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Full-Text Articles in Law
Forum Non Conveniens And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments, Christopher A. Whytock, Cassandra Burke Robertson
Forum Non Conveniens And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments, Christopher A. Whytock, Cassandra Burke Robertson
Faculty Publications
When citizens of Ecuador sued Texaco, Inc. in a U.S. court seeking damages for oil contamination in the Amazon, Texaco successfully moved to dismiss the suit in favor of Ecuador based on the forum non conveniens doctrine, arguing – as that doctrine requires – that Ecuador was an adequate alternative forum and more appropriate than the United States for hearing the suit. The plaintiffs then refiled the suit in Ecuador, and a court there entered a multi-billion dollar judgment against Chevron Corporation, which had merged with Texaco. Chevron now argues that the Ecuadorian legal system suffers from deficiencies that should …
The Unseen Track Of Erie Railroad: Why History And Jurisprudence Suggest A More Straightforward Form Of Erie Analysis, Donald L. Doernberg
The Unseen Track Of Erie Railroad: Why History And Jurisprudence Suggest A More Straightforward Form Of Erie Analysis, Donald L. Doernberg
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I discusses federal law as a new category of law after ratification of the Constitution and what that connotes for the time before federal law existed. Part II examines the shift from the natural law perspective, which had dominated jurisprudence into the late nineteenth century, to legal positivism. It was that change more than anything else that doomed the doctrine of Swift v. Tyson, which controlled vertical choice-of-law questions in the federal courts for ninety-six years until the Erie Court declared it unconstitutional. Part III canvasses the development of the Erie doctrine in …
Preclusion In Class Action Litigation, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Preclusion In Class Action Litigation, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
"Despite the intense focus that courts and commentators have trained upon class litigation for the last twenty-five years, a central feature of the class-action lawsuit has received no sustained attention: the preclusive effect that a judgment in a class action should have upon the other, non-class claims of absentees. The omission is a serious one. If claim and issue preclusion were to operate in their normal mode when a claim is certified for class treatment, absentees would sometimes face a serious threat of having their high-value individual claims compromised. Such a threat, in turn, can create ex ante conflicts of …