Law Commons^™

The Rank-Order Method For Appellate Subset Selection, Michael J. Hasday

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

This Essay proceeds as follows: Part I discusses the “fatal flaws” of random assignment and direct selection: outlier panels and judicial gaming, respectively. Part II introduces the rank-order method and explains how this method is superior to either random assignment or direct selection. Part III provides detailed examples of how the rank-order method works in practice. Part IV concludes.

Aggregation As Disempowerment: Red Flags In Class Action Settlements, Howard M. Erichson

Notre Dame Law Review

Class action critics and proponents cling to the conventional wisdom that class actions empower claimants. Critics complain that class actions over-empower claimants and put defendants at a disadvantage, while proponents defend class actions as essential to consumer protection and rights enforcement. This Article explores how class action settlements sometimes do the opposite. Aggregation empowers claimants’ lawyers by consolidating power in the lawyers’ hands. Consolidation of power allows defendants to strike deals that benefit themselves and claimants’ lawyers while disadvantaging claimants. This Article considers the phenomenon of aggregation as disempowerment by looking at specific settlement features that benefit plaintiffs’ counsel and …

Compensation's Role In Deterrence, Russell M. Gold

Notre Dame Law Review

There are plenty of noneconomic reasons to care whether victims are compensated in class actions. The traditional law-and-economics view, however, is that when individual claim values are small, there is no reason to care whether victims are compensated. Rather than compensation deterring wrongdoing is tort law’s primary economic objective. And on this score, law-and-economics scholars contend that only the aggregate amount of money that a defendant expects to pay affects deterrence. They say that it does not matter for deterrence purposes how that money is split between victims, lawyers, and charities. This Article challenges that claim about achieving tort law’s …

The Coupon Quandry: Restructuring Incentives In Cafa Coupon Settlements, Michael Gallagher Ii

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note proceeds in five parts. Part I provides a background of coupon settlements with special attention paid to the incentives of class counsel. Part II outlines CAFA’s relevant statutory provisions and examines them in light of the “Purposes” section in the statute and the Senate report accompanying the legislation—the most illuminating indicia of legislative intent. Part III examines the rationale supporting both cases in the circuit split and the implications behind both interpretive regimes. Part IV argues that the Seventh Circuit has the better legal argument for two reasons: (1) its strong textual argument; and (2) its support found …

The Big Data Jury, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Notre Dame Law Review

Big data technologies now exist to create algorithmically perfect jury pools matching the demographic realities of a community. Big data technologies also exist to provide litigants a wealth of personal information about potential jurors. The question remains whether these technological innovations benefit the jury system. This Article addresses the disruptive impact of big data on jury selection and the dilemma it presents to courts, lawyers, and citizens.

The Runaway Wagon: How Past School Discrimination, Finance, And Adequacy Case Law Warrants A Political Question Approach To Education Reform Litigation, Anthony Bilan

Notre Dame Law Review

Courtroom battles surrounding school finance and adequacy claims are very much alive today, nearly forty years after their progenitor, Serrano v. Priest. In spawning a potential new chapter in this history, a trial court in California struck down its state’s battalion of teacher tenure and employment laws under a legal analysis based in the education quality that those laws provided. This “landmark” case, Vergara, is generating conversation that its results could be duplicated throughout the nation. In a format familiar to school finance litigation, the Vergara court found that the state’s tenure statutes so detrimentally affected teaching that …

Florida's Stand Your Ground Regime: Legislative Direction, Prosecutorial Discretion, Public Pressures, And The Legitimization Of The Criminal Justice System, Mary Elizabeth Castillo

Journal of Legislation

This note seeks to examine the tripartite relationship between legislative delegation, prosecutorial discretion, and public pressures in the context of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" regime. In the context of high profile criminal cases, a prosecutor faces significant public and political pressures that may influence her exercise of discretion in that case. Ultimately, Castillo argues that when a prosecutor succumbs to these pressures, it undermines her expertise, experience and exercise of discretion, and undercuts the legitimacy of the criminal justice system as a whole.

A Matter Of Trial And Error, Or Betting On Appeals, Radek Goral

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Sampling from the actual portfolio of a leading third-party litigation financier, this Essay demonstrates that making systematic bets on pending appeals is a viable business model applicable to a wide range of cases. “Appellate investments” may include both consumer and commercial cases, including also public-interest actions where prevailing plaintiffs are permitted attorney’s fees—even if they themselves do not seek monetary relief. Additionally, the analyzed sample indicates that appellate funders buy both from plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ attorneys, often in the same case.

