Litigation Commons^™

Recollections Refreshed And Recorded, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Witnesses forget stuff. When they do, the evidence rules give us two tools to help solve the problem. Lawyers call one "refreshed recollection" and the other "past recollection recorded," labels just similar enough to guarantee confusion. Nevertheless, these principles get at very different things and are well worth the effort necessary to distinguish and understand them.

So how do we get there?

Are We There Yet? Discovery For The New Litigator, Erin Rhinehart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

If the road is life, then discovery is litigation. It is how we reach our destination. Unfortunately, discovery is like getting there with someone in the backseat.

Anyone who has ever traveled with passengers, especially children, knows how it plays out. In the beginning, everybody is excited. Everyone gleefully piles into the car, eager to launch. No one has any trouble amusing themselves. A couple hours in, a bathroom break and gas station snack later, it hits. The adrenaline wears off and the tedium kicks in. And then you hear the dreaded cry coming from the rear: Are we there …

Civil Rights, Access To Counsel, And Injunctive Class Actions In The United States, Maureen Carroll

Book Chapters

According to a familiar story about class actions in the United States, aggregation promotes access to counsel by increasing the amount of money from which counsel fees can be taken. Courts usually award class counsel a percentage of the monetary recovery obtained on behalf of the class, and class treatment can turn a $30 case into a $3 million case. But what about class actions that do not involve monetary relief at all? Some civil rights plaintiffs seek to stop a violation, rather than to obtain compensation for past harm, and therefore choose to pursue only an injunction or declaratory …