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Abstract
For many years, the risk posed to American farmers by pesticide drift was minor and incidents were sporadic. As a result, the few farmers who did suffer harm from drift sought recovery in state courts that handled their cases in very different ways. Depending on which torts were successfully advanced as causes of action, remedies ranged from awards of financial damages to injunctions against offending applicators to even nothing for the harmed farmer. Recent drift issues with dicamba have magnified these differences in states’ approaches to drift lawsuits and further increased the demand for a judicial process that manages these incidents in a clear and efficient manner. To better understand these differences, this paper identifies the three torts commonly advanced as causes of actions in drift cases and creates theoretic-game models to evaluate each tort’s impact on the decision-making of farmers and their economic outcomes.