Law Commons^™

Fee Shifting, Nominal Damages, And The Public Interest, Maureen Carroll

Law & Economics Working Papers

As the Supreme Court recognized in its 2021 decision in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, nominal damages can redress violations of “important, but not easily quantifiable, nonpecuniary rights.” For some plaintiffs who establish a violation of their constitutional rights, nominal damages will be the only relief available. In its 1992 decision in Farrar v. Hobby, however, the Court disparaged the nominal-damages remedy. The case involved the interpretation of federal fee-shifting statutes, which enable prevailing civil rights plaintiffs to recover a reasonable attorney’s fee from the defendant. According to Farrar, a plaintiff can prevail by obtaining the “technical” remedy of nominal damages, but …

Class Action Myopia, Maureen Carroll

Articles

Over the past two decades, courts and commentators have often treated the class action as though it were a monolith, limiting their analysis to the particular class form that joins together a large number of claims for monetary relief This Article argues that the myopic focus on the aggregated-damages class action has led to undertheorization of the other class-action subtypes, which serve far different purposes and have far different effects, and has allowed the ongoing backlash against the aggregated-damages class action to affect the other subtypes in an undifferentiated manner. The failure to confine this backlash to its intended target …

What's A Judge To Do? Remedying The Remedy In Institutional Reform Litigation, Susan Poser

Michigan Law Review

Democracy by Decree is the latest contribution to a scholarly literature, now nearly thirty-years old, which questions whether judges have the legitimacy and the capacity to oversee the remedial phase of institutional reform litigation. Previous contributors to this literature have come out on one side or the other of the legitimacy and capacity debate. Abram Chayes, Owen Fiss, and more recently, Malcolm Feeley and Edward Rubin, have all argued that the proper role of judges is to remedy rights violations and that judges possess the legitimate institutional authority to order structural injunctions. Lon Fuller, Donald Horowitz, William Fletcher, and Gerald …

Should Congress Repeal Securities Class Action Reform?, Adam C. Pritchard

Other Publications

The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was designed to curtail class action lawsuits by the plaintiffs’ bar. In particular, the high-technology industry, accountants, and investment bankers thought that they had been unjustly victimized by class action lawsuits based on little more than declines in a company’s stock price. Prior to 1995, the plaintiffs’ bar had free rein to use the discovery process to troll for evidence to support its claims. Moreover, the high costs of litigation were a powerful weapon with which to coerce companies to settle claims. The plaintiffs’ bar and its allies in Congress have called …

Faith In Justice: Fiduciaries, Malpractice & Sexual Abuse By Clergy, Zanita E. Fenton

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article argues that perpetrators of sexual misconduct should not be granted refuge from the potential consequences of their actions by mere affiliation with a religious institution. Part I of this article examines the theories of malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty, and determines the appropriate cause of action for sexual misconduct and ascertains their capacities to withstand First Amendment scrutiny. Determining the cause of action is essential to the evaluation of the potential constitutional challenges. Part II demonstrates that sexual misconduct by clergy is well outside First Amendment constraints. It examines both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, and …

Turning From Tort To Administration, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

My objective here is to challenge the notion that the recent mass tort settlements - for all their novel qualities in the mass tort area - are truly sui generis in the law. Rather, I contend that the rise of such settlements in tort mirrors the development of public administrative agencies earlier in this century - that, in both instances, powerful new institutions emerged outside preexisting channels of control to wield significant power over human lives and resources. I argue that courts usefully may draw upon familiar doctrines of judicial review in administrative law to form a conceptual framework for …

Trends In The Law Of Damages, John W. Reed

Articles

The law of damages deals with the process of translating harm into dollars. It is not, however, a coherent body of knowledge. Rather, it consists of an amalgam of many concepts and rules having to do with fundamental policy questions about loss-shifting, risk-spreading, and allocation of functions between judge and jury. Because damages is a "non-subject," little attention is paid to it in law school curricula and there is little writing about it. As one commentator put it, the law of damages "plods its way, ignored by academicians and 'accepted' by the courts. . . . The 'winds of change' …

Substance And Procedure In The Conflict Of Laws, Edgar H. Ailes

Michigan Law Review

It is perhaps the most inveterate doctrine of the conflict of laws that all questions of procedure in a given instance are governed by the lex fori, or the law of the court invoked, regardless of the law under which the substantive rights of the parties accrued. For seven centuries, at least, courts and lawyers have broadly stated or assumed to be axiomatic the rule that substantive rights are fixed and immutable whilst the procedural devices by which such rights may be vindicated and enforced depend solely upon the law of the forum.

The Powers Of A Court Of Equity In State Tax Litigation, Maurice S. Culp

Michigan Law Review

Hitherto a state taxpayer, otherwise meeting the jurisdictional requirements of a federal district court, could secure an injunction from such a court upon a showing that there was no adequate remedy at law in the federal district court, and this regardless of the legal or equitable remedies afforded by the state courts.

In view of this recent legislation, it becomes important to ascertain the new limitation upon the equity powers of the federal district courts in state tax litigation. Likewise, because of these new rigid limitations upon the jurisdiction of the federal courts, the attitude of the state courts of …

Judgments - Federal Declaratory Judgments Act, Charles R. Moon Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Underlying the declaratory judgment is the idea that in an organized and civilized society where law and order are thoroughly recognized and established, coercion is normally unnecessary to settle legal disputes between parties. The belief is that in many lawsuits the plaintiff is not seeking a means of coercing the defendant but that the plaintiff and the defendant merely want a final and conclusive decision of a disputed question on which their legal relations depend. The value of the declaratory judgment lies in that it may be used to settle this dispute, in many cases before any other form of …

A Manual Of Equity Pleading And Practice, Bradley M. Thompson

Books

The following manual is intended simply as an introduction to the study of Equity Pleading and Practice, and to the course of lectures delivered upon that subject. The manual has been divided into lectures for the purposes of indicating the ground which a particular lecture will cover. It is expected that the student will master the printed synopsis before attending a given lecture.