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Full-Text Articles in Law
Limiting The Last-In-Time Rule For Judgments, Kevin M. Clermont
Limiting The Last-In-Time Rule For Judgments, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
A troublesome problem arises when there are two binding but inconsistent judgments: Say the plaintiff loses on a claim (or issue) in the defendant’s state and then, in a second action back home, wins on the same claim (or issue). American law generally holds that the later judgment is the one entitled to preclusive effects. In the leading article on the problem, then-Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested that our last-in-time rule should not apply if the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the second court’s decision against giving full faith and credit. Although that suggestion is unsound, the last-in-time rule …
Res Judicata As Requisite For Justice, Kevin M. Clermont
Res Judicata As Requisite For Justice, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
From historical, jurisprudential, and comparative perspectives, this Article tries to synthesize res judicata while integrating it with the rest of law. From near their beginnings, all systems of justice have delivered a core of res judicata comprising the substance of bar and defense preclusion. This core is universal not because it represents a universal value, but rather because it responds to a universal institutional need. Any justice system must have adjudicators; to be effective, their judgments must mean something with bindingness; and the minimal bindingness is that, except in specified circumstances, the disgruntled cannot undo a judgment in an effort …
Solving The Puzzle Of Transnational Class Actions, Kevin M. Clermont
Solving The Puzzle Of Transnational Class Actions, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
How should a U.S. class action treat proposed foreign class members in a circumstance where any resulting judgment will likely not bind those absentees abroad? The dominant approach has been an exclusionary one, dropping the absentees from the class. This essay instead recommends an inclusionary approach, so that all the foreigners would remain members of the class in transnational class actions. But the court should create a subclass in damages actions for the foreign claimants who might have an incentive to sue again; the subclass would proceed by the accepted technique of claims-made recovery, so that the subclass members could …
Annexation Of The Jury's Role In Res Judicata Disputes: The Silent Migration From Question Of Fact To Question Of Law, Steven J. Madrid
Annexation Of The Jury's Role In Res Judicata Disputes: The Silent Migration From Question Of Fact To Question Of Law, Steven J. Madrid
Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research Papers
When the application of res judicata involves factual disputes, the jury must be the judicial actor to resolve these discrepancies. The fact-law distinction, which gives questions of fact to the jury and questions of law to the judge, has guided American courts for hundreds of years. From the time of the adoption of the Seventh Amendment until the end of the nineteenth century, courts have viewed res judicata disputes as factual determinations within the province of the jury.The migration from question of fact to question of law in the twentieth century lacked any proffered legal justification, and even as the …
Class Certification’S Preclusive Effects, Kevin M. Clermont
Class Certification’S Preclusive Effects, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
In September 2010, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the controversial Baycol litigation. The central question will be whether, subsequent to a denial of class certification, preclusion can prevent an absentee from seeking to certify another class action on a similar claim. This Essay answers that question in the affirmative, while warning that the preclusion is very limited in scope. It arrives at this answer by analogizing to the more established doctrine of jurisdiction to determine no jurisdiction: if a court’s finding of no jurisdiction over the subject matter or the person can preclude, then a finding of no authority …
Common-Law Compulsory Counterclaim Rule: Creating Effective And Elegant Res Judicata Doctrine, Kevin M. Clermont
Common-Law Compulsory Counterclaim Rule: Creating Effective And Elegant Res Judicata Doctrine, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Even in the absence of an applicable statute or court rule, failure to assert an available counterclaim precludes bringing a subsequent action thereon if granting relief would nullify the judgment in the initial action. This so-called common-law compulsory counterclaim rule emerges from the intuitive principle of claim preclusion that a valid and final judgment generally precludes the defendant from later asserting mere defenses to the claim. The implicit extension of this idea is that once a plaintiff obtains a judgment, the defendant generally cannot bring a new action to undo the judgment by reopening the plaintiff’s claim and pushing those …