About

The Center for Risk and Responsibility

The Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility at Rutgers Law School explores the ways in which society makes choices about risk, its proper allocation, and compensation for the harm caused when risks materialize.

The recognition of risk and attempts to manage it are defining features of modern society, and the law responds in a number of ways. Tort law allocates the burden of harm that results from risk, compensates victims of risk-producing harm, and provides disincentives for risky behavior. Insurance law enables and constrains risk allocation by private parties. Administrative regulation attempts to directly control risk-creating activity. RCRR provides a forum for scholarly discourse on these topics.

Principal activities of RCRR include:

  • Workshops for insurance scholars.
  • Conferences that are broadly interdisciplinary, involving legal academics, social scientists, practicing lawyers, industry executives, and government officials, as appropriate to the topics.
  • The Essential Protections for Policyholders project in cooperation with United Policyholders. Every state regulates homeowners insurance and insurance companies, but states differ dramatically in how much and what kind of regulation they provide for the benefit of policyholders. The Essential Protections provide a roadmap that every state can follow in improving homeowners insurance.
  • The Protection Gap project. In the past few years the insurance community has paid increasing attention to the “protection gap”—the extent to which significant property losses are not covered by insurance. The project produces conferences, research, and recommendations on the protection gap in homeowners insurance.