Law Commons^™

Pop & Perjury: The Irs Valuation War With The Estate Of Michael Jackson, Beckett Cantley, Geoffrey Dietrich

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

When Michael Jackson died unexpectedly in Los Angeles, California, on June 25, 2009, his career and earnings were nearing an all-time low. Plagued by past sexual abuse allegations, scandals, and questionable health, Michael Jackson’s personal finances were purported to be in complete disarray. However, following his unexpected death, the value of his estate, which was reported to be near to nothing, swelled as the world remembered his beloved contributions to the world and began to purchase accordingly. Sales of Michael Jackson’s music began to soar high. The estate’s value soared even higher as it signed licensing agreements and released new …

Non-Lawyer Judges In Devalued Courts, Maureen Carroll

Reviews

Recent legal scholarship has shed needed light on the vast universe of litigation that occurs without lawyers. Large majorities of civil litigants lack representation, even in weighty matters such as eviction and termination of parental rights, raising a host of issues worthy of scholarly attention. For example, one recent article has examined racial and gendered effects of the lack of constitutionally guaranteed counsel in civil matters, and another has shown that judges tend not to reduce the complexity of the proceedings for the benefit of unrepresented parties. In Judging Without a J.D., Sara Greene and Kristen Renberg add an important …

Presuit Lawyer Information Duties Relevant To Civil Litigation, Jeffrey A. Parness

Marquette Law Review

In both federal and state courts in the United States, there are significant civil procedure, professional responsibility, and substantive laws addressing presuit lawyer duties on creating, preserving, producing, and protecting information relevant to later civil litigation. These laws speak to lawyer conduct both in personally handling information and in overseeing the information acts of others. To date, the challenges these laws pose to lawyers have not been well examined, or even largely perceived. And, to date, lawyers have been left unaccountable for their personal violations of these duties.

A Survey Of Civil Procedure: Technology To Covid-19 Within State Courts, Joshua H. Hernandez

Marquette Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the implementation of technological innovation within the legal field. Specifically, state courts used technology to adjust their civil procedures while maintaining accurate results, limiting costs, and providing meaningful participation to varying degrees of success. In addition, given the piecemeal nature of these adjustments, there is a lack of knowledge regarding what actions were taken in the early months of the pandemic. Thus, this Comment conducts a survey focusing on how the states adjusted their judicial civil procedures to respond to COVID-19’s impact. This Comment then argues that the most liberal implementation of technological adjustments may not …

Examination Of Eviction Filings In Lancaster County, Nebraska, 2019–2021, Ryan Sullivan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The study examined and analyzed eviction filings and proceedings in Nebraska, with a specific focus on Lancaster County—the home to the State’s capital, Lincoln. The primary objective of this study is to place eviction proceedings under a microscope to gain a better understanding of the volume of evictions in Nebraska, and whether the statutorily mandated processes are being followed. The study also attempts to capture the impact of certain external factors present during the period examined. Such factors include the COVID-19 pandemic and various eviction moratoria in place during 2020 and 2021, as well as the increased availability of legal …

Jury Nullification As A Spectrum, Richard Lorren Jolly

Pepperdine Law Review

Jury nullification traditionally refers to the jury’s power to deliver a verdict that is deliberately contrary to the law’s clearly dictated outcome. A spirited scholarship is built around this conception, with some painting nullification as democratic and others as anarchic. But this debate is largely unmoored from experience. In practice, courts have formally eliminated the jury’s authority to review the law and have established procedures that make it easier to prevent and overturn seemingly nullificatory verdicts. Thus, outside of a jury’s verdict acquitting a criminal defendant, jury nullification as traditionally understood does not exist. In no other context is a …

[Marked Confidential]: Negative Externalities Of Discovery Secrecy, Gustavo Ribeiro

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Current unprecedented levels of secrecy in civil discovery create significant negative externalities by preventing our adversary system from measuring up to the broad public goals that justify it. First, excessive discovery secrecy undermines the courts and the public’s ability to correct distortions of the truth-seeking function of the adversary system caused by excessive partisanship and confirmation bias. Second, it weakens the adversary system’s promotion of liberal democratic values, such as transparency and self-government. Third, it threatens the adversary system’s role in upholding human dignity, understood either as respect or status. To correct the negative externalities caused by excessive discovery secrecy, …

Procedural Barriers To The Use Of Title Ix As A Defense For Transgender Students In State Juvenile Justice Proceedings, Briana Rosenbaum

Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Mapping The Civil Justice Gap In Federal Court, Roger Michalski, Andrew Hammond

UF Law Faculty Publications

Unrepresented litigants make up a sizable and normatively important chunk of civil litigation in the federal courts. Despite their importance, we still know little about who these pro se litigants are. Debates about pro se litigation take place without sufficient empirical information. To help fill some of the gaps in our understanding of pro se litigants, this Article takes a new approach by mapping where pro se litigants live.

Using a massive data set of 2.5 million federal dockets from a ten-year period, we obtained addresses of non-prisoner pro se litigants. We then geolocated these addresses and cross-referenced that information …

Judges In Lawyerless Courts, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

The typical American civil trial court is lawyerless. In response, access to justice reformers have embraced a key intervention: changing the judge’s traditional role. The prevailing vision for judicial role reform calls on trial judges to offer a range of accommodation, assistance, and process simplification to people without legal representation.

Until now, we have known little about whether and how judges are implementing role reform recommendations or how judges behave in lawyerless courts as a general matter. Our lack of knowledge stands in stark contrast to the responsibility civil trial judges bear – and the discretionary power they wield – …

Preliminary Damages, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

Historically, the law helped impecunious plaintiffs overcome their inherent disadvantage in civil litigation. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case: modern law has largely abandoned the mission of assisting the least well off. In this Essay, we propose a new remedy that can dramatically improve the fortunes of poor plaintiffs and thereby change the errant path of the law: preliminary damages. The unavailability of preliminary damages has dire implications for poor plaintiffs, especially those wronged by affluent individuals and corporations. Resource constrained plaintiffs cannot afford prolonged litigation on account of their limited financial means. Consequently, they are forced to either …

The Democratic (Il)Legitimacy Of Assembly-Line Litigation, Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

Millions of debt cases are filed in the civil courts every year. In debt actions, asymmetrical representation is the norm, with the plaintiff almost always represented by counsel and the defendant very rarely so. A number of jurisdictions report that up to ninety-nine percent of defendants in debt cases appear pro se — a figure that calls into question the basic legitimacy of these proceedings.

Professor Daniel Wilf-Townsend’s central contribution to the literature on debt collection, and state civil justice more broadly, is to demonstrate through sophisticated empirics what has long been anecdotally reported: that a cluster of corporate plaintiffs …

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …

A Tale Of Two Civil Procedures, Pamela K. Bookman, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, there are two kinds of courts: federal and state. Civil procedure classes and scholarship largely focus on federal courts but refer to and make certain assumptions about state courts. While this dichotomy makes sense when discussing some issues, for many aspects of procedure this breakdown can be misleading. Two different categories of courts are just as salient for understanding American civil justice: those that routinely include lawyers and those where lawyers are fundamentally absent.

This Essay urges civil procedure teachers and scholars to think about our courts as “lawyered” and “lawyerless.” Lawyered courts include federal courts …