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Guidelines And Best Practices For Large And Mass-Tort Mdls (Second Edition), Bolch Judicial Institute

Bolch Judicial Institute Publications

Mass-tort MDLs dominate the federal civil docket, yet they present enormous challenges to transferee judges assigned to manage them. There is little official guidance and no rules specific to the management of mass-tort MDLs, often requiring the transferee judge to develop procedures out of whole cloth.

Beginning in 2013, the Bolch Judicial Institute (then the Center for Judicial Studies) sought to address this issue through a series of annual bench-bar conferences. From these conferences came the Guidelines and Best Practices for Large and Mass-Tort MDLs document — now in its Second Edition — which is designed to help judges and …

Certification Of Legal Questions To The Utah Supreme Court, David Nuffer

Duke Law Master of Judicial Studies Theses

For 30 years, federal courts have certified questions of state law to the Utah Supreme Court. This thesis examines the history and utility of the process and recommends changes to the process in the federal district court and in the Utah Supreme Court.

The current focus of federal judges in certifying questions is on utility for the case before the court. But certification of questions from a federal court to a state court is an expression of federalism—a humble acknowledgment by a federal authority which is often regarded as supreme that the state is the proper and best authority to …

Political Question Disconnects, Elizabeth Earle Beske

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …