Law Commons^™

Can Litigation Analytics Tell Us What Became Of The 2015 Proportionality Amendments To The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure?, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

In 2015, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure pertaining to discovery were amended for the seventh time in 40 years–part of a cyclic effort to address the so-called “cost and delay” of litigation. The centerpiece of the amendments was the reconfigured requirement that requested discovery be “proportional to the needs of the case,” in addition to being relevant and nonprivileged. The concept of “proportionality” crystallized the 2015 amendments in a single mantra. The proposed amendments inspired passionate and polarized public reactions. Plaintiffs’ attorneys opposed them as an impediment to obtaining the discovery they needed to prove their case, particularly in …

Making Sense Of Abatement As A Tort Remedy, Anthony J. Sebok

Faculty Articles

Controversy over public nuisance in recent high profile cases invites the question of whether, and to what extent, it is limited by its roots in tort law. This article, which was prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” focuses on causes of action in which the state seeks to enjoin the defendant by requiring that it abate the consequences of the invasion of a public right. In the most controversial of these public nuisance actions, such as lead paint and opioids, the wrongful conduct that is remedied by the injunctive relief has already ceased, and the state does …

Aaron Twerski: Practical Wisdom At Ground Zero, Anthony J. Sebok

Faculty Articles

This Article celebrates Professor. Aaron Twerski’s “practical wisdom” in crafting a solution (with Jim Henderson) to a problem faced by Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the so-called 9/11 First Responder cases. The problem was that Congress did not include these plaintiffs within the Victims Compensation Fund (“VCF”) despite there being every reason to suspect that the interaction of workersman’s compensation law and tort law, if left to operate on their own, would generate a politically unacceptable outcome. Despite his clear misgivings – —expressed decades earlier – —about allowing those who control the workplace to enjoy the benefits of limited liability guaranteed …

Management’S Substantive Edges, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Qualified Immunity’S Flawed Foundation, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

Qualified immunity has faced trenchant criticism for decades, but recent events have renewed focus on this powerful defense to liability for constitutional violations. This Article takes aim at the roots of the doctrine—fundamental errors that have never been excavated. First, this Article demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence is premised on a flawed application of a dubious canon of statutory construction—namely, that statutes in “derogation” of the common law should be strictly construed. Applying the Derogation Canon, the Court has held that 42 U.S.C. § 1983’s silence regarding immunity should be taken as an implicit adoption of common …

Rage Against The Machine: Who Is Responsible For Regulating Generative Artificial Intelligence In Domestic And Cross-Border Litigation?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

In 2023, ChatGPT—an early form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) capable of creating entirely new content—took the world by storm. The first shock came when ChatGPT demonstrated its ability to pass the U.S. bar exam. Soon thereafter, the world learned that ChatGPT was being used by both lawyers and judges in actual litigation.

Some within the legal community find the use of generative AI in civil and criminal litigation entirely unproblematic. Others find generative AI troubling as a matter of due process and procedural fairness due to its propensity not only to misinterpret legitimate legal authorities but to create fictitious …

Public Law Litigation And Electoral Time, Zachary D. Clopton, Katherine Shaw

Faculty Articles

Public law litigation is often politics by other means. Yet scholars and practitioners have failed to appreciate how public law litigation intersects with an important aspect of politics-electoral time. This Essay identifies three temporal dimensions of public law litigation. First, the electoral time of government litigants-measured by the fixed terms of state and federal executive officials-may affect their conduct in litigation, such as when they engage in midnight litigation in the run-up to and aftermath of their election. Second, the electoral time of state courts-measured by the fixed terms of state judges-creates openings for strategic behavior among litigants (both public …

Pandemic Rules: Covid-19 And The Prison Litigation Reform Act’S Exhaustion Requirement, Betsy Ginsberg, Margo Schlanger

Faculty Articles

For over twenty-five years, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) has undermined the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. For people behind bars and their allies, the PLRA makes civil rights cases harder to bring and harder to win—regardless of merit. We have seen the result in the wave of litigation relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning March 2020, incarcerated people facing a high risk of infection because of their incarceration, and a high risk of harm because of their medical status, began to bring lawsuits seeking changes to the policies and practices augmenting the danger to them. Time and again, …

The Mysterious Market For Post-Settlement Litigant Finance, Ronen Avraham, Lynn A. Baker, Anthony J. Sebok

