Litigation Commons^™

Amicus Briefs: Friends Of Lawyering Skills Pedagogy, Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing - What's Next? Real-World, Persuasion Pedagogy From Day One, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

Law schools have an ethical duty to train effective legal writers who understand that the skills acquired in law school are intended to serve something greater than themselves — the bench, bar, and broader community. Training good writers — and good people — can happen by creating a writing curriculum that focuses on persuasive advocacy, public service, and honest legal representation from the first semester to the last. This change will be a challenge to legal writing professors everywhere, but with proper institutional support and collaboration, law schools can prepare their students for a profession “that depends on flawless writing, logical reasoning, and ...

Options And Rights In Real Property…. Oh My!! The Scary Truth About Future Interests, Alisa M. Levin

Alisa M Levin

The law is a many splendored thing, but one thing is clear, that certain kinds of contracts and rights embodied within contracts can be confusing, especially for attorneys. True to form then, where even lawyers practicing in a particular area of law find something difficult to deal with, or they find that the law itself is unclear or that it has many ways to say the same thing, clarity is a welcome thing. In relation to real estate law in particular and specifically about the law of options and rights embodied within real estate contracts (whether purchase/sale documents or ...

Beyond The Verdict: Why The Courts Must Protect Jurors From The Public Before, During, And After High-Profile Cases, Scott Ritter

Indiana Law Journal

In a time when more and more criminal trials are saturated in news coverage, media outlets race to get as much information as possible to the public. That access to the criminal justice system is a right protected by the First Amendment. But where does the access stop? This Note explores those limits, and the intersection between the First and Fourth Amendments.

You Booze, You Bruise, You Lose: Analyzing The Constitutionality Of Florida’S Involuntary Blood Draw Statute In The Wake Of Missouri V. Mcneely, Francisco D. Zornosa

Francisco D Zornosa

No abstract provided.

The Poker-Litigation Game, F.E. Guerra-Pujol

F.E. Guerra-Pujol

Is civil and criminal litigation a search for truth, like science or philosophy, or a game of skill and luck, like the game of poker? Although the process of litigation has been modeled as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, as a War of Attrition, as a Game of Chicken, and even as a simple coin toss, no one has formally modeled litigation as a game of poker. This paper is the first to do so. Specifically, we present a simple “poker-litigation game” and find the optimal strategy for playing this game.

Why Don't Juries Try Range Voting?, F.E. Guerra-Pujol

F.E. Guerra-Pujol

In this paper, the author proposes the use of a simple “range voting” method by juries in which jurors would rate or score on a scale of zero to ten (or some other specified scale) the evidence presented by the parties at trial. The jury’s verdict would thus consist of a numerical value, either the average or the sum total of all the individual scores, which the author refers to as a “range verdict.” Range voting by juries thus produces a numerical verdict, a range verdict, consisting of an average value or total sum, and a plaintiff or other ...

The False Claims Act Creates A 'Zone Of Protection' That Bars Suits Against Employees Who Report Fraud Against The Government, Joel D. Hesch

Joel D. Hesch

May employees copy internal company documents and turn them over to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of applying for a whistleblower reward for reporting fraud against the Government? This is one of the most hotly contested issues facing whistleblowers and employers, and the answer will affect the future of the Government’s primary whistleblower reward program.

Each year, companies are cheating the military and Medicare by billions of dollars. To combat fraud, Congress enacted the federal False Claims Act (FCA), which is the primary anti-fraud tool used by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the fastest growing ...

An Empirical Analysis Of The Infield Fly Rule, Howard M. Wasserman

Howard M Wasserman

Legal scholars have written extensively about baseball’s Infield Fly Rule--its history and logic, its use as legal metaphor, and its cost-benefit policy rationales. This paper now conducts the first empirical analysis of the rule, exploring whether the rule’s legal and policy justifications are statistically supported. Based on a review of every fly ball caught by an infielder in the relevant game situation in Major League Baseball from 2010-2013, this paper measures the frequency and location of Infield Fly calls and the effect the rule has on individual games, all to determine whether the feared cost-benefit disparities that motivate ...

Values V. Reason: What We Can Learn From Our Colleagues “Across The Pond”: A Comparison Of The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct And The Solicitors Regulation Authority Code Of Conduct, Victoria Vuletich Ms.

Victoria Vuletich Ms.

Although there are some moderate structural and procedural differences between the British and American legal systems, we share many core ethical principles. And though the ethical principles in these two systems are highly similar, the expression of those principles, and the goals they are designed to achieve, differ significantly. This article posits that the U.K. Solicitors Regulation Authority Code of Conduct, in general, better states the legal profession’s core ethical principles and is better designed to ensure the stated ethical outcomes of both systems.

The question of whether alternative business structures, as recently adopted in the U.K ...

