Torts Commons^™

Monopolies In Multidistrict Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

When transferee judges receive a multidistrict proceeding, they select a few lead plaintiffs’ lawyers to efficiently manage litigation and settlement negotiations. That decision gives those attorneys total control over all consolidated plaintiffs’ claims and rewards them richly in common-benefit fees. It’s no surprise then that these are coveted positions, yet empirical evidence confirms that the same attorneys occupy them time and again.

Anytime repeat players exist and exercise both oligopolistic leadership control across multidistrict proceedings and monopolistic power within a single proceeding, there is concern that they will use their dominance to enshrine practices and norms that benefit themselves at …

When Torts Met Civil Procedure: A Curricular Coupling, Laura G. Dooley, Brigham A. Fordham, Ann E. Woodley

Scholarly Works

Law students must become adept at understanding how various bodies of law interact-supporting, balancing, and even conflicting with each other. This article describes an attempt to achieve these goals by merging two canonical first-year courses, civil procedure and torts, into an integrated class titled ‘Introduction to Civil Litigation’. Our most pressing motivation was concern that students who study civil procedure and torts in isolation develop a skewed, unrealistic view of how law works in the real world. By combining these courses, we hoped to teach students early in their careers to approach problems more like practicing lawyers, who must deal …

Repeat Players In Multidistrict Litigation: The Social Network, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams

Scholarly Works

As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal-agent concerns that plagued class-action attorneys linger. These circumstances are ripe for exploitation: few rules, little oversight, multi-million dollar common-benefit fees, and a push for settlement can tempt a cadre of repeat players to fill in the gaps in ways that further their own self-interest.

Although multidistrict litigation now comprises 36 percent of the entire federal civil caseload, legal scholars have …