From the text...'A new generation of prescribed fire statutes have been developed in the southeastern states beginning with Florida in 1990 (Brenner and Wade 1992). The Florida statute goes to great length to recognize prescribed burning as a useful land management tool. The legislation explicitly recognizes ecological benefits, and benefits from reducing the likelihood and severity of wildfires. It explicitly recognizes prescribed burning as a property right, subject to a relatively detailed set of precautionary requirements. Finally, it specifies that landowners are not liable for damage or injury caused by escaped fire or smoke unless found to be grossly negligent. Other southern states to explicitly recognize prescribed burning as a beneficial property right include Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. In the context of our model, the explicit recognition of the value of prescribed burning acts to emphasize the possibility that R1 in Figure 1 is high, arguably increasing, the likelihood that a value-based rule is found by the courts to be satisfied. The requirement of gross negligence arguably lowers the negligence standard, B, relative to not requiring gross negligence. These statutes are therefore consistent with an apparent attempt to reduce the likelihood of prescribed burner liability. If land and demographic characteristics of southern states result in relatively large benefits from prescribed fire, our model predicts more widespread use of negligence rules in these states (implication 5). One conjecture regarding the relative support of prescribed burning in these new statutes is that these statutes are a response to an apparent growing recognition of the role of prescribed fire as a wildfire management tool. To the extent that reduction of fuel loads resulting from controlled burning reduces the likelihood and severity of wildfires, prescribed burners may contribute positive externalities by reducing potential fuel accumulation that would contribute to fire spread across numerous landholdings in a region. If this conjecture is correct, we would expect this type of statutory response in areas where prescribed burning can reduce the total social costs of fire generally (that is, the net cost of prescribed fires plus the costs of wildfires and their control).... This paper is about tradeoffs in the design of law. State prescribed fire law varies across states, and these laws affect the amount of precautionary effort expended by burners and their neighbors. Strict liability induces appropriate precaution from the person conducting the burn if a prescribed fire is performed, but neighbors have little incentive to reduce potential damage. Negligence standards, if properly set, induce appropriate precaution by both burners and neighbors for any prescribed fire, but prescribed fires may be performed too often from an economic perspective. Strict liability is likely to result in fewer escaped prescribed fires than a properly set negligence rule, but this comes at a cost as well, including excessive precaution costs by the burner, potentially higher damage for any escaped fire, and less aggregate benefits from fires because fewer prescribed fires will be performed. If one of the objectives of liability law in this context is to promote total social welfare and economically efficient resource management, these tradeoffs must by addressed when tailoring law to a given environment.' ©Society for Range Management. Abstract reproduced by permission.