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Full-Text Articles in Law
Rethinking The Impact Of Third-Party Funding On Access To Civil Justice, Victoria Sahani
Rethinking The Impact Of Third-Party Funding On Access To Civil Justice, Victoria Sahani
Faculty Scholarship
Third-party funding indisputably puts a gold-weighted thumb on the scales of justice in favor of funded parties for two main reasons: (1) funded cases already tend to be calculable winners on the merits, and (2) third-party funders seeking a profit generally do not fund cases that are demonstrably likely to lose on the merits. Thus, we are left with both the promising potential for winners to be more likely to win with third-party funding and the alarming realization that not all winners are offered this same chance. This provokes a larger, fundamental question: If funders are picking winners among the …
Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Faculty Scholarship
State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …
"It's Not About The Money!": A Theory On Misconceptions Of Plaintiffs' Litigation Aims, Tamara Relis
"It's Not About The Money!": A Theory On Misconceptions Of Plaintiffs' Litigation Aims, Tamara Relis
Scholarly Works
This Article examines from a new angle a long-standing debate on a central question of the legal system: why plaintiffs sue and what they seek from litigation. Legal research has documented various extra-legal aims or non-economic agendas of plaintiffs who commence legal proceedings for various case-types. However, current debates have failed to address this issue in depth from the perspectives of plaintiffs themselves, subsequent to lawyers conditioning them on legal system realities and translating their disputes into legally cognizable compartments. Nor have understandings of plaintiffs' aims been examined from the perspectives of defense lawyers. These are significant gaps in the …