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Full-Text Articles in Law
Procedural Fairness In Antitrust Enforcement: The U.S. Perspective, Christopher S. Yoo, Hendrik M. Wendland
Procedural Fairness In Antitrust Enforcement: The U.S. Perspective, Christopher S. Yoo, Hendrik M. Wendland
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Due process and fairness in enforcement procedures represent a critical aspect of the rule of law. Allowing greater participation by the parties and making enforcement procedures more transparent serve several functions, including better decisionmaking, greater respect for government, stronger economic growth, promotion of investment, limits corruption and politically motivated actions, regulation of bureaucratic ambition, and greater control of agency staff whose vision do not align with agency leadership or who are using an enforcement matter to advance their careers. That is why such distinguished actors as the International Competition Network (ICN), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the …
Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
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Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
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The individual plaintiff plays a critical—yet, underappreciated—role in our legal system. Only lawsuits that are brought by individual plaintiffs allow the law to achieve the twin goals of efficiency and fairness. The ability of individual plaintiffs to seek justice against those who wronged them deters wrongdoing, ex ante, and in those cases in which a wrong has been committed nevertheless, it guarantees the payment of compensation, ex post. No other form of litigation, including class actions and criminal prosecutions, or even compensation funds, can accomplish the same result. Yet, as we show in this Essay, in many key sectors of …
Occam's Phaser: Making Proportional Discovery (Finally) Work In Litigation By Requiring Phased Discovery, Michael Thomas Murphy
Occam's Phaser: Making Proportional Discovery (Finally) Work In Litigation By Requiring Phased Discovery, Michael Thomas Murphy
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This is an article about solving the problem of expensive electronic discovery in litigation by simply learning the most important facts first. Judges and parties often complain that the scope of information included in fact discovery in civil litigation is overinclusive and disproportionate to size of the dispute, resulting in overly expensive costs. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure recently changed again to further emphasize the use of “proportional” limits in discovery, but provide little practical mechanism for parties, lawyers, and judges to make discovery “right-sized.” This Article proposes that parties should be required to “phase” discovery by first setting …
Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank
Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank
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In this essay, prepared as part of a festschrift for the Italian scholar, Michele Taruffo, I portray him as a pragmatic realist of the sort described by Richard Posner in his book, Reflections on Judging. Viewing him as such, I salute Taruffo for challenging the established order in domestic and comparative law thinking about civil law systems, the role of lawyers, courts and precedent in those systems, and also for casting the light of the comparative enterprise on common law systems, particularly that in the United States. Speaking as one iconoclast of another, however, I also raise questions about Taruffo’s …
Can Simple Mechanism Design Results Be Used To Implement The Proportionality Standard In Discovery?, Jonah B. Gelbach
Can Simple Mechanism Design Results Be Used To Implement The Proportionality Standard In Discovery?, Jonah B. Gelbach
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I point out that the Coase theorem suggests there should not be wasteful discovery, in the sense that the value to the requester is less than the cost to the responder. I use a toy model to show that a sufficiently informed court could design a mechanism under which the Coasean prediction is borne out. I then suggest that the actual information available to courts is too little to effect this mechanism, and I consider alternatives. In discussing mechanisms intended to avoid wasteful discovery where courts have limited information, I emphasize the role of normative considerations.
