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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Litigation Budget, Jay Tidmarsh
The Litigation Budget, Jay Tidmarsh
Journal Articles
Because of fears that litigation is too costly, reduction of litigation expenses has been the touchstone of procedural reform for the past thirty years. In certain circumstances, however, the parties have incentives—both rational and irrational—to spend more on a lawsuit than the social benefits that the case provides. Present and proposed reform efforts do not adequately address these incentives, and, in some instances, exacerbate the parties’ incentives to overspend. The best way to ensure that the cost of a lawsuit does not exceed the benefits that it provides to the parties and society is to control spending directly: to require …
Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh
Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh
Journal Articles
“Trial by statistics” was a means by which a court could resolve a large number of aggregated claims: a court could try a random sample of claim, and extrapolate the average result to the remainder. In Wal-Mart, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court seemingly ended the practice at the federal level, thus removing from judges a tool that made mass aggregation more feasible. After examining the benefits and drawbacks of trial by statistics, this Article suggests an alternative that harnesses many of the positive features of the technique while avoiding its major difficulties. The technique is the “presumptive judgment”: a …
The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French
The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French
Journal Articles
Risks in the world abound. Every day there is a chance that each of us could be in a car accident. Or, one of us could be the victim of a tornado, flood or earthquake. Every day someone becomes deathly ill from an insidious disease. Our properties are in constant peril—one’s house could catch fire at any time or a tree could fall on it during a storm. Any one of these events could have devastating financial consequences, and they are just a few of the many risks that impact our daily lives. One of the principal ways we manage …