Evidence Commons^™

The Euclid Proviso, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article argues that the Euclid Proviso, which allows regional concerns to trump local zoning when required by the general welfare, should play a larger role in zoning's second century. Traditional zoning operates to severely limit the construction of additional housing. This locks in the advantages of homeowners but at tremendous cost, primarily in the form of unaffordable housing, to those who would like to join the community. State preemption of local zoning defies traditional categorization; it is at once both radically destabilizing and market-responsive. But, given the ways in which zoning is a foundational part of the racial and …

Unbuckling The Seat Belt Defense In Arkansas, Spencer G. Dougherty

Arkansas Law Review

The “seat belt defense” has been hotly litigated over the decades in numerous jurisdictions across the United States. It is an affirmative defense that, when allowed, reduces a plaintiff’s recovery for personal injuries resulting from an automobile collision where the defendant can establish that those injuries would have been less severe or avoided entirely had the plaintiff been wearing an available seat belt. This is an unsettled legal issue in Arkansas, despite the growing number of cases in which the seat belt defense is raised as an issue. Most jurisdictions, including Arkansas, initially rejected the defense, but the basis for …

The Admissibility Of Sampling Evidence To Prove Individual Damages In Class Actions, Hillel J. Bavli, John Kenneth Felter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The 2016 Supreme Court decision in Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo revived the use of “representative” or sampling evidence in class actions. Federal courts are now more receptive to class plaintiffs’ efforts to prove classwide liability and, occasionally, aggregate damages, with sampling evidence. However, federal courts still routinely deny motions for class certification because they find that calculations of class members’ individual damages defeat the predominance prerequisite of Rule 23(b)(3). As a result, meritorious classwide claims founder. In this paper, we combine legal and statistical analyses and propose a novel solution to this dilemma that adheres to the Tysondecision …

The Virtue Of Process: Finding The Legitimacy Of Judicial Fact-Finding In Personal Injury Litigation, Nayha Acharya

PhD Dissertations

This thesis is an inquiry into the legitimacy of judicial fact-finding in civil litigation. Judges make authoritative factual findings in conditions of uncertainty and the decision-making process cannot, and does not, guarantee the accuracy of those outcomes. Given the inevitable risk of error, on what basis is the authority of judicial fact-finding legitimate? This project provides a framework of procedural legitimacy that bridges two unavoidable aspects of adjudication: factual indeterminacy and the need for justifiably authoritative dispute resolution. This work draws of the legal theories of Lon Fuller and Jurgen Habermas to substantiate the notion of procedural legitimacy in the …

Causation In Cases Of Evidential Uncertainty: Juridical Techniques And Fundamental Issues, Ken Oliphant

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This paper reviews from a comparative legal perspective the range of juridical techniques that have been developed in different legal systems to address perceived problems of uncertain alternative causation. It finds that the process of development has generally proceeded in an ad hoc and unprincipled fashion, without regard for overall coherence. It argues for a more principled legal approach in which the appropriate legal response (full liability, proportional liability or no liability) is adopted on the basis of a ranking of the different categories of cases in which problems of causal uncertainty can arise, reflecting the strength (or weakness) of …

Rish V. Simao, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 17 (Mar. 17, 2016), Heather Caliguire

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Nevada Supreme Court held that the District Court wrongly excluded evidence of low-impact defense when it required a biomechanical expert testify about the nature of the accident, erroneously interpreting Hallmark v. Eldgridge Instead, Hallmark requires sufficient foundation for admission of testimony and evidence, specifically excluding a biomechanical expert’s testimony under NRS 50.275. The Court additionally held that the District Court erred when it ultimately struck the defendant’s answer for violations of the pretrial order precluding defendant from raising a minor or low impact defense.

