Foreword

This issue of JELS has its genesis in a RAND Institute for Civil Justice/JELSconference held in Santa Monica in March 2006. Dr. Steven Garber of theRAND ICJ oversaw a two-day meeting at which six of the seven papers in thisissue were presented and commented upon. A referee process followed, withall papers revised in light of referee comments. After the conference, I readan article in the October 2005 issue of Neurology1 reporting that preventableharm had been found in 24 of 42 cases involving neurologic malpracticeclaims. JELS invited the authors to submit a paper reporting on the outcomeof the 42 claims in terms of payment and court disposition. The authorsaccepted the invitation; a paper was submitted, refereed, and revised and isa welcome addition to this symposium on medical malpractice. Together,the seven articles in this issue of JELS, from legal, medical, statistical, andhealth-care policy professionals, shed important new light on the function-ing of the medical malpractice system.

Theodore EisenbergEditor, JELS

1T. H. Glick, L. D. Cranberg, R. B. Hanscom & L. Sato, Neurologic Patient Safety: An In-DepthStudy of Malpractice Claims, 65 Neurology 1284 (2005).

Journal of Empirical Legal StudiesVolume 4, Issue 1, 1, March 2007

©2007, Copyright the AuthorJournal compilation ©2007, Cornell Law School and Blackwell Publisher, Inc.

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