Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Preliminary Damages, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
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 …
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
All Faculty Scholarship
The individual plaintiff plays a critical—yet, underappreciated—role in our legal system. Only lawsuits that are brought by individual plaintiffs allow the law to achieve the twin goals of efficiency and fairness. The ability of individual plaintiffs to seek justice against those who wronged them deters wrongdoing, ex ante, and in those cases in which a wrong has been committed nevertheless, it guarantees the payment of compensation, ex post. No other form of litigation, including class actions and criminal prosecutions, or even compensation funds, can accomplish the same result. Yet, as we show in this Essay, in many key sectors of …
Can We Learn Anything About Pleading Changes From Existing Data?, Jonah B. Gelbach
Can We Learn Anything About Pleading Changes From Existing Data?, Jonah B. Gelbach
All Faculty Scholarship
In light of the gateway role that the pleading standard can play in our civil litigation system, measuring the empirical effects of pleading policy changes embodied in the Supreme Court's controversial Twombly and Iqbal cases is important. In my earlier paper, Locking the Doors to Discovery, I argued that in doing so, special care is required in formulating the object of empirical study. Taking party behavior seriously, as Locking the Doors does, leads to empirical results suggesting that Twombly and Iqbal have had substantial effects among cases that face Rule 12(b)(6) motions post-Iqbal. This paper responds to …