Presumptions And Modal Logic: A Hohfeldian Approach, John P. Finan

Akron Law Review

The difficulty of distinguishing between an inference and a presumption, a difficulty that bedevils tort and evidence teachers, (see Appendix I) among others, may be dispelled by a study of the deontic nature of permissible inferences and presumptions. Using scholastic terminology, an inference is a function of the intellect, not the will. Therefore, deontic notions of permission and duty seem foreign to inference. However, deontic notions are legitimate, because the law, in assigning a fact finding function to judge and jury, uses deontic notions in assigning fact finding competence. Thus, the statement that an inference is not permissible means that …

Common Ignorance: Medical Malpractice Law And The Misconceived Application Of The “Common Knowledge” And “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Doctrines, Amanda E. Spinner

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Ice: How Plaintiffs May Establish Premises Liability In "Black Ice" Cases Where The Dangerous Condition Is By Definition Not Visible Or Apparent To The Property Owner, Hon. Mark Dillon

Hon. Mark C. Dillon

Plaintiffs that are injured as a result of encounters with "black ice," as distinguished from regular ice, face peculiar difficulties in establishing liability against property owners for the dangerous icy conditions on their premises. Black ice results from a unique process under certain conditions by which air bubbles are expelled from water during the freezing process, rendering the ice virtually invisible to the naked eye. Property owners therefore are not typically on actual or constructive notice of black ice conditions as to become subject to the legal requirement of undertaking measures to remedy the conditions. This article explores the law …

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …

Adult Survivors Of Childhood Sexual Abuse And The Statute Of Limitations: The Need For Consistent Application Of The Delayed Discovery Rule, Gregory G. Gordon

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French

Journal Articles

As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …

Erie And The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Jay Tidmarsh offers an intriguing new test for drawing the allimportant line between procedure and substance for purposes of Erie. The Tidmarsh test is attractively simple, yet seemingly reaches the right result in separating out truly “procedural” rules from more substantive ones. Since I am not a proceduralist, in this Response I will leave the Tidmarsh test’s explanatory power and practical workability vis-à-vis general civil procedure rules to others more qualified than I. Instead, I want to focus on the implications of the Tidmarsh test for the Federal Rules of Evidence. Like others in the evidence world, I have long …

The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French

Christopher C. French

As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …

Working Without A Net: The Third Circuit Juggles Skepticism And Deference Inside The Ring Of Products Liability Experts After The Daubert Trilogy In Pineda V. Ford Motor Co. & (And) Calhoun V. Yamaha Corp., Jennifer E. Burke

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Knew? Admissibility Of Subsequent Remedial Measures When Defendants Are Without Knowledge Of The Injuries, Mark G. Boyko, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Federal Rule of Evidence 407 prohibits the introduction of subsequent remedial measures for the purposes of demonstrating negligence, culpable conduct, or product defect. But the rule breaks down, in application and purpose, when a defendant undertakes the new safety measure after the plaintiff's injury, but before the defendant had knowledge of the loss. Such a situation is not uncommon. Would-be defendants frequently improve their products and product safety for a variety of reasons. Toxic exposure cases, where exposure often predates diagnosis of the injury by a decade or more, represent a prime example of cases where defendants are likely to …

Daubert And The Disappearing Jury Trial, Allan Kanner

ExpressO

Since being decided by the Supreme Court in 1993, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals has earned its place as one of the most misinterpreted and misapplied decisions in modern history. Meant to liberalize the standards for admissions of proof, the decision has had the opposite effect. The gatekeeper powers given to judges via Daubert, coupled with the internal and external incentives to prevent jury trials, has placed our entire civil justice system at risk.

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Reassessing Damages In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Elizabeth C. Burch

ExpressO

No coherent doctrinal statement exists for calculating open-market damages for securities fraud class actions. Instead, courts have tried in vain to fashion common-law deceit and misrepresentation remedies to fit open-market fraud. The result is a relatively ineffective system with a hallmark feature: unpredictable damage awards. This poses a significant fraud deterrence problem from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint.

