Law Commons^™

Platform Procedure: Using Technology To Facilitate (Efficient) Civil Settlement., J.J. Prescott, Alexander Sanchez

Book Chapters

In this chapter, we explore the ability of courts to enhance the role of substantive law in case outcomes by reducing party litigation costs. When it becomes less costly for parties to engage actively in dispute resolution, the shadow of substantive law should, in theory, become more pronounced and case outcomes should change (and hopefully become more accurate/efficient on average). To empirically investigate this hypothesis, we examine the consequences of a large state court’s implementation of court-assisted online dispute resolution (ODR) tools for its small claims docket. A central goal of this technology is to reduce litigation costs of all …

Newsroom: Rwu Law Welcomes New Director Of Business Law Programs And The Corporate Counsel Externship Program July 19, 2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

New

Good Pretrial Lawyering: Planning To Get To Yes Sooner, Cheaper, And Better, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Although the ostensible purpose for pretrial litigation is to prepare for trial, such preparation is inextricably intertwined with negotiation because the expected trial outcome is a major factor affecting negotiation. Indeed, since most litigated cases are settled, good litigators prepare for negotiation at least as much as trial. The lawyers interviewed for this article, who were selected because of their good reputations, described how they prepare for both possibilities. They recommend taking charge of their cases from the outset, which includes getting a clear understanding of clients and their interests, developing good relationships with counterpart lawyers, carefully investigating the cases, …

Trial And Settlement: A Study Of High-Low Agreements, J. J. Prescott, Kathryn E. Spier, Albert Yoon

Articles

This article presents the first systematic theoretical and empirical study of highlow agreements in civil litigation. A high-low agreement is a private contract that, if signed by litigants before trial, constrains any plaintiff’s recovery to a specified range. In our theoretical model, trial is both costly and risky. When litigants have divergent subjective beliefs and are mutually optimistic about their trial prospects, cases may fail to settle. In these cases, high-low agreements can be in litigants’ mutual interest because they limit the risk of outlier awards while still allowing mutually beneficial speculation. Using claims data from a national insurance company, …

Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.”

However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument …

Agenda: Water, Oil And Gas: Nuts And Bolts Of Oil And Gas Leases, Surface Use Agreements, And Water Rights For Non-Oil And Gas Attorneys, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment, Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute (Denver, Colo.), Colorado Bar Association. Natural Resources & Energy Section

Water, Oil and Gas: Nuts and Bolts of Oil and Gas Leases, Surface Use Agreements, and Water Rights for Non-Oil and Gas Attorneys (September 26)

This third program in the Water, Oil, and Gas 101 series was designed to provide those who don’t practice in the area with essential information regarding leases, surface use agreements, siting considerations for oil and gas facilities, the resolution of disputes before the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the ins and outs of nontributary and produced nontributary ground water, and water rights as an asset.

Program topics include:

• Oil and Gas Leases
• Surface Use Agreements (SUAs)
• Government’s Role in Authorizing Locations for Oil and Gas Development
• Technical Aspects of Nontributary and Produced Nontributary Ground Water
• Produced Nontributary Ground …

Ducks And Decoys: Revisiting The Exit-Voice-Loyalty Framework In Assessing The Impact Of A Workplace Dispute Resolution System, Zev J. Eigen, Adam Seth Litwin

Faculty Working Papers

Until now, empirical research has been unable to reliably identify the impact of organizational dispute resolution systems (DRSs) on the workforce at large, in part because of the dearth of data tracking employee perceptions pre- and post- implementation. This study begins to fill this major gap by exploiting survey data from a single, geographically-expansive, US firm with well over 100,000 employees in over a thousand locations. The research design allows us to examine employment relations and human resource (HR) measures, namely, perceptions of justice, organizational commitment, and perceived legal compliance, in the same locations before and after the implementation of …

A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn

Faculty Working Papers

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …

Legal Bargaining Theory's New "Prospecting" Agenda: It May Be Social Science, But Is It News?, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

In the good old days legal bargaining scholarship was based mostly on negotiator war stories exuberantly told. The social-scientific study of the subject did not begin in earnest until the nineteen-seventies. Since then, however, the literature of storytelling has gone into a pronounced eclipse and social-scientific study is now the principal scholarly game in town. This article questions the wisdom of this shift, almost seismic in its proportions, and argues that it is too soon to jump on the social science bandwagon. Discussion focuses on the uses made of the Prospect Theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the …

Interlocutory Review By Agreement Of The Parties: A Preliminary Analysis, James Pfander, Dave Pekarek-Krohn

