Law Commons^™

Some Important Causes For Settlement In American Civil Litigation, Felipe Forte Cobo

LLM Theses and Essays

This paper focuses on pure economic disputes such as contract, real property and tort conflicts, in which the economic efficiency model is very accepted. In this limited scenario, the consensual resolution of disputes is always more efficient than decisions made by a third-party decision-maker, whether from a post-trial or pre-trial perspective.

Considering that lower transaction costs drive parties towards settlement, part II of this essay provides an overview of the American costs of legal disputes, framing several issues that might be determinative to settlements. Part III explores how two specific American procedural institutes – discovery and civil jury trial – …

Litigating Toward Settlement, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

Civil litigation typically ends when the parties compromise. While existing theories of settlement primarily focus on information exchange, we instead examine how motion practice, especially non-discovery motions, can substantially shape parties’ knowledge about their cases and thereby influence the timing of settlement. Using docket-level federal district court data, we find a number of strong effects regarding how motions can influence this process, including that the filing of a motion significantly speeds case settlement, that granted motions are more immediately critical to settlement timing than motions denied, and that plaintiff victories have a stronger effect than defendant victories. These results provide …

Trial By Preview, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

It has been an obsession of modern civil procedure to design ways to reveal more before trial about what will happen during trial. Litigants today, as a matter of course, are made to preview the evidence they will use. This practice is celebrated because standard theory says it should induce the parties to settle; why incur the expenses of trial, if everyone knows what will happen? Rarely noted, however, is one complication: The impact of previewing the evidence is intertwined with how well the parties know their future audience-that is, the judge or the jury who will be the finder …