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Efficiency At The Price Of Accuracy: The Case For Assigning Mdls To Multiple Districts And Circuits, Isaak Elkind
Efficiency At The Price Of Accuracy: The Case For Assigning Mdls To Multiple Districts And Circuits, Isaak Elkind
Vanderbilt Law Review
28 U.S.C. § 1407 allows for the centralization of unique cases into a single forum for pretrial purposes. The product is multidistrict litigation, known colloquially as the “MDL.” While initially conceived as a means of increasing efficiency for only particularly massive, complex litigation, MDLs have become pervasive. Today, over fifteen percent of all civil litigation—and fifty percent of all federal civil litigation—is consolidated into MDLs. Yet, MDLs are commonly overconsolidated, such that only one judge presides over hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of individual cases at a time. Fewer than three percent of such cases return to their …
Discovery Disclosure And Deterrence, Sergio J. Campos, Cheng Li
Discovery Disclosure And Deterrence, Sergio J. Campos, Cheng Li
Vanderbilt Law Review
Courts, practitioners, and scholars have recently expressed concern over the ex post costs of discovery in civil litigation. In this Article, we develop a game theoretic model of litigant behavior to study an overlooked phenomenon-the ex ante effects of discovery on a defendant's incentive to engage in unlawful conduct. We focus on motions to seal, which limit the disclosure of discovered information to the public, but permit disclosure to the court and parties. Specifically, we examine the effect different rules regarding such motions have in deterring defendants from engaging in unlawful behavior. We show that as a rule becomes more …
Evening The Odds In Civil Litigation:A Proposed Methodology For Using Adverse Inferences When Nonparty Witnesses Invoke The Fifth Amendment, Charles H. Rabon, Jr.
Evening The Odds In Civil Litigation:A Proposed Methodology For Using Adverse Inferences When Nonparty Witnesses Invoke The Fifth Amendment, Charles H. Rabon, Jr.
Vanderbilt Law Review
A nonparty witness who responds to questioning by invoking the privilege against self-incrimination seriously can impair the party against whom the response suggests an unfavorable answer. The possible injury to a party's case is greatest when the invocation occurs unexpectedly at trial, but may cause equal damage when the privilege is relied on during discovery because the deposition of an unavailable witness may be read to the jury. In the past, courts and commentators generally opposed allowing such invocations in the jury's presence based on the belief that invocations lack credible evidentiary value because witnesses can invoke validly for a …