Litigation Commons^™

Work Made For Hire – Analyzing The Multifactor Balancing Test, Ryan G. Vacca

Ryan G. Vacca

Authorship, and hence, initial ownership of copyrighted works is oftentimes controlled by the 1976 Copyright Act’s work made for hire doctrine. This doctrine states that works created by employees within the scope of their employment result in the employer owning the copyright. One key determination in this analysis is whether the hired party is an employee or independent contractor. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court, in CCNV v. Reid, answered the question of how employees are distinguished from independent contractors by setting forth a list of factors courts should consider. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not give further ...

Screening Out Innovation: The Merits Of Meritless Litigation, Alexander A. Reinert

Indiana Law Journal

Courts and legislatures often conflate meritless and frivolous cases when balancing the desire to keep courthouse doors open to novel or unlikely claims against the concern that entertaining ultimately unsuccessful litigation will prove too costly for courts and defendants. Recently, significant procedural and substantive barriers to civil litigation have been informed by judicial and legislative assumptions about the costs of entertaining meritless and frivolous litigation. The prevailing wisdom is that eliminating meritless and frivolous claims as early in a case’s trajectory as possible will focus scarce resources on the truly meritorious cases, thereby ensuring that available remedies are properly ...

A Mother Goose Guide To Legal Writing, Jessica Ronay

Jessica Ronay

An original substantive poem with footnotes and explanatory paragraphs that provides examples and explanations of legal writing rules, illustrates the nuances of legal writing, and untangles the challenging legal writing concepts for students, professors, scholars, and practitioners.

Jurisdiction, Choice Of Law And Property, Daniel M. Klerman

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Jurisdiction and choice of law in property disputes has been remarkably stable. The situs rule, which requires adjudication where the property is located and application of that state’s law, remains the norm in most of the world. This article is the first to apply modern economic analysis to choice of law and jurisdiction in property disputes. It largely confirms the wisdom of the situs rule, but suggests some situations where other rules may be superior. For example, in disputes about stolen art, the state where the work was last undisputedly owned may be both the most efficient forum and ...

The Misapplication Of The Illinois Tort Immunity Act To The Intentional Torts Of Police Officers, William J. Campbell-Bezat

William J Campbell-Bezat

According to prevailing State and Federal case law, the Illinois Tort Immunity Act immunizes police officers against liability for a variety of tort offenses. Upper level courts have painted with too broad a brush in construing the Act, allowing defendant-officers to assert immunity as an affirmative defense to intentional torts. In practice the effect is both confusing and burdensome to plaintiffs and juries. In many intentional tort cases the misconstruction requires the unauthorized revision of jury instructions and an unjustified heightening of the mental state to be proved by plaintiffs.

While there are many variations, the prevailing approach of upper-level ...

The Practical Challenges Of Litigating And Trying A Claim For Attorney Fees To A Jury In Minnesota: Providing Minnesota’S District Court Judges, Lawyers, And Litigants The Guidance And Predictability They Need, S. Jamal Faleel

Hamline Law Review

abstract

Rethinking Personal Jurisdiction, Daniel M. Klerman

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

This article sets out a pragmatic justification for the main features of current personal jurisdiction doctrine. According to that justification, personal jurisdiction rules minimize litigation costs and bias. This approach to personal jurisdiction helps resolve difficult and open jurisdictional issues, such as the scope of general jurisdiction and the validity of jurisdiction based on the stream-of-commerce theory. This article then explores the empirical assumptions underlying this pragmatic explanation for current doctrine and shows how doctrine should change if those empirical assumptions were incorrect. For example, the Supreme Court’s “purposeful availment” requirement is justified only if the danger of bias ...

Inferences From Litigated Cases, Daniel M. Klerman, Yoon-Ho Alex Lee

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Priest and Klein (1984) argued that, because of selection effects, the percentage of litigated cases won by plaintiffs will not vary with the legal standard. Many researchers thereafter concluded that one could not make valid inferences about the character of the law from the percentage of cases plaintiffs won, nor could one measure legal change by observing changes in that percentage. This article argues that, even taking selection effects into account, one may be able to make valid inferences from the percentage of plaintiff trial victories. First, it analyzes selection effects under asymmetric information models. It shows that, under a ...

