Litigation Commons^™

The Court And The Private Plaintiff, Elizabeth Beske

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Two seemingly irreconcilable story arcs have emerged from the Supreme Court over the past decade. First, the Court has definitively taken itself out of the business of creating private rights of action under statutes and the Constitution, decrying such moves as relics of an “ancient regime.” Thus, the Supreme Court has slammed the door on its own ability to craft rights of action under federal statutes and put Bivens, which recognized implied constitutional remedies, into an ever-smaller box. The Court has justified these moves as necessary to keep judges from overstepping their bounds and wading into the province of the …

Non-Extraterritoriality, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The extraterritorial application of statutes has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years, but very little attention has been paid the non-extraterritoriality of statutes, by which I mean their effect on cases beyond their specified territorial reach. The question matters when a choice-of-law rule or a contractual choice-of-law clause directs application of a state’s law and the state has a statute that, because of a provision limiting its external reach, does not reach the case. On one view, the state has no law for cases beyond the reach of the statute. The territorial limitation is a choice-of-law …

Extraterritoriality As Choice Of Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The proper treatment of provisions that specify the extraterritorial scope of statutes has long been a matter of controversy in Conflict of Laws scholarship. This issue is a matter of considerable contemporary interest because the Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws proposes to address such provisions in a way that diverges from how they were treated in the Second Restatement. The Second Restatement treats such provisions—which I call geographic scope limitations—as choice-of-law rules, meaning, inter alia, that the courts will ordinarily disregard them when the forum’s choice-of-law rules or a contractual choice-of-law clause selects the law of a state as …

Social Science Evidence In Charter Litigation: Lessons From Carter V Canada (Attorney General), Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this paper, I offer the reflections of an academic who wandered well out of her wheelhouse. While I have graduate training in both philosophy and law, I am not an expert on the use of social science and humanities evidence in litigation. But, through the course of working on Carter v Canada (Attorney General), I had the opportunity to participate directly in the process of marshalling, preparing, analyzing, and critiquing the evidence. My hope is that, through this paper, I can bring a perspective that may be useful both for practitioners who might (or, I would say, should) be …

All Together Now: Using Principles Of Group Dynamics To Train Better Jurors, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

We ask juries to make important decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives. We leave these decisions in the hands of groups of laypeople because we hope that the diverse range of experiences and knowledge in the group will lead to more thoughtful and informed decisionmaking. Studies suggest that diverse groups of jurors have different perspectives on evidence, engage in more thorough debate, and more closely evaluate facts. At the same time, there are a variety of problems associated with group decisionmaking, from the loss of individual motivation in group settings, to the vulnerability of groups to various …

A Pragmatic Approach To Interpreting The Federal Rules, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

What Jurors Want To Know: Motivating Juror Cognition To Increase Legal Knowledge & Improve Decisionmaking, Sara Gordon

Scholarly Works

What do jurors want to know? Jury research tells us that jurors want to understand the information they hear in a trial so they can reach the correct decision. But like all people, jurors who are asked to analyze information in a trial—even jurors who consciously want to reach a fair and accurate verdict—are unconsciously influenced by their internal goals and motivations. Some of these motives are specific to individual jurors; for instance, a potential juror with a financial interest in a case would be excluded from the jury pool. But other motivations, like the motive to understand the law …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Spatial Dynamics Of U.S. Cultural Resource Law, Robert Z. Selden Jr., C. Britt Bousman

CRHR: Archaeology

The American Antiquities Act, Historic Sites Act, Archeological and Historic Preservation Act, National Historic Preservation Act, American Indian Religious Freedom Act, Archeological Resources Protection Act, Abandoned Shipwreck Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act comprise the basis of our exploration of cultural resource legislation in the United States. Since the passage of the American Antiquities Act in 1906, 1086 cases have challenged these statutes in U.S. courts. We investigate temporal and regional patterns of the case law to establish whether these laws are uniformly prosecuted throughout the U.S. Our findings suggest that case law is complex and …

Civility And Collegiality—Unreasonable Judicial Expectations For Lawyers As Officers Of The Court?, Lonnie T. Brown

Scholarly Works

It is a well-settled and often-recited fact that lawyers are “officers of the court.” That title, however, is notoriously hortatory and devoid of meaning. Nevertheless, the Eleventh Circuit recently took the somewhat unprecedented step of utilizing the officer-of-the-court label to, in effect, sanction an attorney for the purportedly uncivil act of failing to provide defendant attorneys with pre-suit notice. While the author applauds the court’s desire to place greater emphasis on lawyer-to-lawyer collegiality as a component of officer-of-the-court status, the uncertainty the decision creates in terms of a lawyer’s role will potentially force litigators to compromise important client-centered duties. This …

Agenda: A Life Of Contributions For All Time: Symposium In Honor Of David H. Getches, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law, University Of Colorado Law Review

A Life of Contributions for All Time: Symposium in Honor of David H. Getches (April 26-27)

On April 26-27, 2012, Colorado Law honored David H. Getches with a symposium to celebrate his life and legacy of trailblazing scholarship. “A Life of Contributions for All Time” featured a keynote address by Distinguished Professor Charles Wilkinson entitled, “Hero for the People, Hero for the Land and Water: Reflections on the Enduring Contributions of David Getches.” Top scholars in the fields of natural resources, water, and American Indian law reflected on Dean Getches’ contributions and their own insights into these fields, including Professor John Leshy, John Echohawk, Professor Carole Goldberg, Professor Joe Sax, Professor Rebecca Tsosie, Justice Greg Hobbs, …

Professionalism And Advocacy At Trial – Real Jurors Speak In Detail About The Performance Of Their Advocates, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Access To Justice And The Evolution Of Class Action Litigation In Australia, Camille Cameron, Bernard Murphy

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The federal and Victorian class action regimes are intended to facilitate aggregation of multiple claims. Aggregation can improve efficiency by combining similar claims and can enhance access to justice by providing a mechanism to litigate small claims. This article considers whether these efficiency and access aims are being achieved. The authors argue that whilst some developments in class action jurisprudence have been consistent with these legislative aims, other have not. Several features of Australian class action jurisprudence and practice have hampered the healthy development of the legislative regimes, including adverse costs orders, unclear threshold requirements, evasive posturing and unresolved class …

A Global Convention On Choice Of Court Agreements, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This article reviews the work of the Special Commission of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which meet during the first nine days of December 2003 to consider a Draft Text on Choice of Court Agreements. Negotiations originally sought a rather comprehensive convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments, with a preliminary draft convention being prepared in October 1999, and further revised at the first part of a Diplomatic Conference in June 2001. When it became clear that some countries, particularly the United States, could not agree to the convention being considered, negotiations were redirected at …

Lawyers On The Auction Block: Evaluation And Selection Of Class Counsel By Auction, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Roles Of Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Human Rights, Civil Wrongs And Foreign Relations: A "Sinical" Look At The Use Of U.S. Litigation To Address Human Rights Abuses Abroad, Jacques Delisle

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …

Girls Should Bring Lawsuits Everywhere . . . Nothing Will Be Corrupted: Pornography As Speech And Product, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Rewriting History: The Propriety Of Eradicating Prior Decisional Law Through Settlement And Vacatur, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Costs Of Complexity, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.