Law Commons^™

The Mdl Vortex Revisited, Thomas B. Metzloff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Understanding Causation In Private Securities Lawsuits: Building On Amgen, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

With Amgen, the Supreme Court’s majority once again holds that inquiry into the alleged market impact of a misrepresentation is not required to invoke fraud on the market approach to causation so that the class can be certified. Rather than just leaving matters where they have been since the Supreme Court’s muddled encounter with causation in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, the Supreme Court’s most recent decision appears to relax some earlier-held tenets with respect to markets believed sufficiently efficient for fraud on the market to be invoked. This Article not only identifies the central flaw of Basic that has over …

They Were Meant For Each Other: Professor Edward Cooper And The Rules Enabling Act, Mark R. Kravitz, David F. Levi, Lee H. Rosenthal, Anthomy J. Scricia

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Aggregate Litigation Goes Public: Representative Suits By State Attorneys General, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

State attorneys general represent their citizens in aggregate litigation that bears a striking resemblance to the much-maligned damages class action. Yet, while class actions are subject to a raft of procedural rules designed to protect absent class members, equivalent suits in the public sphere are largely free from constraint. The procedural disconnect between the two categories of aggregate litigation reflects a widespread assumption that attorneys general will adequately represent the interests of the state’s citizens, obviating any need for case-specific mechanisms for assuring the loyalty of lawyer to client.

This Article challenges the presumption of adequate public representation. By conflating …

Securities Class Actions As Public Law, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

The Political Economy of Fraud on the Market provides a wide-ranging criticism of and thoughtful reforms for securities class actions....However, both their critique of contemporary class actions and their model of the reforms they propose leave unexamined a good many matters relevant to both the criticism and reform of securities class actions....Bratton and Wachter earn high marks for being less passionate and much more thoughtful than others in the chorus calling for reform; indeed, their observations are among the most thoughtful to be found in this area. Nonetheless, their analysis is incomplete in many important areas, and in addition to …

The American Law Institute’S New Principles Of Aggregate Litigation, Sam Issacharoff, Carolyn Kuhl, Francis Mcgovern, Stephanie Middleton, John Beisner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Punitive Damages And Class Actions, Francis Mcgovern

Faculty Scholarship

The union of punitive damages and class actions can be aptly described with Samuel Johnson’s famous quotation regarding marriage: “The triumph of hope over experience.” By most conventional wisdom, there is little future for plaintiffs or defendants who desire to resolve punitive damages claims globally using the procedural vehicle of a class action. From a conceptual perspective, however, there are circumstances under which the union could function. This Article explores those possibilities, not in the spirit of normative support, but in the spirit of exploring theories that may have some prospective vitality. Notwithstanding the chilly reception that punitive damages class …

Judicial Ability And Securities Class Actions, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

We exploit a new data set of judicial rulings on motions in order to investigate the relationship between judicial ability and judicial outcomes. The data set consists of federal district judges’ rulings on motions to dismiss, to approve the lead plaintiff, and to approve attorneys’ fees in securities class actions cases, and also judges’ decisions to remove themselves from cases. We predict that higher-quality judges, as measured by citations, affirmance rates, and similar criteria, are more likely to dismiss cases, reject lead plaintiffs, reject attorneys’ fees, and retain cases rather than hand them over to other judges. Our results are …

Mapping The American Shareholder Litigation Experience: A Survey Of Empirical Studies Of The Enforcement Of The U.S. Securities Law, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we provide an overview of the most significant empirical research that has been conducted in recent years on the public and private enforcement of the federal securities laws. The existing studies of the U.S. enforcement system provide a rich tapestry for assessing the value of enforcement, both private and public, as well as market penalties for fraudulent financial reporting practices. The relevance of the U.S. experience is made broader by the introduction through the PSLRA in late 1995 of new procedures for the conduct of private suits and the numerous efforts to evaluate the effects of those …

Lying And Getting Caught: An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Securities Class Action Settlements On Targeted Firms, James D. Cox, Lynn Bai, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

The ongoing Great Recession has triggered numerous proposals to improve the regulation of financial markets and, most importantly, the regulation of organizations such as credit rating agencies, underwriters, hedge funds, and banks, whose behavior is believed to have caused the credit crisis that spawned the economic collapse. Not surprisingly, some of the reform efforts seek to strengthen the use of private litigation. Private suits have long been championed as a necessary mechanism not only to compensate investors for harms they suffer from financial frauds but also to enhance deterrence of wrongdoing. However, in recent years there has been a chorus …

Do Differences In Pleading Standards Cause Forum Shopping In Securities Class Actions?: Doctrinal And Empirical Analyses, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas, Lynn Bai

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Distribution Of Funds In Class Actions - Claims Administration, Francis Mcgovern

Faculty Scholarship

Most class action securities cases result in a settlement where the parties agree on a defined amount of money to be placed in a fund for distribution to eligible beneficiaries. Although the size of the fund and the losses suffered by eligible beneficiaries are defined, the number of potential beneficiaries who decide not to participate in the settlement by opting out and the number and value of losses eventually claimed by those eligible beneficiaries are not known until long after the settlement amount has been established. In any closed-end fund, like the securities class action settlements, there is the potential …

Does The Plaintiff Matter?: An Empirical Analysis Of Lead Plaintiffs In Securities Class Actions, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas, Dana Kiku

Faculty Scholarship

With the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLR) the U.S. Congress introduced sweeping substantive and procedural reforms for securities class actions. A central provision of the Act is the lead plaintiff provision, which creates a rebuttable presumption that the investor with the largest financial interest in a securities fraud class action should be appointed the lead plaintiff for the suit. The lead plaintiff provision was adopted to encourage a class member with a large financial stake to become the class representative. Congress expected that such a plaintiff would actively monitor the conduct of a securities …

Letting Billions Slip Through Your Fingers: Empirical Evidence And Legal Implications Of The Failure Of Financial Institutions To Participate In Securities Class Action Settlements, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In a pilot study we published two years ago, we reported that nearly two-thirds of the institutional investors with financial losses in 53 settled securities class actions fail to submit claims. As a consequence of this failure substantial sums they were entitled to receive were given to others. This article presents the results of a much more extensive investigation of the frequency with which financial institutions submit claims in settled securities class actions. We combine an empirical study of a much larger set of settlements with the results of a survey of institutional investors about their claims filing practices. Consistent …