In 2005, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to clarify open-market damage principles and to facilitate earlier dismissal of cases without compensable economic losses. Instead, in Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo, it further confused the damage issue by (1) perpetuating the …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

Believing In Products Liability: Reflections On Daubert, Doctrinal Evolution, And David Owen's "Products Liability Law", Richard L. Cupp

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The Overlapping Magisteria Of Law And Science: When Litigation And Science Collide, William G. Childs

ExpressO

The Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals transformed courts’ evaluation of expert testimony. Many courts, applying Daubert, focus extensively on whether the purported expert’s methodology has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This focus on peer review results in two unintended consequences that have triggered criticism: litigation-driven scholarship and litigants taking discovery into the peer review process. Critics contend that litigation-driven scholarship is irredeemably biased and that peer review discovery is too often an effort to intimidate scholars from speaking on subjects of public concern.

In this Article, I explore these phenomena and the criticisms of …

Los Principios Generales Del Derecho Probatorio Y El Proceso Civil, Dr Leonardo J. Raznovich

Dr Leonardo J Raznovich

This article, written and published for a Spanish speaking audience, provides with a critical comparative overview of the principles of civil procedure and of the law of evidence.

The Accuracy And Manipulability Of Lost Profits Damages Calculations: Should The Trier Of Fact Be "Reasonably Certain"?, Jonathan T. Tomlin, David Merrell

ExpressO

The accuracy and manipulability of calculations for lost profits damages are critical determinants of the ability of harmed parties to receive just compensation in a wide range of legal cases including antitrust, fraud, false advertising, intellectual property infringement, and breach of contract. They are also important determinants of the deterrent effects of the law. Using a sample of over 5,000 U.S. firms, we show that simple damages methods are capable of being substantially inaccurate. We also show that damages methods in general are highly susceptible to manipulation. In the absence of reasonable justifications for why particular data sets and methods …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Learning The Wrong Lessons From "An American Tragedy": A Critique Of The Berger-Twerski Informed Choice Proposal, David E. Bernstein

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

This paper is a critique of Margaret Berger and Aaron Twerski, “Uncertainty and Informed Choice: Unmasking Daubert”, forthcoming the Michigan Law Review. Berger and Twerski propose that courts recognize a cause of action that would allow plaintiffs who claim injury from pharmaceutical products, but who do not have sufficient evidence to prove causation, to recover damages for deprivation of informed choice. Berger and Twerski claim inspiration from the litigation over allegations that the morning sickness drug Bendectin caused birth defects. Considering the criteria Berger and Twerski suggest for their proposed cause of action in the context of Bendectin, it appears …

Constructing Products Liability: Reforms In Theory And Procedure, Frank J. Vandall

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Legal Scholars Get Daubert Wrong: A Contextualist Explanation Of Law's Epistemology, Alani Golanski

Alani Golanski

Daubert requires the court to make judgments about scientific evidence. But judges, like jurors, are lay persons in relation to such evidence. So Daubert has been criticized as requiring too much of the court, and such alternatives as blue ribbon panels have been proposed. This article shows that, notwithstanding any problems that Daubert itself might have, the Daubert scholarship is significantly hampered by the way legal scholars categorize knowledge. A "contextualist" (as opposed to "invariantist") theory of knowledge is both philosophically best, and makes sense of law's relation to science.

Causation In Toxic Tort Litigation: Which Way Do We Go, Judge, Laurie Alberts

Villanova Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Fishing For The Smoking Gun, Y. Daphne Coelho-Adam

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Industry-wide tort litigation, such as tobacco and gun litigation, poses a new problem for extraterritorial discovery. These suits allege conspiracies on the part of the tobacco and gun industries to conceal the dangers of their products from the public. Much of the evidence needed to prove the industries' knowledge is in their possession. These industries are international with companies located in the United Kingdom. Under U.S. discovery law the evidence is discoverable, but such is not the case under British discovery law. Therefore, the evidence and witnesses located in the United Kingdom are outside the grasp of U.S. plaintiffs. The …