Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang
Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Damages can add up to super-punitive amounts in unintended ways. To take a textbook example: The Defendant has caused an industrial accident or other mass tort. Plaintiff 1 sues, winning punitive damages based on the reprehensibility of that original act. Plaintiff 2 also sues – and also wins punitive damages on the same grounds. So do Plaintiff 3, Plaintiff 4, and so forth. If each of these punitive awards is directed at the same general badness of that original act, then these punishments are redundant. When such redundancy occurs, even damages that are meant to be punitive can reach surprisingly …
Conflicts Consent And Allocation After Amchem Products – Or Why Attorneys Still Need Consent To Give Away Their Clients' Money, John C. Coffee Jr.
Conflicts Consent And Allocation After Amchem Products – Or Why Attorneys Still Need Consent To Give Away Their Clients' Money, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
If it was the goal of Silver and Baker to write a provocative article, they have succeeded. They ask probing questions; they are appropriately scornful of superficial answers; and they seek to relate their view of legal ethics to what they perceive to be the prevailing standards in the legal marketplace. All this is good. They also usefully focus on an underappreciated dichotomy: the ethical rules governing aggregated settlements in consensual litigation versus the rules applicable in aggregated nonconsensual litigation (i.e., class actions). Essentially, they argue that the rules in both contexts should be the same or very similar, the …