Faculty Working Papers

Although the nineteenth century's final judgment rule no longer represents an absolute barrier to interlocutory appellate review, scholars disagree about what should take its place. Some favor a regime of discretionary interlocutory review, with power conferred on appellate courts to select issues that warrant intervention. Others reject discretionary review as a waste of appellate resources and call upon the rule makers to identify specific categories of non-final orders that always warrant review. While the Supreme Court's collateral order doctrine bears some similarity to this process of categorization, the Court may have called a halt to the judicial recognition of new …

Collateral Review Of Remand Orders: Reasserting The Supervisory Role Of The Supreme Court, James Pfander

Faculty Working Papers

Although some might consider the appellate review of remand orders as something of a jurisdictional backwater, recent developments suggest that the rules need attention. The Supreme Court has decided no fewer than four cases in the past few years and has failed to develop a persuasive framework. Indeed, one member of the Court, Justice Breyer, has invited "experts" to solve the problem.

In this essay, I suggest that the solution lies in the Court's own hands. Rather than proposing legislative or rulemaking solutions, I call on the Court to re-invigorate its supervisory powers and conduct direct review of district court …

The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …

The Growing Influence Of Tort And Property Law On Natural Resources Law: Case Studies Of Coal Bed Methane Development And Geologic Carbon Sequestration, Alexandra B. Klass

The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

19 pages.

"Alexandra B. Klass, Associate Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School"

Updating Our Understanding Of The Role Of Lawyers: Lessons From Mastercard, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

No abstract provided.

How Much Justice Can We Afford?: Defining The Courts' Roles And Deciding The Appropriate Number Of Trials, Settlement Signals, And Other Elements Needed To Administer Justice, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article discusses how the U.S. court system can function optimally given declining trial rates and the limited resources available. The question of how much justice we can afford is a challenge that becomes more difficult as budgets fall behind the increasing demand for and cost of court services. Presumably most analysts would agree that courts should try cases when appropriate - and help litigants find just resolutions without trial when it is not needed. The courts' ability to provide trials in some cases is possible only if the vast majority of other cases are not tried.This article provides background …

Possibilities For Collaborative Law: Ethics And Practice Of Lawyer Disqualification And Process Control In A New Model Of Lawyering, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article assesses the possibilities for collaborative law (CL) to promote problem-solving negotiation and analyzes the operation and effect of the CL disqualification agreement (DA), which CL leaders hold as essential to the process. In CL, the lawyers and clients agree to negotiate from the outset of the case using a problem-solving approach. Under CL theory, the process creates a metaphorical "container" by using a DA disqualifying both lawyers from representing their clients if either party chooses to proceed in litigation. This article argues that much CL theory and practice is valuable, including protocols of early commitment to negotiation, interest-based …

A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

The following essay is based on the talk "Government, Citizens, and Injurious Industries: A Case Study of the Tobacco Litigation," delivered by Hanoch Dagan last May to the Detroit Chapter of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and on the article "Governments, Citizens, and Injurious Industries," by Dagan and James J. White, '62, which appeared in 75.2 New York University Law Review 254-428 (May 2000). The authors hold conflicting view on the underlying issue of this topic: tobacco company product liability. Professor Dagan holds the position that tobacco companies are liable for harm done by their products; Professor …

Civil Litigation From Litigants' Perspectives: What We Know And What We Don't Know About The Litigation Experience Of Individual Litigants, Tamara Relis

Scholarly Works

This study of the entire phenomenon of civil litigation commenced with the sole aim of ascertaining the extant gaps in the available knowledge about litigation from the perspectives of those who are by far affected most by it: the litigants. What does litigation mean for those who are directly embroiled and whose lives may consequently be radically transformed? Serious lacunas exist. However, extensive readings worldwide throughout the research process result in a stark elucidation of an overlooked, yet crucially important and somewhat egregious state of affairs, making surprisingly clear just how pernicious litigation is for the average 'nonrepeat player'.

Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

In this Article, Professors Hanoch Dagan and James White study the most recent challenge raised by mass torts litigation: the interference of governments with the bilateral relationship between citizens and injurious industries. Using the tobacco settlement as their case study, Dagan and White explore the important benefits and the grave dangers of recognizing governments' entitlement to reimbursement for costs they have incurred in preventing or ameliorating their citizens' injuries. They further demonstrate that the current law can help capture these benefits and guard against the entailing risks, showing how subrogation law can serve as the legal foundation of the governments' …

