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Civil Procedure

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Practice and Procedure

Publication Year

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Aggregation On The Couch: The Strategic Uses Of Ambiguity And Hypocrisy, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2006

Aggregation On The Couch: The Strategic Uses Of Ambiguity And Hypocrisy, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, Professor Burbank comments on the essays by Professors Nagareda and Issacharoff. Welcoming the opportunity to revisit the interplay between procedure and substantive law and the question of democratic accountability that Professor Nagareda’s essay presents, Professor Burbank concludes that the parts of that essay are greater than the whole. He finds that Professor Nagareda’s pursuit of unifying themes and a general normative theory leads to inconsistencies in classification between procedure and substance and to an impoverished vision of institutional legitimacy. Professor Burbank voices concern that this quest, which is also evident in the current draft of the American …


Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman Jan 2000

Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman

All Faculty Scholarship

Congress may soon restrict joint and several liability for cleanup of contaminated sites under Superfund. We explore whether this change would discourage settlements and is therefore likely to increase the program 's already high litigation costs per site. Recent theoretical research by Kornhauser and Revesz finds that joint and several liability may either encourage or discourage settlement, depending on the correlation of outcomes at trial across defendants. We extend their two-defendant model to a richer framework with N defendants. This extension allows us to test the theoretical model empirically using data on Superfund litigation. We find that joint and several …