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Full-Text Articles in Law
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
Empowering Individual Plaintiffs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
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The individual plaintiff plays a critical—yet, underappreciated—role in our legal system. Only lawsuits that are brought by individual plaintiffs allow the law to achieve the twin goals of efficiency and fairness. The ability of individual plaintiffs to seek justice against those who wronged them deters wrongdoing, ex ante, and in those cases in which a wrong has been committed nevertheless, it guarantees the payment of compensation, ex post. No other form of litigation, including class actions and criminal prosecutions, or even compensation funds, can accomplish the same result. Yet, as we show in this Essay, in many key sectors of …
Occam's Phaser: Making Proportional Discovery (Finally) Work In Litigation By Requiring Phased Discovery, Michael Thomas Murphy
Occam's Phaser: Making Proportional Discovery (Finally) Work In Litigation By Requiring Phased Discovery, Michael Thomas Murphy
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This is an article about solving the problem of expensive electronic discovery in litigation by simply learning the most important facts first. Judges and parties often complain that the scope of information included in fact discovery in civil litigation is overinclusive and disproportionate to size of the dispute, resulting in overly expensive costs. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure recently changed again to further emphasize the use of “proportional” limits in discovery, but provide little practical mechanism for parties, lawyers, and judges to make discovery “right-sized.” This Article proposes that parties should be required to “phase” discovery by first setting …
Shleifer's Failure, Jonathan Klick
The Effect Of Judicial Expedience On Attorney Fees In Class Actions, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
The Effect Of Judicial Expedience On Attorney Fees In Class Actions, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick
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Judges facing exogenous constraints on their pecuniary income have an incentive to reduce their workload to increase their private welfare. In the face of an increase in caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases more rapidly. In class action cases, failing to grant an attorney fee request will delay termination. This conflict is likely to lead judges to authorize higher fees as court congestion increases. Using two data sets of class action settlements, we show that attorney fees are significantly and positively related to the congestion level of the court hearing the case.
Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.
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No abstract provided.
The Tuna Court: Law And Norms In The World's Premier Fish Market, Eric Feldman
The Tuna Court: Law And Norms In The World's Premier Fish Market, Eric Feldman
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Legal scholars have long emphasized the corrosive impact of conflict on long-term commercial and interpersonal relationships. To minimize the negative consequences of such conflict, members of close-knit groups who anticipate future interactions create ways of resolving their disputes with reference to internal group norms rather than relying on state-mandated legal rules. From farmers in California’s Shasta County to jewelers in midtown Manhattan and neighbors in Sanders County, the literature describes people who create norms of conflict management that are faster and less expensive than relying on formal law, and lessen the harm that conflict causes to their relationships. This article …