Law Commons^™

The Jury's Response To Business And Corporate Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Some of the most vociferous criticisms of the jury relate to its performance in cases involving business and corporate wrongdoing. The jury's competence in such cases is assaulted on a variety of fronts. Critics question the jury's factfinding ability in cases with business and corporate parties, and doubt whether lay jurors can understand the often complex and esoteric evidence of business wrongdoing. Others claim that bias and prejudice, rather than evidence, determine jury decisions about businesses and corporations. The presumed biases cut both ways. The generally positive regard in which the public holds business is credited with creating leniency toward …

Responses To Corporate Versus Individual Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans, M. David Ermann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

For many years, researchers assumed that the public was indifferent to corporate wrongdoing, but recent surveys have discovered evidence to the contrary. Taking insights from these data a step further, this study employed an experimental design to examine whether people responded differently to corporate versus individual wrongdoers. We varied the identity of the central actor in a scenario involving harm to workers. Half the respondents were informed that a corporation caused the harm; the remainder were told that an individual did so. Respondents applied a higher standard of responsibility to the corporate actor. For identical actions, the corporation was judged …

What Shapes Perceptions Of The Federal Court System?, Theodore Eisenberg, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Two hundred years is a long time. It is too long after formation of a court system to ask such basic questions as (1) what cases occupy the system, and (2) whether even informed professionals have a reasonable picture of what goes on within the system. Nonetheless, continuing debate about the volume and makeup of litigation in general and of federal court litigation in particular requires legal scholars to address these questions. Professor Marc Galanter's work on the litigation explosion questions central assumptions about the nature and growth of the federal docket. Our prior work undermines widely held views about …

Litigation Models And Trial Outcomes In Civil Rights And Prisoner Cases, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In ideal circumstances, court cases are won or lost on their merits. But litigation does not proceed free from external social factors or from the characteristics of the participants. Factors other than the merits of cases, therefore, may help explain litigation outcomes and selection of disputes for trial. Possible factors include judge or jury bias, regional influence, the type of case, the quality of counsel, and the nature and resources of plaintiffs and defendants.

This Article uses both impressionistic conjecture about litigation and formal litigation theory to develop and test hypotheses about factors affecting outcomes in civil rights and prisoner …

Bowen V. Massachusetts: The "Money Damages Exception" To The Administrative Procedure Act And Grant-In-Aid Litigation, Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.