CAMDEN —
Insurance and issues of risk are important in all facets of life, and the
recognition of risk and attempts to manage it are defining features of everyday
life.

The newly
established Center for Risk and Responsibility at the Rutgers School of
Law–Camden will provide a national forum to discuss risk issues and how to
better manage them.

 “The Center for
Risk and Responsibility will provide a forum for scholarly discourse and promote interchange across the disciplines
that study risk,” says Rayman
L. Solomon, dean of the Rutgers School of Law–Camden. “This is an
excellent example of how collaboration between legal scholars and the bar
benefits both the legal profession and legal scholarship.”

Initially,
the center will present two events each academic year: a workshop for scholars
and a conference that will also include leading insurance industry experts.

“The new center
will explore the ways in which society makes choices about risk, its proper
allocation, and compensation for the harm caused when risks materialize,” says
Jay Feinman, a distinguished professor of law at the Rutgers School of
Law–Camden and co-founder of the center.

Feinman also
is the author of the book Delay, Deny,
Defend:  Why Insurance Companies Don’t
Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It (Penguin, 2010).

Rick
Swedloff, an assistant professor of law at Rutgers–Camden and co-founder of the
center, says that without insurance proceeds, most tort victims would be
unwilling to sue; without a way to protect against the potential loss of the
home, banks would be unwilling to finance home ownership; and without a system
of insurance, most Americans would find themselves without access to quality
health care.

“Given its
prevalence, one would think that insurance would be at the center of legal
study, but there is only one other insurance law center in this country,”
Swedloff says. “The Center for Risk and Responsibility is an opportunity to
leverage the assets of Rutgers University–Camden to join together academics
from different disciplines and practitioners in various fields to discuss these
important issues.”

Planned
workshops will invite insurance law scholars from across the country to the
Rutgers–Camden campus for a day-long discussion and presentation of works-in-progress,
drafts, and ideas for scholarly projects.

The
conferences will involve legal academics, social scientists, practicing
lawyers, industry executives, and government officials, as appropriate to the
topics.

“We want to
bring together people who are interested in the overlapping set of issues
related to how society manages risk and risk allocation,” says Adam Scales, a
professor of law at Rutgers–Camden and co-founder of the center. “The center
becomes a device for concentrating our efforts in that area.”

The center’s
first conference, “Bad Faith and Beyond: A Conference on the Law of Claims
Practices,” will be held from 9:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 29. More
information about the conference is at camlaw.rutgers.edu/bad-faith-beyond.

A noted legal
scholar, Feinman is the author of Law
101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law and has written widely on tort law and
insurance law.

Scales is the author of six published articles on topics like corporate
succession in insurance, the evolution of accidental death insurance, and flood
insurance.

Swedloff has also authored published
articles on torts and insurance and practiced as a litigation associate
with Dechert LLP in Philadelphia, where he specialized in complex commercial,
tort and insurance cases.

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