Digital Commons Network^™

Sweetheart Deals, Deferred Prosecution, And Making A Mockery Of The Criminal Justice System: U.S. Corporate Dpas Rejected On Many Fronts, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) are contracts negotiated between the federal government and defendants to address allegations of corporate misconduct without going to trial. The agreements are hailed as a model of speedy and efficient law enforcement, but also derided as making a “mockery” of America’s criminal justice system stemming from lenient deals being offered to some defendants. This Article questions why corporate DPAs are not given meaningful judicial review when such protection is required for other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) tools, including plea bargains, settlement agreements, and consent decrees. The Article also analyzes several cases in which federal district …

The Fine Print Of The Mexican Energy Reform, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

Five years ago, when Mexico transformed its energy sector, most commentators were worried about the government’s capacity to implement the reform. What would the upstream contracts look like? Would the auctions be transparent? How would international companies react? After two successful auction rounds, 107 signed contracts, and the creation of viable regulatory agencies to manage and monitor the reform agenda, the questions have changed. Today, Mexico’s capacity to implement energy reforms and attract foreign investment is no longer in doubt. Today, the most pressing questions about the reform concern its long-term sustainability. Can it survive the Mexican electoral cycles? Will …

Adr And Access To Justice: Current Perspectives, Ellen E. Deason, Michael Z. Green, Donna Shestowsky, Rory Van Loo, Ellen Waldman

Faculty Scholarship

Extract:

I want to give you a roadmap for our program. We will not be delivering individual papers but, rather, hope to have a discussion. We are planning to spend thirty minutes on introductions for the purpose of allowing you to identify the source of each panelist's perspectives. We will then use an hour, more or less, for a discussion among the panel. That will leave fifteen minutes for audience questions and participation. Because we will be publishing an edited transcript, we ask that you hold your questions until the end.

Access to justice is a broad topic, and we …

The Blurring Of The Public/Private Distinction Or The Collapse Of A Category? The Story Of Investment Arbitration, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

The paper is a response piece to Deborah Hensler and Damira Khatam’s new article, Re-inventing Arbitration: How Expanding the Scope of Arbitration Is Re-Shaping Its Form and Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Adjudication. Their main argument regarding the public-private distinction is that the arbitral procedure has changed as a consequence of the substantive issues resolved in this particular ADR system. According to them the arbitral system, which was originally conceived for commercial purposes, has become another way of litigating public law, but without the accountability mechanisms attached to public courts. In this paper, I agree in large part …

How Asian Should Asian Law Be? – An Outsider’S View, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Is there an Asian identity of Asian law, comparable to European identity and therefore similarly useful as a justification for unification projects? If so, what does it look like? And if so, does this make Asia more like Europe, or less so? Or is this question itself already a mere European projection?

This chapter tries to address such questions. In particular, I look at a concrete project of Asian law unification—the Principles of Asian Comparative Law—and connect discussions about its Asian identity with four concepts of Asia. The first such concept is a European idea of Asia and Asian law, …

Does Adr’S “Access To Justice” Come At The Expense Of Meaningful Consent?, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last forty years, ADR processes, in particular mediation and arbitration, have been advanced as vehicles to secure access to justice for individual litigants and to improve efficiency in overburdened court systems. These processes have functioned as alternatives to the court adjudication of disputes, complementing the judicial system, and operating in what has been famously described as “the shadow of the law. The primary benefits promised by ADR were party autonomy and empowerment. ADR processes would allow parties to “fit the forum to the fuss.” These processes would give parties the opportunity to create their own mosaic of justice, …

Judge Victor Marrero’S Challenge To The Legal Profession: A ‘Little Rebellion Now And Then’, John D. Feerick

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Confidentiality In Patent Dispute Resolution: Antitrust Implications, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

nformation is crucial to the functioning of the patent system, as it is for other markets. Nevertheless, patent licensing terms are often subject to confidentiality agreements. On the one hand, this is not surprising: sellers and buyers do not normally publicize the details of their transactions. On the other hand, explicit confidentiality agreements are not common in other markets, and they may be particularly problematic for patents.

Several United States Supreme Court cases have condemned agreements that suppress market information, and those cases could be applied to confidentiality agreements in the patent context. Of course, confidentiality may sometimes be pro-competitive, …

Studying The "New" Civil Judges, Anna E. Carpenter, Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

We know very little about the people and institutions that make up the bulk of the United States civil justice system: state judges and state courts. Our understanding of civil justice is based primarily on federal litigation and the decisions of appellate judges. Staggeringly little legal scholarship focuses on state courts and judges. We simply do not know what most judges are doing in their day-to-day courtroom roles or in their roles as institutional actors and managers of civil justice infrastructure. We know little about the factors that shape and influence judicial practices, let alone the consequences of those practices …

Crowdsourcing & Data Analytics: The New Settlement Tools, Christopher Robertson, Bernard Chao, David Yokum

Faculty Scholarship

By protecting the right to a jury, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having civil and criminal disputes resolved by laypersons. However actual trials are relatively rare, in part because parties seek to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and courts seek to clear dockets efficiently. Even as settlement may be desirable, it is sometimes difficult to resolve a dispute. Parties naturally view their cases from different perspectives, and these perspectives often cause both sides to be overly optimistic, seeking unreasonably large or unreasonably small resolutions.

This article describes a novel method of incorporating layperson …

Adr And Access To Justice: Current Perspectives, Rory Van Loo, Ellen E. Deason, Michael Z. Green, Donna Shestowsky, Ellen Waldman

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice is a broad topic, and we cannot cover everything. You will notice a few major omissions. Most notably, we are not going to emphasize consumer pre-dispute arbitration agreements. This is not because they are not important, but because much has been written and said on this topic, and it could easily swallow the whole discussion. Also, we are probably not going to say very much about restorative justice, and I am sure you will notice some other holes. We invite you to raise missing issues in your comments.

Let me start with a few opening remarks. We …

Righting Research Wrongs: An Empirical Study Of How U.S. Institutions Resolve Grievances Involving Human Subjects, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

Tens of millions of people enroll in research studies in the United States every year, making human subjects research a multi-billion-dollar industry in the U.S. alone. Research carries risks: although many harms are inevitable, some also arise from errors or mistreatment by researchers, and the history of research ethics is in many ways a history of scandal. Despite regulatory efforts to remedy these abuses, injured subjects nonetheless have little recourse to U.S. courts. In the absence of tort remedies for research-related injuries, the only venue for resolving such disputes is through alternative dispute resolution (ADR) – or more commonly, internal …