Law Commons^™

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Cornell Law Review

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, like enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods LLC illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically …

A Jury Of Your [Redacted]: The Rise And Implications Of Anonymous Juries, Leonardo Mangat

Cornell Law Review

Since their relatively recent beginnings in 1977, anonymous juries have been used across a litany of cases: organized crime, terrorism, murder, sports scandals, police killings, and even political corruption. And their use is on the rise. An anonymous jury is a type of jury that a court may empanel in a criminal trial; if one is used, then information that might otherwise identify jurors is withheld from the parties, the public, or some combination thereof, for varying lengths of time.

Though not without its benefits, anonymous juries raise questions regarding a defendant’s presumption of innocence, the public’s right to an …

Semi-Confidential Settlements In Civil, Criminal, And Sexual Assault Cases, Saul Levmore, Frank Fagan

Cornell Law Review

Settlement is more likely if parties are free to set its terms, including a promise that these terms will remain secret between them. State sunshine-in-litigation laws work to defeat this incentive for confidentiality in order to protect third parties from otherwise unknown hazards. The intuition is that a wrongdoer should not be able to pay one plaintiff for silence at the expense of other victims. This Article begins by showing that the intuition is often wrong or overstated. A plaintiff who can assess a defendant’s vulnerability to future claims can extract a large enough settlement to provide substantial deterrence, and …

Stricken: The Need For Positive Statutory Law To Prevent Discriminatory Peremptory Strikes Of Disabled Jurors, Jordan Benson

Cornell Law Review

A representative jury ensures a truly impartial trial and that all groups are able to share in this valuable opportunity for civic engagement.Though the disabled constitute a minority of the population, their viewpoint is no less necessary to securing the benefits of a representative jury than that of groups already afforded protection from discriminatory strikes. As the disabled become more represented in many areas of society, their continued underrepresentation on juries will become even more difficult to justify. Discriminatory peremptory strikes are a significant, discretionary means by which the disabled can continue to be excluded from juries even when other …