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Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams
Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams
Scholarly Works
With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup.
Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure …
Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Scholarly Works
This Article identifies a market-based solution for monitoring large-scale litigation proceeding outside of Rule 23’s safeguards. Although class actions dominate the scholarly discussion of mass litigation, the ever increasing restrictions on certifying a class mean that plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely rely on aggregate, multidistrict litigation to seek redress for group-wide harms. Despite sharing key features with its class action counterpart—such as attenuated attorney-client relationships, attorneyclient conflicts of interest, and high agency costs—no monitor exists in aggregate litigation. Informal group litigation not only lacks Rule 23’s judicial protections against attorney overreaching and self-dealing, but plaintiff’s themselves cannot adequately supervise their attorneys’ behavior. …