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Litigation

University of Georgia School of Law

Multi-district litigation

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Aggregation, Community, And The Line Between, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch May 2010

Aggregation, Community, And The Line Between, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

As class-action theorists, we sometimes focus so heavily on the class certification threshold that we neglect to reassess the line itself. The current line asks whether procedurally aggregated individuals form a sufficiently cohesive group before the decision to sue. Given this symposium’s topic - the state of aggregate litigation and the boundaries of class actions in the decade after Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp. - the time is ripe to challenge our assumptions about this line in non-class aggregation. Accordingly, this Article examines group cohesion and asks whether the current line is the only dividing …


A New Way Forward: A Response To Judge Weinstein, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch Jan 2009

A New Way Forward: A Response To Judge Weinstein, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

This short essay responds to Judge Jack Weinstein's essay, Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigations, 2009 Cardozo De Novo 1. In so doing, it also provides a condensed version of my earlier article, Litigating Groups, which analyzes group dynamics within nonclass aggregation. By drawing on the literature of moral and political philosophy as well as social psychology, I contend that, in the face of hard cases, of instability and disunity, plaintiffs who have made promises and assurances to one another can invoke social norms of promise-keeping, social agglomeration, compatibility, and the desire for means-end coherence to achieve consensus, mitigate …