Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Legal Profession Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 31 - 34 of 34

Full-Text Articles in Legal Profession

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs’ Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss Mar 2013

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs’ Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Scott A Moss

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiff’s lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs’ briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for won/loss rate, bad plaintiffs’ briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling; in a major legal service market, how …


The Law Of Corporate Purpose, David Yosifon Jan 2013

The Law Of Corporate Purpose, David Yosifon

David G. Yosifon

Delaware corporate law requires corporate directors to manage firms for the benefit of shareholders, and not for any other constituency. Delaware jurists have been clear about this in their case law, and they are not coy about it in extra-judicial settings, such as speeches directed at law students and practicing members of the corporate bar. Nevertheless, the reader of leading corporate law scholarship is continually exposed to the scholarly assertion that the law is ambiguous or ambivalent on this point, or even that case law affirmatively empowers directors to pursue non-shareholder interests. It is shocking, and troubling, for corporate law …


A Market For Justice: A First Empirical Look At Third Party Litigation Funding, David S. Abrams, Daniel L. Chen Jan 2013

A Market For Justice: A First Empirical Look At Third Party Litigation Funding, David S. Abrams, Daniel L. Chen

All Faculty Scholarship

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of the law. While much theoretical work points to this possibility, no empirical work has investigated the claims, largely due to the rarity of trading in legal claims in modern systems of law. In this paper we take the first step toward empirically testing some of these theoretical claims using data from Australia. We find some evidence that third-party funding corresponds to an increase in litigation and court caseloads. Cases with third-party funders are more prominent than comparable ones. While third-party funding may have …


The Cost Of Law: Promoting Access To Justice Through The (Un)Corporate Practice Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield Dec 2012

The Cost Of Law: Promoting Access To Justice Through The (Un)Corporate Practice Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield

Gillian K Hadfield

The U.S. faces a mounting crisis in access to justice. Vast numbers of ordinary Americans represent themselves in routine legal matters daily in our over-burdened courts. Obtaining ex ante legal advice is effectively impossible for almost everyone except larger corporate entities, organizations and governments. In this paper, I explain why, as a matter of economic policy, it is essential that the legal profession abandon the prohibition on the corporate practice of law in order to remedy the access problem. The prohibitions on the corporate practice of law rule out the use of essential organizational and contracting tools widely used in …