The overview of the business strategy of appellate financing contributes to a larger theme: the role and impact of …

The Litigation Budget, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Because of fears that litigation is too costly, reduction of litigation expenses has been the touchstone of procedural reform for the past thirty years. In certain circumstances, however, the parties have incentives—both rational and irrational—to spend more on a lawsuit than the social benefits that the case provides. Present and proposed reform efforts do not adequately address these incentives, and, in some instances, exacerbate the parties’ incentives to overspend. The best way to ensure that the cost of a lawsuit does not exceed the benefits that it provides to the parties and society is to control spending directly: to require …

Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

“Trial by statistics” was a 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 …

The Future Of Human Rights Litigation After Kiobel, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

This Article begins from the premise that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) no longer serves a useful purpose in litigating human rights claims. As others have argued in this issue, that premise may not be correct. Assuming it is, however, one should anticipate that human rights lawyers will pursue alternative avenues for relief.

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 …

Is Expert Evidence Really Different?, Frederick Schauer, Barbara A. Spellman

Notre Dame Law Review

The problem with expert evidence is not the inappropriateness of the Daubert approach. The narrow focus on Daubert is misplaced. The real problem is with the more deeply entrenched view that expert evidence should be excluded under circumstances in which analogous non-expert evidence would be admitted. Daubert embodies the distinction between expert and non-expert evidence, but it is that very distinction, and not just Daubert, that is the problem. Daubert has indeed transformed modern evidence law, but perhaps it has awakened us to the need for a more profound transformation, one in which the very foundations of treating expert …

The Misbegotten Judicial Resistance To The Daubert Revolution, David E. Bernstein

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article reviews the history of the evolution of the rules for the admissibility of expert testimony since the 1980s, the revolutionary nature of what ultimately emerged, and the consistent efforts by recalcitrant judges to stop or roll back the changes, even after Rule 702 was amended to explicitly incorporate a strict interpretation of those changes.

Part I reviews the law of expert testimony through the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision. Critics had charged for decades that the adversarial system was a failure with regard to expert testimony. Parties to litigation, they argued, often presented expert testimony of dubious validity because …

Confusion Isn't Everything, William Mcgeveran, Mark P. Mckenna

Notre Dame Law Review

The typical shorthand justification for trademark rights centers on avoiding consumer confusion. But in truth, this encapsulation mistakes a method for a purpose: confusion merely serves as an indicator of the underlying problems that trademark law seeks to prevent. Other areas of law accept confusion or mistake of all kinds, intervening only when those errors lead to more serious harms. Likewise, every theory of trademark rights considers confusion troubling solely because it threatens more fundamental values such as fair competition or informative communication. In other words, when it comes to the deep purposes of trademark law, confusion isn’t everything.

Yet …

An Argument Against Open-File Discovery In Criminal Cases, Brian P. Fox

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note argues that, for the most part, open-file discovery proponents fail to recognize the added burden that defense counsel would face under a regime in which all items of the prosecution’s evidence are available for investigation by the defense. This is particularly true in the eighty to ninety percent of criminal cases where the defendant is indigent, and the court appointed defense counsel is operating under strict resource constraints.

This Note also argues that advocates of open-file discovery fail to recognize that in the majority of cases involving prosecutorial misconduct, the prosecutor’s intentional wrongdoing will be sufficient to overshadow …

Superiority As Unity, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

One of Professor Redish’s many important contributions to legal scholarship is his recent work on class actions. Grounding his argument in the theory of democratic accountability that has been at the centerpiece of all his work, Professor Redish suggests that, in nearly all instances, class actions violate the individual autonomy of litigants and should not be used by courts. This Essay, prepared for a festschrift in honor of Professor Redish, begins from the opposite premise: that class actions should be grounded in the notion of social utility rather than autonomy so that class actions should be used whenever they achieve …

Living In Cafa's World, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article, prepared for a conference on the Class Action Fairness Act, examines the effect of CAFA on our understanding about the benefits and drawbacks of class actions. The Article describes the vision of class actions that imbues CAFA, and demonstrates how many subsequent developments in the law of class actions — including the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, and Shady Grove Orthopedics v. Allstate Insurance — have advanced CAFA’s restrictive vision about the role of class actions in modern American litigation. The Article demonstrates that competing visions about the role of class actions …

Strategic Spillovers, Daniel B. Kelly

Journal Articles

The conventional problem with externalities is well known: Parties often generate harm as an unintended byproduct of using their property. This Article examines situations in which parties may generate harm purposely, in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting. Such “strategic spillovers” have received relatively little attention, but the problem is a perennial one. From the “livery stable scam” in Chicago to “pollution entrepreneurs” in China, parties may engage in externality-generating activities they otherwise would not have undertaken, or increase the level of harm given that they are engaging in such activities, to profit through bargaining or subsidies. This …

Optimal Class Size, Opt-Out Rights, And "Indivisible" Remedies, Jay Tidmarsh, David Betson

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on the ALI’s Aggregate Litigation Project, this paper examines the ALI’s proposal to permit opt-out rights when remedies and “divisible,” but not to permit them when remedies are “indivisible.” Starting from the ground up, the paper employs economic analysis to determine what the optimal size of a class action should be. We demonstrate that, in some circumstances, the optimal size of a class is a class composed of all victims, while in other cases, the optimal size is smaller. We further argue that courts should consider optimal class size in determining whether to certify a class, …

Exiting Litigation, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The American judicial system will face significant challenges in the twenty-first century. One of its immediate challenges is adapting the rules of civil procedure to the stresses under which the civil-justice system operates. Some of the most notable pressures arise from transnational litigation, mass litigation, proliferation of claims against governmental and corporate institutions, and competition from methods of alternative dispute resolution that promise to dispense cheaper, faster, and more satisfying justice.

