Law Commons^™

Compensation's Role In Deterrence, Russell M. Gold

Articles

There are plenty of noneconomic reasons to care whether victims are compensated in class actions. The traditional law-and-economics view, however, is that when individual claim values are small, there is no reason to care whether victims are compensated. Rather than compensation deterring wrongdoing is tort law's primary economic objective. And on this score, law-and-economics scholars contend that only the aggregate amount of money that a defendant expects to pay affects deterrence. They say that it does not matter for deterrence purposes how that money is split between victims, lawyers, and charities. This Article challenges that claim about achieving tort law's …

The End Of An Era? Federal Civil Procedure After The 2015 Amendments, Adam N. Steinman

Articles

The recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were the most controversial in decades. The biggest criticisms concerned pleading standards and access to discovery. Many feared that the amendments would undermine the simplified, merits-driven approach that the original drafters of the Federal Rules envisioned and would weaken access to justice and the enforcement of substantive rights and obligations.

This Article argues that the amendments that came into effect on December 1, 2015, do not mandate a more restrictive approach to pleading or discovery. Although there was legitimate cause for alarm given the advisory committee's earlier proposals and supporting …

The Ideological Origins Of The Right To Counsel, John Felipe Acevedo

Articles

The defense counsel is a paramount actor in modem criminal trials, but this was not always the case. Indeed, the allowance of counsel to felony defendants can be traced to only a few hundred years ago, a relatively modem innovation in the area of legal history. This Essay examines the intellectual origins of the right to counsel, which it situates in the era of the English Revolution. Drawing on pamphlet literature, cases, and statutes from the seventeenth century in both England and North America, it argues that the right originated from a fear of unfairness brought on by a mistrust …