Faculty Articles

Litigant finance is a growing and increasingly controversial industry in which financial firms advance a plaintiff money in exchange for ownership rights in the proceeds of the legal claim on a nonrecourse basis: A plaintiff must repay the advance only if compensation is ultimately received for the legal claim. The nonrecourse nature of this funding exempts it from most states’ consumer credit laws, enabling funders to charge higher interest and fees than would otherwise be permitted. When this funding involves ordinary consumers, critics of the industry contend that the uncapped interest rates exploit vulnerable litigants, while its defenders argue that …

Collective Wisdom: When To Impeach With An Inconsistent Statement, A. J. Bellido De Luna

Faculty Articles

The recognition of multiple goals of cross-examination is nothing new. Despite early emphasis on cross-examination as being needed to expose “mendacity,” Dean Wigmore viewed cross-examination as the essence of the trial and truth-seeking process in the United States. He viewed it as capable of serving two ends: proving untruths and completing the story by eliciting facts that “remained suppressed or undeveloped” on direct examination, including “the remaining and qualifying circumstances of the subject of testimony, as known to the witness.” Precisely because of the presence of dual objectives, timing is everything. Said differently, assume a witness has information useful to …

Aligning Incentives And Cost Allocation In Discovery, Jonathan R. Nash, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Recent proposals to revise Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 to incorporate cost allocation of discovery have sparked considerable controversy. Advocates for reform argue that replacing the long-standing “producer-pays” presumption with something more akin to a “requester-pays” rule would better align economic incentives and reduce litigants’ ability to wield discovery as an instrument to force settlement. Opponents argue that such a reform would limit access to justice by saddling requesters with an ex ante burden of funding the opposition’s discovery.

In this Article, we explain that either a rule requiring both parties to share the costs of discovery (“cost-sharing rule”) …

Defense Against The Dark Arts Of Copyright Trolling, Matthew Sag, Jake Haskell

Faculty Articles

In this Article, we offer both a legal and a pragmatic framework for defending against copyright trolls. Lawsuits alleging online copyright infringement by John Doe defendants have accounted for roughly half of all copyright cases filed in the United States over the past three years. In the typical case, the plaintiff’s claims of infringement rely on a poorly substantiated form pleading and are targeted indiscriminately at noninfringers as well as infringers. This practice is a subset of the broader problem of opportunistic litigation, but it persists due to certain unique features of copyright law and the technical complexity of Internet …

Solitary Troubles, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

Solitary confinement is one of the most severe forms of punishment that can be inflicted on human beings. In recent years, the use of extreme isolation in our prisons and jails has been questioned by correctional officials, medical experts, and reform advocates alike. Yet for nearly the entirety of American history, judicial regulation of the practice has been extremely limited. This Article explains why judges hesitate to question the use of solitary confinement, while also providing a path forward for greater scrutiny of the practice.

The Narrative Of Costs, The Cost Of Narrative, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

In Judge Victor Marrero’s Article “The Cost of Rules, the Rule of Costs,” he argues that too many lawyers use too many procedural devices to cause too much inefficiency within our civil justice system. His Article helpfully asks us to focus on the role of the lawyer and law firm economics in assessing how to solve waste and abuse in civil litigation. He proposes an array of procedural changes to address these perceived problems. In this response, I argue that Judge Marrero’s assertions about costs are questionable, given relevant empirical evidence. Moreover, although I am confident that there are instances …

Spokeo, Inc. V. Robins: The Illusory “No-Injury Class” Reaches The Supreme Court, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins and three other cases involving class actions in the October 2015 term could be a bad sign for those who think the class action should remain a viable species of private regulation. The grant of certiorari in Spokeo is also a bad sign for those who think Congress should be able to enact statutes regulating businesses’ behavior for the public good—the petitioner, Spokeo, and its army of business amici are urging the Court to cut the legs out from under many such statutes.

Corporate litigation activists such as the …

Uncovering The Silent Victims Of The American Medical Liability System, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

A frequently overlooked problem with the current medical liability system is the vast number of medical errors that go uncompensated. Although studies indicate that 1% of hospital patients are victims of medical negligence, fewer than 2% of these injured patients file claims. In this Article, I explain that many victims of medical malpractice do not file claims because they are unable to find attorneys willing to take their cases.