What Is The Time Limit For Filing A Lawsuit? It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Arising Under" Is! An Analysis Of Jones V. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Jones et. al. v. R.R. Donnelly & Sons Co., 541 U.S. 369 (2004). The author predicted that the case would require the court to determine the appropriate statute of limitations to apply in a class action race-discrimination lawsuit filed under 42 U.S.C. § 1981.

Overcoming Impediments To Information Sharing, Avishalom Tor, Amitai Aviram

Journal Articles

When deciding whether to share information, firms consider their private welfare. Discrepancies between social and private welfare may lead firms excessively to share information to anti-competitive ends - in facilitating of cartels and other harmful horizontal practices - a problem both antitrust scholarship and case law have paid much attention to. On the other hand, legal scholars have paid far less attention to the opposite type of inefficiency in information sharing among competitors - namely, the problem of sub-optimal information sharing. This phenomenon can generate significant social costs and is of special importance in network industries because the maintenance of …

Solving The Nuisance-Value Settlement Problem: Manadatory Summary Judgment, David Rosenberg, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

The nuisance-value settlement problem arises whenever a litigant can profitably initiate a meritless claim or defense and offer to settle it for less than it would cost the opposing litigant to have a court dismiss the claim or defense on a standard motion for merits review like summary judgment. The opposing litigant confronted with such a nuisance-value claim or defense rationally would agree to settle for any amount up to the cost of litigating to have it dismissed. These settlement payoffs skew litigation outcomes away from socially appropriate levels, undermining the deterrence and compensation objectives of civil liability. Yet current …

Musical Courts: Plaintiff Picks A Court But Can Defendant Trump The Choice? An Analysis Of Breuer V. Jim's Concrete Of Brevard, Inc., Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Brewer v. Jim's Concrete of Brevard, 538 U.S. 691 (2003). The author expected the Court to address the issue of whether the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act providing that "an action . . . may be maintained in any federal or state court" constitutes an express provision prohibiting removal to federal court when the plaintiff has chosen to maintain its lawsuit in state court.

New Opportunities For Obtaining And Using Litigation Reserves And Disclosures, Matthew J. Barrett

Journal Articles

Following the publication of Opportunities for Obtaining and Using Litigation Reserves and Disclosures, which highlighted the helpful information about litigation reserves that a litigator can often detect or discover from an opponent's financial statements, accounting books and records, tax returns, public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), and auditor, two important regulatory developments occurred in early 2003 that create additional opportunities to obtain information about an opponent's assessments of (i) expected liability in the underlying case or (ii) obligations or settlements in similar cases. First, pursuant to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the SEC issued final regulations …

Mixed Up About Mixed Motive: What Will Trigger A "Mixed Motive" Analysis In Title Vii Cases? An Analysis Of Desert Palace, Inc. V. Costa, Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa, 539 U.S. 90, 2003. The author expected the Court to clarify and define the circumstances in which it is appropriate to use the "mixed-motive model" to prove a violation of Title VII under the disparate treatment theory.

Opportunities For Obtaining And Using Litigation Reserves And Disclosures, Matthew J. Barrett

Journal Articles

In late 1975, the accounting and legal professions reached an accord that led to three new professional standards: (1) a new financial accounting rule for contingencies, (2) an auditing standard addressing the requirement that an auditor obtain evidence about an audit client's contingent liabilities to determine whether the client has properly treated those items in its financial statements, and (3) the American Bar Association's Statement of Policy Regarding Lawyers' Responses to Auditors' Requests for Information under that auditing standard. The Commentary that accompanied the Statement of Policy explicitly stated that the organized bar's expectation that communications between lawyers and auditors …

Can Contested Disciplinary Actions Be Considered In Subsequent Termination Proceedings? An Analysis Of United States Postal Service V. Gregory, Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case U.S. Postal Service v. Gregory, 534 U.S. 1, 2001. The author expected the case to examine whether, under the Civil Service Reform Act, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) abuse its discretion when it considers prior discipline that is currently being challenged by the employee in ongoing grievance proceedings?

The Constitutional Dilemma Of Litigation Under The Independent Counsel System, William K. Kelley

Journal Articles

The independent counsel system as established by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 has put different components of the executive branch, such as the President and Department of Justice in the position of litigating against a special counsel. Litigation is not only a bad idea, it also gives rise to a serious constitutional dilemma. It either violates Article III because there is insufficient adversity to support litigation between the parties. Or it violates Article II, by preventing the President and his subordinates from controlling central functions of the executive branch, and places the independent counsel, an inferior officer, in …