Can The Dark Arts Of The Dismal Science Shed Light On The Empirical Reality Of Civil Procedure?, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Can The Dark Arts Of The Dismal Science Shed Light On The Empirical Reality Of Civil Procedure?, Jonah B. Gelbach
All Faculty Scholarship
Litigation involves human beings, who are likely to be motivated to pursue their interests as they understand them. Empirical civil procedure researchers must take this fact seriously if we are to adequately characterize the effects of policy changes. To make this point concrete, I first step outside the realm of civil procedure and illustrate the importance of accounting for human agency in empirical research. I use the canonical problem of demand estimation in economics to show how what I call the “urn approach” to empirical work fails to uncover important empirical relationships by disregarding behavioral aspects of human action. I …
Discovery Of Medical Records In Oklahoma State Courts, 2014 University of Tulsa College of Law
Discovery Of Medical Records In Oklahoma State Courts, Charles W. Adams
Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
Trans-Substantivity Beyond Procedure, 2014 University of Colorado Law School
Trans-Substantivity Beyond Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux
Publications
No abstract provided.
Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
All Faculty Scholarship
The program of regulation through private litigation that Democratic Congresses purposefully created starting in the late 1960s soon met opposition emanating primarily from the Republican party. In the long campaign for retrenchment that began in the Reagan administration, consequential reform proved difficult and ultimately failed in Congress. Litigation reformers turned to the courts and, in marked contrast to their legislative failure, were well-rewarded, achieving growing rates of voting support from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court on issues curtailing private enforcement under individual statutes. We also demonstrate that the judiciary’s control of procedure has been central to the campaign to retrench …
Cy Pres And The Optimal Class Action, 2014 Notre Dame Law School
Cy Pres And The Optimal Class Action, Jay Tidmarsh
Journal Articles
This Article, prepared for a symposium on class actions, examines the problem of cy pres relief through the lens of ensuring that class actions have an optimal claim structure and class membership. It finds that the present cy pres doctrine does little to advance the creation of optimal class actions, and may do some harm to achieving that goal. The Article then proposes an alternative “nudge” to induce putative class counsel to structure class actions in an optimal way: set attorneys’ fees so that counsel is compensated through a combination of an hourly market rate and a percentage of the …
Whither Bespoke Procedure?, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Whither Bespoke Procedure?, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
Increasingly we hear that civil procedure lurks in the shadow of private law. Scholars suggest that the civil rules are mere defaults, applying if the parties fail to contract around them. When judges confront terms modifying court procedures — a trend said to be explosive — they seem all-too-willing to surrender to the inevitable logic of private and efficient private ordering. * How concerned should we be? This Article casts a wide net to find examples of private contracts governing procedure, and finds a decided absence of evidence. I search a large database of agreements entered into by public firms, …
Multiple Attempts At Class Certification, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Multiple Attempts At Class Certification, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
The phenomenon of multiple attempts at class certification -- when class counsel file the same putative class action in multiple successive courts and attempt to secure an order of certification despite previous denials of the same request -- has always presented a vexing analytical puzzle. When the Supreme Court rejected one proposed solution to that problem in Smith v. Bayer, it left unresolved some of the broader questions of preclusion doctrine, federal common law, and the constraints of due process with which any satisfying approach will have to grapple.
This essay was solicited as a reply to a recent …
Rethinking Summary Judgment Empirics: The Life Of The Parties, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Rethinking Summary Judgment Empirics: The Life Of The Parties, Jonah B. Gelbach
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Roadblocks To Access To Justice: Reforming Ethical Rules To Meet The Special Needs Of Low-Income Clients, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Roadblocks To Access To Justice: Reforming Ethical Rules To Meet The Special Needs Of Low-Income Clients, Louis S. Rulli
All Faculty Scholarship
The nation’s growing justice gap has left the poor with far too little access to legal representation, even in the most serious of civil matters. With poverty rates approaching their highest levels in the last fifty years, the poor struggle to hold on to their homes, their jobs, and their families, frequently overmatched by superior resources and an abundance of opposing lawyers representing corporations, government, and well-heeled interests. Non-profit lawyers struggle to provide limited assistance to the poor in high volume, community settings, or in courtroom corridors and on telephone hot lines. It is in these non-traditional settings that lawyers …
Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, 2014 New York Law School
Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow
Articles & Chapters
The Supreme Court's recent interest in patentable subject matter has had several, unexpected downstream effects on preliminary injunctions in patent disputes.
The Supreme Court has recently expressed increased interest in patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, the doctrine that limits the types of inventions eligible for patenting. Its two decisions, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., in 2012, and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., in 2013, represented the first broad restrictions on patentable subject matter in over thirty years. And later this term, the Court will decide yet another patent eligibility case: Alice Corp. v. CLS …
Discretion In Class Certification, 2014 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Discretion In Class Certification, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
A district court has broad discretion in deciding whether a suit may be maintained as a class action. Variations on this phrase populate the class action jurisprudence of the federal courts. The power of the federal courts to exercise discretion when deciding whether to permit a suit to proceed as a class action has long been treated as an elemental component of a representative proceeding. It is therefore cause for surprise that there is no broad consensus regarding the nature and definition of this judicial discretion in the certification process. The federal courts have not coalesced around a clear or …
The Fourth Era Of American Civil Procedure, 2014 University of Nevada Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law
The Fourth Era Of American Civil Procedure, Thomas O. Main, Stephen N. Subrin
Scholarly Works
Every contemporary American lawyer who has engaged in litigation is familiar with the now fifty-four-volume treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure. Both of that treatise’s named authors, Charles Alan Wright and Arthur Miller, have mourned the death of a Federal Rules regime that they spent much of their professional lives explaining and often celebrating. Wright shared a sense of gloom about federal procedure that he compared to the setting before World War I. Miller has also published a series of articles that chronicled his grief.
