Who Gets what: Fair Compensation After Tragedy and Financial Upheaval

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PublicAffairs, Jun 26, 2012 - Social Science - 216 pages

Agent Orange, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the Virginia Tech massacre, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Deep Horizon gulf oil spill: each was a disaster in its own right. What they had in common was their aftermath—each required compensation for lives lost, bodies maimed, livelihoods wrecked, economies and ecosystems upended. In each instance, an objective third party had to step up and dole out allocated funds: in each instance, Presidents, Attorneys General, and other public officials have asked Kenneth R. Feinberg to get the job done.

In Who Gets What?, Feinberg reveals the deep thought that must go into each decision, not to mention the most important question that arises after a tragedy: why compensate at all? The result is a remarkably accessible discussion of the practical and philosophical problems of using money as a way to address wrongs and reflect individual worth.

 

Contents

The Professor the Judge the Lawyer and the Senator
1
Agent Orange
23
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund
41
The Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund
63
Paying Wall Street Executives
85
Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico ix xiii 23 41 63 85
125
EPILOGUE
185
APPENDIX
201
INDEX 201
205
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Kenneth R. Feinberg, one of the nation’s leading lawyers, has been front and center in some of the most complex legal disputes of the past three decades: Agent Orange, asbestos, the closing of the Shoreham Nuclear Plant, and 9/11. He is adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia.

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