Processing Disability, Jasmine E. Harris
Processing Disability, Jasmine E. Harris
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This Article argues that the practice of holding so many adjudicative proceedings related to disability in private settings (e.g., guardianship, special education due process, civil commitment, and social security) relative to our strong normative presumption of public access to adjudication may cultivate and perpetuate stigma in contravention of the goals of inclusion and enhanced agency set forth in antidiscrimination laws. Descriptively, the law has a complicated history with disability — initially rendering disability invisible, later, legitimizing particular narratives of disability synonymous with incapacity, and, in recent history, advancing full socio-economic visibility of people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act, …
Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
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The purpose of this article is to advance understanding of the role that federal court rulemaking has played in litigation reform. For that purpose, we created original data sets that include (1) information about every member of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules who served from 1960 to 2013, and (2) every proposal for amending the Federal Rules that the Advisory Committee approved for consideration by the Standing Committee during the same period and that had implications for private enforcement. We show that, beginning in 1971, when a succession of Chief Justices appointed by Republican Presidents have chosen committee members, …
Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
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The program of regulation through private litigation that Democratic Congresses purposefully created starting in the late 1960s soon met opposition emanating primarily from the Republican party. In the long campaign for retrenchment that began in the Reagan administration, consequential reform proved difficult and ultimately failed in Congress. Litigation reformers turned to the courts and, in marked contrast to their legislative failure, were well-rewarded, achieving growing rates of voting support from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court on issues curtailing private enforcement under individual statutes. We also demonstrate that the judiciary’s control of procedure has been central to the campaign to retrench …
Toward A Revised 4.2 No-Contact Rule, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
Toward A Revised 4.2 No-Contact Rule, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
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No abstract provided.
Time Out, Stephen B. Burbank
Straw, Sand, And Sophistry, Stephen B. Burbank
Straw, Sand, And Sophistry, Stephen B. Burbank
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No abstract provided.
Docketology, District Courts And Doctrine, David A. Hoffman, Alan J. Izenman, Jeffrey Lidicker
Docketology, District Courts And Doctrine, David A. Hoffman, Alan J. Izenman, Jeffrey Lidicker
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Empirical legal scholars have traditionally modeled trial court judicial opinion writing by assuming that judges act rationally, seeking to maximize their influence by writing opinions in politically important cases. Support for this hypothesis has reviewed published trial court opinions, finding that civil rights and other "hot" topics are more likely to be explained than purportedly ordinary legal problems involved in resolving social security and commercial law cases. This orthodoxy comforts consumers of legal opinions, because it suggests that they are largely representative of judicial work. To test such views, we collected data from a thousand cases in four different jurisdictions. …
Two Valuable Treatises On Civil Procedure, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
Two Valuable Treatises On Civil Procedure, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
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No abstract provided.
Jurisdictional Conflict And Jurisdictional Equilibration: Paths To A Via Media, Stephen B. Burbank
Jurisdictional Conflict And Jurisdictional Equilibration: Paths To A Via Media, Stephen B. Burbank
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No abstract provided.
Semtek, Forum Shopping, And Federal Common Law, Stephen B. Burbank
Semtek, Forum Shopping, And Federal Common Law, Stephen B. Burbank
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No abstract provided.
Lawyers On The Auction Block: Evaluation And Selection Of Class Counsel By Auction, Jill E. Fisch
Lawyers On The Auction Block: Evaluation And Selection Of Class Counsel By Auction, Jill E. Fisch
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The lead counsel auction has attracted increasing attention. Auction advocates argue that auctions introduce competitive market forces that improve the selection and compensation of class counsel. The benefits of the auction, the;' claim, include lower legal fees and better representation. Careful scrutiny reveals that auction advocates have overlooked substantial methodological problems with the design and implementation of the lead counsel auction. Even if these problems were overcome, the auction procedure is flawed: Auctions are poor tools for selecting firms based on multiple criteria, compromise the judicial role, and are unlikely to produce reasonable fee awards. Although the existing record is …
Managing Punitive Damages: A Role For Mandatory "Limited Generosity" Classes And Anti-Suit Injunctions?, Joan E. Steinman
Managing Punitive Damages: A Role For Mandatory "Limited Generosity" Classes And Anti-Suit Injunctions?, Joan E. Steinman
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In this Article, I consider whether "limited generosity" classes may be used to determine a defendant's entire liability for punitive damages arising from a defined course of conduct. The goals of such a class action would include adequately punishing and deterring the defendant, keeping the defendant's liability within state-mandated and constitutional limits, and facilitating equitable distribution of the damages among injured plaintiffs. The Article describes the legal limits on punitive damages liability that states have established and that the Supreme Court has held substantive due process to impose, and then carefully examines whether such limits constitute a predicate for mandatory …