Dissymmetry Of Intervening Rights In The Aia And Marine Polymer, Juan Villar

Juan Villar

No abstract provided.

Do Not Screw This Up (Why You're Likely Committing Malpractice Already), Juan Villar

Juan Villar

If you've been filing patent applications on or after March 16, 2013 (the date AIA "first-to-invent" went into effect) that claim priority of an application filed BEFORE that date, there is a better than even chance you need to double check and ensure your malpractice coverage is in force.

Tell Us A Story, But Don't Make It A Good One: Resolving The Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories And Federal Rule Of Evidence 403, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Abstract: Tell Us a Story, But Don’t Make It A Good One: Resolving the Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories and Federal Rule of Evidence 403

by Cathren Koehlert-Page

Courts need to reword their opinions regarding Rule 403 to address the tension between the advice to tell an emotionally evocative story at trial and the notion that evidence can be excluded if it is too emotional.

In the murder mystery Mystic River, Dave Boyle is kidnapped in the beginning. The audience feels empathy for Dave who as an adult becomes one of the main suspects in the murder of his friend ...

How To Avoid The Death Of Your Case By Two Billion Paper Cuts: Encouraging Arbitration As An Alternative Way To Resolve Costly Discovery Disputes, Tzipora Goodfriend-Gelernter

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

This article analyzes the costly effect of electronic information on discovery practice and advocates for the arbitration of discovery disputes. Part II discusses the background of electronic discovery, the evolution of our reliance on ESI (electronically stored information) as part of our modern day discovery practice, and the benefits and detriments of electronic discovery. Part III discusses the effects of our reliance on electronic discovery and the implications of those effects on litigating parties. It examines how the increasingly computer-based world of discovery has increased the cost of litigation disputes significantly and proposes using the patent arbitration model as a ...

Caudle V. District Of Columbia: The Golden Rule Has No Place In A Courtroom, Craig Randall

Boston College Law Review

On February 15, 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Caudle v. District of Columbia held that golden rule arguments made in the context of liability are prejudicial and can warrant the granting of a new trial. This Comment argues that the damages-liability distinction for golden rule arguments as applied by the Second, Fifth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits is the appropriate approach, and that there should not be a per se exclusion of golden rule arguments on the issue of liability.

Kaleidoscopic Chaos: Understanding The Circuit Courts’ Various Interpretations Of § 2255’S Savings Clause, Jennifer L. Case

Jennifer L. Case

More than 65 years ago, Congress enacted a short statute (codified at 28 U.S.C. § 2255) to even the habeas corpus workload among the federal courts. That statute included a “Savings Clause,” which allows prisoners to challenge their convictions and sentences in a federal habeas petition when § 2255 is “inadequate or ineffective” for the task. Since that time—and with increasing frequency—the U.S. Courts of Appeals have developed wildly varying tests to determine when and how § 2255’s Savings Clause applies to prisoners’ attempts to bring federal habeas petitions under 28 U.S.C. § 2241.

In their ...

Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh

Jay Tidmarsh

“Trial by statistics” was one means by which a court could resolve a large number of aggregated claims: a court could try a random sample of claim, and extrapolate the average result to the remainder. In Wal-Mart, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court seemingly ended the practice at the federal level, thus removing from judges a tool that made mass aggregation more feasible.

After examining the benefits and drawbacks of trial by statistics, this Article suggests an alternative that harnesses many of the positive features of the technique while avoiding its major difficulties. The technique is the “presumptive judgment”: a ...

Auctioning Class Settlements, Jay Tidmarsh

Jay Tidmarsh

Although they promise better deterrence at a lower cost, class actions are infected with problems that can keep them from delivering on this promise. One of these problems is the issue of agency cost, in which the agents of the class (the class representative and class counsel) advance their own interests at the expense of the class. Controlling agency cost, which often manifests itself at the time of settlement, has been the impetus behind a number of class-action reform proposals.

This Essay develops an idea that, in conjunction with reforms in fee structure and opt-out rights, controls agency costs at ...

The Perverse Effects Of Efficiency In Criminal Process, Darryl K. Brown

Darryl K. Brown

The need for greater efficiency in legal process is an undisputed premise of modern policy, and efficiency’s virtues hardly merit debate, notably by the U.S. Supreme Court. A central part of the story of modern adjudication is the steady gains in case processing efficiency. This, above all else, explains the “vanishing trial” and its replacement by civil settlement and, in criminal courts, by plea bar-gaining.

Defining efficiency in any context, however, is a more complicated endeavor than courts, policymakers, and many commentators commonly acknowledge. It requires first defining ends and means, and even whether a given practice is ...

Drafting New York Civil-Litigation Documents: Part Xxx—Subpoenas, Gerald Lebovits

Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.