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University of Florida Levin College of Law

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Empirical legal studies

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Mapping The Civil Justice Gap In Federal Court, Roger Michalski, Andrew Hammond Jan 2022

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 …


Shopping For Judges: An Empirical Analysis Of Venue Choice In Large Chapter 11 Reorganizations, Theodore Eisenberg, Lynn M. Lopucki May 1999

Shopping For Judges: An Empirical Analysis Of Venue Choice In Large Chapter 11 Reorganizations, Theodore Eisenberg, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article reports the results of a comprehensive study of big-case bankruptcy forum shopping from 1980 to 1997. A description of what has occurred helps explain both the causes of Delaware's rise as the preferred Chapter 11 forum and why embarrassment forced the system to take extraordinary countermeasures. The temporal coincidence of three major changes in Chapter 11 practice obscures those causes: (1) a nationwide increase in the rate of Chapter 11 forum shopping; (2) a national trend toward faster case-processing times; and (3) the rise of "prepackaged" bankruptcy cases in which the necessary majorities of creditors have accepted the …