Law Commons^™

The Curse Of Bigness And The Optimal Size Of Class Actions, Alexandra Lahav

Alexandra D. Lahav

How big is too big when it comes to class actions? This short essay, written for the Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc roundtable on Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. examines that question. Size in itself should not be a barrier to certification, but courts may rightly be concerned with variation within the class. Variation causes manageability problems, but in some cases (like Dukes) variation can be managed within the class context by judicious use of statistical methods. I also demonstrate why the related argument that this class ought not be certified because it is too big and Wal-Mart will be …

Best Of The Supremes - A Review Of The U.S. Supreme Court Term 2009-2010, Miller W. Shealy Jr.

Miller W. Shealy Jr.

No abstract provided.

Ashcroft V. Iqbal And Pleading In Federal Drug And Device Cases, William Janssen

William M. Janssen

No abstract provided.

Rough Justice, Alexandra Lahav

Alexandra D. Lahav

This Essay offers a new justification for rough justice. Rough justice, as I use the term here, is the attempt to resolve large numbers of cases by using statistical methods to give plaintiffs a justifiable amount of recovery. It replaces the trial, which most consider the ideal process for assigning value to cases. Ordinarily rough justice is justified on utilitarian grounds. But rough justice is not only efficient, it is also fair. In fact, even though individual litigation is often held out as the sine qua non of process, rough justice does a better job at obtaining fair results for …

It's All About The People: Creating A "Community Of Memory" In Civil Procedure Ii, Part One, Jennifer E. Spreng

Jennifer E Spreng

In Fall 2008, a nascent classroom community emerged among my Civil Procedure students, teaching assistants and I. That term’s adventure eventually became the vital “past” for the fully formed community that would knit students of future classes together as one.

The genesis of this early classroom community was my ideal of “the good lawyer” as the small-firm or small-jurisdiction practitioner I had known as a seven-year solo practitioner in a town of 50,000 people. That ideal was a combination of “the rhythms of the law” that run throughout the specialties; a more respectful and less stratified model of professionalism, and …

O'Connell V. Chapman Univ., No. 10-810, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

No abstract provided.

Justice Souter And The Civil Rules, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

Justice Souter’s recent retirement from the Court after nearly twenty years presents a unique opportunity to comment on his legacy. No doubt others will eulogize or castigate him for his membership in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey troika, but there is much more to the man and his jurisprudence. Indeed, the danger is that Justice Souter will be pigeonholed into one opinion, an opinion that he wrote early in his Supreme Court career, to the detriment of understanding the complex justice that he was. This short essay therefore analyzes a unique set of opinions—those that he authored on the federal …

New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

Pleading in federal court has a new narrative. The old narrative was one of notice, with the goal of broad access to the civil justice system. New Pleading, after the landmark Supreme Court cases of Twombly and Iqbal, is focused on factual sufficiency, with the purpose of screening out meritless cases that otherwise might impose discovery costs on defendants. The problem with New Pleading is that factual sufficiency often is a poor proxy for meritlessness. Some plaintiffs lack sufficient factual knowledge of the elements of their claims not because the claims lack merit but because the information they need is …

Comparative Convergences In Pleading Standards, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

Comparative civil procedure has had little influence in American jurisprudence and commentary, in part because of American procedure’s deep and widespread exceptionalism. But this may be changing, at least in certain areas. The American notice pleading standard, for example, which has long been considered exceptional, shows signs of trending toward the fact pleading models of foreign countries. Congressional experimentation with heightened pleading in statutes such as the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and the Supreme Court’s recent pronouncement in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly suggest that American pleading jurisprudence is moving away from its traditionally exceptionalist corner and towards a regime …