We agree that something has fundamentally changed. In fact, we believe that we are in …
The Political And Professional Context Of Rule Making, 2013 Boston College Law School
The Political And Professional Context Of Rule Making, Daniel Coquillette
Daniel R. Coquillette
No abstract provided.
Retroactivity And Prospectivity Of Judgments In American Law, 2013 Selected Works
Retroactivity And Prospectivity Of Judgments In American Law, Richard Kay
Richard Kay
In every American jurisdiction, new rules of law announced by a court are presumed to have retrospective effect—that is, they are presumed to apply to events occurring before the date of judgment. There are, however, exceptions in certain cases where a court believes that such application of the new rule will upset serious and reasonable reliance on the prior state of the law. This essay, a substantially abridged version of the United States Report on the subject, submitted at the Nineteenth International Congress of Comparative Law, summarizes these exceptional cases. It shows that the proper occasions for issuing exclusively or …
Morphing Case Boundaries In Multidistrict Litigation Settlements, 2013 Louisiana State Univiersity, Paul M. Hebert Law Center
Morphing Case Boundaries In Multidistrict Litigation Settlements, Margaret Thomas
Margaret S. Thomas
The boundaries of federal multidistrict litigation (MDL) are blurring, as district courts seek innovative ways to facilitate global settlements to resolve multijurisdictional, multidimensional, national mass torts. The techniques emerging from the district courts have mostly evaded appellate review and received little scholarly attention, but they raise important challenges to traditional understandings of the nature of MDL and complex litigation. This Article argues that factually similar cases proceeding in multiple court systems in mass tort disputes create a “federalism problem” for global settlements: global settlements typically benefit from oversight by a single judge, but often there is no single judge who …
Life After Comcast: Reasonable Interpretations Preserve The Rule And Keep Class Actions Alive, 2013 DePaul University
Life After Comcast: Reasonable Interpretations Preserve The Rule And Keep Class Actions Alive, Brittni W. King
Brittni W King
No abstract provided.
Inhibiting Patent Trolling: A New Approach For Applying Rule 11 (Working Paper), 2013 Chicago-Kent College of Law
Inhibiting Patent Trolling: A New Approach For Applying Rule 11 (Working Paper), Young Jeon, Eric J. Rogers
Youngsik Jeon
The existing Rule 11 of the FRCP can be immediately harnessed to help solve the patent troll, nuisance-lawsuit problem. Currently there is the perception that too many litigious entities, commonly referred to as “patent trolls,” are creating too much dead-weight economic waste in society. The popular view is that there has been an alarming rise in the number of patent trolls that make no products but try to monetize patents by filing dubious patent infringement lawsuits merely to extract money from commercially productive companies that actually make products and use technologies for society’s benefit. Defining “patent troll” is probably too …
The Practice And Theory Of Lawyer Disqualification, 2013 Arizona Summit Law School
The Practice And Theory Of Lawyer Disqualification, Keith Swisher
Keith Swisher
Lawyer disqualification is commonly feared — as a “strategic,” “tactical,” and “harassing” “potent weapon” depriving clients of their trusted counsel of choice. Although disqualification comes with costs, fundamental misunderstandings fuel this common fear. This Article finds that disqualification is a uniquely effective remedy for lawyer misconduct and makes the following contributions to the law and practice of lawyer disqualification: (1) an exhaustive study surveying disqualification cases and refuting the common misconception that disqualification motions are uncontrollably on the rise and uncontrollably bad; (2) an accessible analysis of lawyer disqualification doctrine that permits lawyers and judges to begin assessing common disqualification …
Administrative Arbitrary Embarrassments At Brazilian Social Security Procedures, 2013 Universidade do Oeste de Santa Catarina
Administrative Arbitrary Embarrassments At Brazilian Social Security Procedures, Carlos Luiz Strapazzon, Maria Helena Pinheiro Renck
Carlos Luiz Strapazzon
Within Brazilian constitutional system, Social Security rights are fundamental rights. However, social insurance is divided into two branches: by one side, Pensions Rights (also called Direitos Previdenciários), by the other, the Social Assistance Rights. The former exists to protect some special rights-holders from several social risks (health, death, injury, unemployment, old-age, etc.), through regular payments made by the State. It works as a public insurance system directed by the Social Insurance National Institute (INSS). This paper maintain that several administrative embarrassments disturb too much seriously a regular acess to those payments by the needy citizens (right-holders). Likewise, it maintains that …
Mapping Supreme Court Doctrine: Civil Pleading, 2013 University of Baltimore
Mapping Supreme Court Doctrine: Civil Pleading, Scott Dodson, Colin Starger
Scott Dodson
This essay, adapted from the video presentation available at http://vimeo.com/89845875, graphically depicts the genealogy and evolution of federal civil pleading standards in U.S. Supreme Court opinions over time. We show that the standard narrative—of a decline in pleading liberality from Conley to Twombly to Iqbal—is complicated by both progenitors and progeny. We therefore offer a fuller picture of the doctrine of Rule 8 pleading that ought to be of use to judges and practitioners in federal court. We also hope to introduce a new visual format for academic scholarship that capitalizes on the virtues of narration, graphics, mapping, online accessibility, …