decide when to waive cases from juvenile into adult criminal courts).

Yoon’s proposed voting study would focus on laws in Colorado and elsewhere allowing non-residents to vote in elections for municipalities and other local taxing districts where they own property. Yoon plans to research both the existing scholarship on the constitutional issues of standing in local elections and the empirical implications of non-resident voting, such as changes in taxation and public services.

Yoon teaches torts and business associations at the School of Law, which he joined in 2001, and has a courtesy appointment as Assistant Professor of Political Science. He wrote briefs and drafted opinions for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and analyzed truth-in-sentencing policies for the RAND corporation before beginning his research into malpractice litigation as a Robert W. Johnson Scholar at U.C. Berkeley in 1999. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.