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11th Circuit Court Of Appeals: Cambridge Univ. Press V. Patton, Opinion (2014), 11th Circuit Court Of Appeals Oct 2014

11th Circuit Court Of Appeals: Cambridge Univ. Press V. Patton, Opinion (2014), 11th Circuit Court Of Appeals

Georgia State University Copyright Lawsuit

No abstract provided.


Good Pretrial Lawyering: Planning To Get To Yes Sooner, Cheaper, And Better, John M. Lande Oct 2014

Good Pretrial Lawyering: Planning To Get To Yes Sooner, Cheaper, And Better, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Although the ostensible purpose for pretrial litigation is to prepare for trial, such preparation is inextricably intertwined with negotiation because the expected trial outcome is a major factor affecting negotiation. Indeed, since most litigated cases are settled, good litigators prepare for negotiation at least as much as trial. The lawyers interviewed for this article, who were selected because of their good reputations, described how they prepare for both possibilities. They recommend taking charge of their cases from the outset, which includes getting a clear understanding of clients and their interests, developing good relationships with counterpart lawyers, carefully investigating the cases, …


Judgment Day For Fraud-On-The-Market: Reflections On Amgen And The Second Coming Of Halliburton, Donald C. Langevoort Jul 2014

Judgment Day For Fraud-On-The-Market: Reflections On Amgen And The Second Coming Of Halliburton, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the "fraud on the market" presumption of reliance, facilitating large scale class actions for this kind of securities fraud. This essay traces the road from its decision last year in Amgen to this year's reaffirmation in Halliburton II, and considers some of the issues that will emerge as lower courts struggle with Halliburton II's secondary holding--that the issue of "price impact" is crucial to class certification, even if the burden of proof is on the defendants.


What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat Apr 2014

What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This essay gives an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders during 2003-2013.

The study confirms the commonsense view that plaintiffs have tended to …


Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly Mar 2014

Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.”

However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument …


“Where Does A Wise Man Hide A Leaf?” : Modernising The Laws Of Disclosure In The Information Age, Denise Huiwen Wong Jan 2014

“Where Does A Wise Man Hide A Leaf?” : Modernising The Laws Of Disclosure In The Information Age, Denise Huiwen Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Litigation practice has been significantly altered by the advent of electronically stored information in daily corporate life. It is argued that the laws of disclosure should be updated to recognise that technology-assisted document review via keyword searching is crucial in ensuring that the costs of litigation are well managed. In order to facilitate keyword searching, a new legal concept of accuracy in the selection of keywords should be introduced into the laws of disclosure. At the same time, despite the adversarial nature of litigation, it is imperative that parties approach electronic disclosure with a spirit of collaboration in order to …


Rethinking Summary Judgment Empirics: The Life Of The Parties, Jonah B. Gelbach Jan 2014

Rethinking Summary Judgment Empirics: The Life Of The Parties, Jonah B. Gelbach

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber Jan 2014

Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Transactional class and derivative actions have long been controversial in both the popular and the academic literatures. Yet, the debate over such litigation has thus far neglected to consider a change in legal technology, adopted in Delaware a dozen years ago, favoring selection of institutional investors as lead plaintiffs in these cases. This Article fills that gap, offering new insights into the utility of mergers and acquisitions litigation. Based on a hand-collected dataset of all Delaware class and derivative actions filed from November 1, 2003 to December 31, 2009, I find that institutional investors play as large of a role …


What Jurors Want To Know: Motivating Juror Cognition To Increase Legal Knowledge & Improve Decisionmaking, Sara Gordon Jan 2014

What Jurors Want To Know: Motivating Juror Cognition To Increase Legal Knowledge & Improve Decisionmaking, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

What do jurors want to know? Jury research tells us that jurors want to understand the information they hear in a trial so they can reach the correct decision. But like all people, jurors who are asked to analyze information in a trial—even jurors who consciously want to reach a fair and accurate verdict—are unconsciously influenced by their internal goals and motivations. Some of these motives are specific to individual jurors; for instance, a potential juror with a financial interest in a case would be excluded from the jury pool. But other motivations, like the motive to understand the law …


It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce Jan 2014

It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce

Faculty Scholarship

In 2004, just five years after introducing the drug, Vioxx, pharmaceutical company, Merck, voluntarily withdrew the prescription pain-killer after a clinical study suggested that the drug increased the risk of heart attack and stroke. But in that relatively short time, an estimated 20 million Americans had already taken the drug. By late 2007, Merck announced it would pay $4.85 billion — the largest drug settlement ever — in “global settlements” for Vioxx-related claims. These settlements ultimately included roughly 47,000 individual lawsuits and about 265 potential class actions, but the Vioxx settlements were far from global.

In 2012, a purported parallel …


Pleading Patterns And The Role Of Litigation As A Driver Of Federal Climate Change Legislation, Juscelino F. Colares, Kosta Ristovski Jan 2014

Pleading Patterns And The Role Of Litigation As A Driver Of Federal Climate Change Legislation, Juscelino F. Colares, Kosta Ristovski

Faculty Publications

Based on a variant of the Elliott-Ackerman-Millian theory that variable, potentially inconsistent and costly litigation outcomes induce industry to seek federal preemptive legislation to reign in such costs, we collect data on climate change-related litigation to determine whether litigation might motivate major greenhouse gas emitters to accept a preemptive, though possibly carbon-restricting, legislative compromise. We conduct a spectral cluster analysis on 178 initial federal and state judicial filings to reveal the most relevant groupings among climate change-related suits and their underlying pleading patterns. Besides exposing the general content and structure of climate change-related filings, this study identifies major specific pleading …


Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee Jan 2014

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …


Against Settlement Of (Some) Patent Cases, Megan M. La Belle Jan 2014

Against Settlement Of (Some) Patent Cases, Megan M. La Belle

Scholarly Articles

For decades now, there has been a pronounced trend away from adjudication and toward settlement in civil litigation. This settlement phenomenon has spawned a vast critical literature beginning with Owen Fiss’s seminal work, Against Settlement. Fiss opposes settlement because it achieves peace rather than justice, and because settlements often are coerced due to power and resource imbalances between the parties. Other critics have questioned the role that courts play (or ought to play) in settlement proceedings, and have argued that the secondary effects of settlement – especially the lack of decisional law – are damaging to our judicial system. Still, …


Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow Jan 2014

Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court's recent interest in patentable subject matter has had several, unexpected downstream effects on preliminary injunctions in patent disputes.

The Supreme Court has recently expressed increased interest in patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, the doctrine that limits the types of inventions eligible for patenting. Its two decisions, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., in 2012, and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., in 2013, represented the first broad restrictions on patentable subject matter in over thirty years. And later this term, the Court will decide yet another patent eligibility case: Alice Corp. v. CLS …