Law Commons^™

Class Warfare: Why Antitrust Class Actions Are Essential For Compensation And Deterrence, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent empirical studies demonstrate five reasons why antitrust class action cases are essential: (1) class actions are virtually the only way for most victims of antitrust violations to receive compensation; (2) most successful class actions involve collusion that was anticompetitive; (3) class victims’ compensation has been modest, generally less than their damages; (4) class actions deter significant amounts of collusion and other anticompetitive behavior; and (5) anticompetitive collusion is underdeterred, a problem that would be exacerbated without class actions. Unfortunately, a number of court decisions have undermined class action cases, thus preventing much effective and important antitrust enforcement.

What's Coming For Class Actions,, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

A trio of cases before the Supreme Court in its current term has the potential to dramatically impact the ability of plaintiffs to bring class actions. By taking up Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, Spokeo v. Robins, and Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez, the Court could be signaling that a shift against class actions is underway which could have significant consequences for plaintiffs seeking class certification.

Recently, in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, Comcast v. Behrend, and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Court handed down decisions that increased the burden on plaintiffs' attorneys to show issues and damages common to all plaintiffs in the proposed …

Newsroom: Logan On 2015'S Record Settlements, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

Also available @ http://law.rwu.edu/story/logan-2015s-record-settlements

Cy Pres And The Optimal Class Action, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article, prepared for a symposium on class actions, examines the problem of cy pres relief through the lens of ensuring that class actions have an optimal claim structure and class membership. It finds that the present cy pres doctrine does little to advance the creation of optimal class actions, and may do some harm to achieving that goal. The Article then proposes an alternative “nudge” to induce putative class counsel to structure class actions in an optimal way: set attorneys’ fees so that counsel is compensated through a combination of an hourly market rate and a percentage of the …

The Allocation Problem In Multiple-Claimant Representations, Paul H. Edelman, Richard A. Nagareda, Charles Silver

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Multiple-claimant representations-classa ctions and other group lawsuits-pose two principal-agent problems: Shirking (failure to maximize the aggregate recovery) and misallocation (distribution of the aggregate recovery other than according to the relative value of claims). Clients have dealt with these problems separately, using contingent percentage fees to motivate lawyers to maximize the aggregate recovery and monitoring devices (disclosure requirements, client control rights, and third-party review) to encourage appropriate allocations. The scholarly literature has proceeded on the premise that monitoring devices are needed to police misallocations, because the fee calculus cannot do the entire job. This paper shows that this premise is mistaken …

What The Shutts Opt-Out Right Is And What It Ought To Be, Brian Wolfman, Alan B. Morrison

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article discusses the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts, 472 U.S. 797 (1985), regarding the right of an absent class member to opt out of a class action. The article addresses both the current prevailing understanding of Shutts, which is based on the personal jurisdiction strain of due process jurisprudence, and what the authors believe is a more useful understanding, based on the property rights strain of due process jurisprudence. As an addendum to the article, the authors propose a new civil procedure rule governing class actions that would implement …