Identifying Real Dichotomies Underlying The False Dichotomy: Twenty-First Century Mediation In An Eclectic Regime, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Some people (lawyers, scholars, judges, dispute resolvers, policymakers) are more concerned about fidelity to procedural protocols while others are more concerned with the substantive rules governing disputes and substantive outcomes. Those in the dispute resolution community preferring facilitation tend to be proceduralists. For them, the observance of proper procedure is a high goal, perhaps the dominant goal. They reason, often implicitly, that adherence to the rules of procedure is the essence of neutrality, fairness, and the proper role of a dispute resolving apparatus. At some level, usually subconscious, there is a post-modern philosophical aspect of this preference. Because humans cannot …

The Inevitability Of The Eclectic: Liberating Adr From Ideology, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The problem with viewing facilitation as the only legitimate form of mediation, of course, is that it borders on tautology: mediation is nonevaluative, therefore any evaluation in mediation must be impermissible. Although this view remains strongly held in many quarters, it appears to be in retreat, both within the mediation community and in the legal community at large. Courts and commentators have shown increasing favor toward some evaluative or advising component of mediation. More important, the eclectic style appears to be what takes place in the metaphorical trenches of mediation practice (although sound empirical data is necessarily hard to obtain …

When Winning Isn’T Everything: The Lawyer As Problem Solver, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Today I want to address the question of what the modern lawyer needs to know and what the modern lawyer must know how to do to be good at what he or she does, to be helpful to clients, to lead a fulfilling life, and hopefully, to leave the world a better place than he or she first found it. I went to law school to work on that illusive jurisprudential concept - justice. On the outside walls of the Edward Bennett Williams Library where I work in Washington, DC, is a quote, which we attribute to a former Georgetown …

Why Civil Cases Go To Trial: Strategic Bargaining And The Desire For Vindication, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud

Articles

When negotiations break down and a dispute cannot be settled, attorneys commonly blame their adversaries, often questioning their ethics or their judgment. After interviewing many attorneys, we have come to believe much of the criticism is directed at strategic moves in negotiation. But strategic ploys are not the only reason dispute resolution fails. Rather, our research also suggest that a genuine desire for vindication through trial or other formal process may be very significant in some types of cases where bargaining breaks down.

Using Decision Trees As Tools For Settlement, Marjorie Corman Aaron

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

While experienced lawyers can some­ times develop an intuitive sense of what a case is worth, their intuition may not be sufficient in a case of considerable complexity. Furthermore, intuitive "gut sense" valuations are hard to support or explain to clients.

Decision trees allow the parties and their lawyers to see more clearly how the strengths and weaknesses of their positions on specific issues will affect the overall value of a case. Long popular in the business community, deci­sion analysis has evolved as a tool for lawyers to help make decisions in complex litigation.

Getting To No: A Study Of Settlement Negotiations And The Selection Of Cases For Trial, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud

Articles

A trial is a failure. Although we celebrate it as the centerpiece of our system of justice, we know that trial is not only an uncommon method of resolving disputes, but a disfavored one. With some notable exceptions, lawyers, judges, and commentators agree that pretrial settlement is almost always cheaper, faster, and better than trial. Much of our civil procedure is justified by the desire to promote settlement and avoid trial. More important, the nature of our civil process drives parties to settle so as to avoid the costs, delays, and uncertainties of trial, and, in many cases, to agree …

Agenda: Moving The West's Water To New Uses: Winners And Losers, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Moving the West's Water to New Uses: Winners and Losers (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado Law School professors Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Mark Squillace.

Moving the West's Water to New Uses: Winners and Losers will be the theme for this year's water conference, June 6-8 at the Law School in Boulder. The conference will consider the changing demands for water in the West and the need to reallocate a portion of the existing uses of water to new uses.

The first day will provide the background by looking at the most likely sources of water to meet these demands, including agriculture, federal water projects, interstate transfers, and …

Antidegradation And Nonpoint Source Pollution In The West, H. Michael Anderson

Water Quality Control: Integrating Beneficial Use and Environmental Protection (Summer Conference, June 1-3)

31 pages.

Contains references.

Lessons From The Alternative Dispute Resolution Movement, Jethro K. Lieberman

Articles & Chapters

In less than a decade, alternative dispute resolution- ADR-has grown from a bravely-voiced hope to a congeries of practices animated by the desire to resolve legal battles outside the courtroom. ADR offers a way-station, or a series of them, between the probity of the adversary system and the flexibility of private negotiations. Though not without an ideology, ADR has never had a unified theory to explain what it accomplishes and how it works. But enough experience has accumulated by now to permit a search for a more analytical understanding of ADR and the lessons it might teach.

The Case For A Legislative Solution To Indian Water Claims, James M. Bush

The Federal Impact on State Water Rights (Summer Conference, June 11-13)

57 pages.