I conducted the first national survey of attorneys to explore medical malpractice victims' access to the civil justice system. The results from the survey indicate that the economic reality of litigation …

Union Made: Labor’S Litigation For Social Change, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

Unions are key repeat players before the Supreme Court. Their involvement extends beyond what one might expect (labor) and extends to key cases involving federalism, discrimination, affirmative action, the First Amendment, and workplace health and safety, among others. Though scholars have written about how other union activity, like collective bargaining, impacts non-union workers, the role and impact of union participation in non-labor litigation has largely been ignored in the public debate over unions in America and in the academic literature about what unions do. This article focuses on unions’ Supreme Court litigation that arises outside of the context of traditional …

Jewish Law Courts In America: Lessons Offered To Sharia Courts By The Beth Din Of America Precedent, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

Although the BDA is now a fifty-year-old organization, its true metamorphosis as an arbitration panel began only in 1996 when it gained autonomy from the Rabbinical Council of America. In the fifteen years since, an independent board of directors has worked with the BDA’s rabbinic leaders to craft an arbitration process that secular courts would feel comfortable upholding. While the BDA’s transformation required some level of compromise within Jewish law itself, the adaptations necessary for judicial acceptance proved to be procedural. Broadly, this meant conforming to the tenets of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). More specifically, the BDA’s viability came …

Regulatory Litigation In The European Union: Does The U.S. Class Action Have A New Analogue?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

The United States has long embraced the concept of regulatory litigation, whereby individual litigants, often termed “private attorneys general,” are allowed to enforce certain public laws as a matter of institutional design. Although several types of regulatory litigation exist, the U.S. class action is often considered the paradigmatic model for this type of private regulation.

For years, the United States appeared to be the sole proponent of both regulatory litigation and large-scale litigation. However, in February 2012, the European Union dramatically reversed its existing policies toward mass claims resolution when the European Parliament adopted a resolution proposing to create a …

The Court Against The Courts: Hostility To Litigation As An Organizing Theme In The Rehnquist Court’S Jurisprudence, Andrew Siegel

Faculty Articles

Previous commentators on the Rehnquist Court's history, seeking an overarching explanation for the Court's cases, have focused their attention primarily on a revitalized "federalism," an agenda-driven "conservatism," and a constitutionally fixated "judicial supremacy." While each of these themes is undoubtedly present in the Court's later jurisprudence, this article argues that one cannot understand the Rehnquist Court's complicated intellectual matrix without taking account of its profound hostility towards the institution of litigation and its concomitant skepticism as to ability of litigation to function as a mechanism for organizing social relations and collectively administering justice. The article takes a pointillist approach, commenting …

The Court Against The Courts: Hostility To Litigation As An Organizing Theme In The Rehnquist Court’S Jurisprudence, Andrew Siegel

Faculty Articles

Previous commentators on the Rehnquist Court's history, seeking an overarching explanation for the Court's cases, have focused their attention primarily on a revitalized 'federalism, " an agenda-driven "conservatism," and a constitutionally fixated 'Judicial supremacy." While each of these themes is undoubtedly present in the Court's later jurisprudence, this Article argues that one cannot understand the Rehnquist Court's complicated intellectual matrix without taking account of its profound hostility toward the institution of litigation and its concomitant skepticism as to the ability of litigation to function as a mechanism for organizing social relations and collectively administering justice. The article takes a pointillist …

Litigating Global Warming: Substantive Law In Search Of A Forum, Henry Mcgee

Faculty Articles

In response to the obstruction by the United States of the Kyoto protocols and its subsequent agreements, American environmental NGOs and state governments have filed a range of lawsuits to force the current U.S. administration, automobile manufacturers, and regulatory actors to combat global warming. This essay first very briefly sketches some of the strategies by litigants to force compliance with Kyoto, an agreement which reflects nearly all of the international community's desire to schedule reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The essay then describes a strategy that perhaps is the most conventional in terms of international law, but requires a nation …

A Selective Bibliography On The Endangered Species Act, Kristin Cheney

Faculty Articles

Since its passage in 1973, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been the subject of much discussion and numerous publications. This bibliography is not an exhaustive treatment of the topic, but rather concentrates on monographs published from 1980 forward and includes only post-1988 journal articles. To aid the reader in locating relevant references, the journal articles are organized into the subcategories of (1) law and regulations, (2) litigation, and (3) international and extraterritorial.

Rethinking Advocacy Training, Marilyn Berger, John Mitchell

Faculty Articles

This article examines advocacy teaching methodology and how to impart to students and beginning attorneys the methods and approaches that experienced trial lawyers use.

Community Institution Building: A Response To The Limits Of Litigation In Addressing The Problem Of Homelessness, Ronald Slye

Faculty Articles

This article draws upon the experiences of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School to argue that, while litigation has a place in addressing both the problem of homelessness and the problems of the homeless, it must be placed within a broader context and supplemented by other, non-litigious, legal activity. Using as an example a lawsuit brought on behalf of homeless families in Connecticut, this article makes four observations which support the conclusion that litigation, used alone, is an ineffective means of addressing the problem of homelessness.