Proactive Gatekeepers: The Jurisprudence Of The Icc’S Pre-Trial Chambers, Christodoulos Kaoutzanis, Jocelyn Joan Courtney

Christodoulos Kaoutzanis

Due to the fairly recent inception of the International Criminal Court (“ICC), its

Pre-Trial Chambers has been the only judicial body at the ICC thus far to be exposed to

a wide variety of cases. In the seven years since Pre-Trial Chamber I held the

proceedings against the confirmation of charges against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the

ICC’s two Pre-Trial Chambers have conducted hearings and determined the charges

against 14 individuals for crimes allegedly committed in four Situations. This article

systematically classifies the jurisprudence of the Pre-Trial Chambers in an attempt to

identify the trends that cut across the Pre-Trial ...

Preventative Legislation Ensures Intended Parents Of Gestational Surrogacy Benefits Under The California Family Rights Act, Jennifer Jackson

Jennifer Jackson

We live in a rapidly evolving technological age, which now allows parents to enter surrogacy contracts. In such a world, the law often lags in catching up to technology and the ramifications that may ensue. This paper focuses on the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) and the consequences it has on surrogacy agreements and the rights intended parents. While the CFRA includes broad language as to the definition of a “child,” case law shows that surrogate born children may be unintentionally excluded. As a result, this paper analyzes the arguments both for and against revision to the CFRA and concludes ...

The Supreme Court’S New Approach To Personal Jurisdiction, Bernadette Bollas Genetin

Bernadette Bollas Genetin

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the two personal jurisdiction opinions the United States Supreme Court issued in 2014. The article concludes that, these cases, Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), and Walden v. Fiore, 134 S. Ct. 1115 (2014), usher in a new doctrinal approach to personal jurisdiction.

In Daimler AG v. Bauman, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of general jurisdiction, making it available primarily in a corporation’s states of incorporation and principal place of business and rejecting the prior approach of permitting general jurisdiction based on a defendant’s “continuous and systematic ...

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.

The Two Faces Of Janus: The Jurisprudential Past And New Beginning Of Rule 10b-5, John Patrick Clayton

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and its implementing Rule 10b-5 are the primary antifraud provisions for both private and public enforcement of the federal securities laws. Neither the statute nor the rule expressly provides for a private right of action, but federal courts have long recognized such an implied right, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has supported the implied private right of action as a “necessary supplement” to its own efforts. However, after a decade of applying an expansive interpretation to Section 10(b), in the early 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrowly ...

N.I.G.G.A., Slumdog, Dyke, Jap, And Heeb: Reconsidering Disparaging Trademarks In A Post-Racial Era, Amanda E. Compton

Amanda E. Compton

Currently registration of disparaging trademarks is prohibited under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act. Recent events, however, should reinvigorate the debate about the protection and registration of disparaging marks: (1) recent decisions published by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) that continue to address and highlight the issues surrounding the registration of disparaging marks; (2) a proposed federal act that would not only specifically bar the registration of any trademark that includes the word “redskins,” but would also retroactively cancel any existing registration that consist of or includes that term; and (3) an amendment to a state act ...

Can The Dark Arts Of The Dismal Science Shed Light On The Empirical Reality Of Civil Procedure?, Jonah B. Gelbach

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical questions in civil procedure are too important to be answered as if motivated people weren’t involved in the legal system. Parties don’t conduct their primary behavior that way, lawyers don’t plead or brief that way, and judges don’t decide cases that way. We ought not to study litigation that way, either. This paper is a step toward a better alternative.

Empirical researchers must take seriously the fact that litigation involves human beings, who are motivated and have agency. To make this point concrete, I first step outside the realm of civil procedure and illustrate the ...

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.