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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Settlement Trap, Lindsey Simon
The Settlement Trap, Lindsey Simon
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Mass tort victims often wait years for resolution of their personal injury claims, but many who successfully navigate this arduous process will not receive a single dollar of their settlement award. According to applicable bankruptcy and state law, settlement payments may be an asset of the estate that the trustee, exercising its significant authority, administers and distributes to creditors instead of a claimant who had filed for bankruptcy. This distribution power maximizes repayment, a critical counterbalance to the robust protections and benefits that debtors receive in bankruptcy.
Setting aside the perceived unfairness of taking desperately needed money from tort victims, …
Mdl Revolution, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Abbe Gluck
Mdl Revolution, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Abbe Gluck
Scholarly Works
Over the past 50 years, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly revolutionized civil procedure. MDLs include the largest tort cases in U.S. history, but without the authority of the class-action rule, MDL judges—who formally have only pretrial jurisdiction over individual cases—have resorted to extraordinary procedural exceptionalism to settle cases on a national scale. Substantive state laws, personal jurisdiction, transparency, impartiality, reviewability, federalism, and adequate representation must all yield if doing so fulfills that one goal.
Somehow, until now, this has remained below the surface to everyone but MDL insiders. Thanks to the sprawling MDL over the opioid crisis—and unprecedented opposition to …
Information For The Common Good In Mass Torts, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Alexandra D. Lahav
Information For The Common Good In Mass Torts, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Alexandra D. Lahav
Scholarly Works
In recent years, judges have privileged confidentiality over transparency in discovery, especially in large scale multidistrict litigation such as the Opiate litigation. By uncovering the assumptions underlying our current regime, this Article sheds light on the process that got us here as a first step towards re-envisioning the rules governing information in litigation. We investigate an untold history of discovery’s publicity to show that many of our assumptions about what is public and what is private is historically contingent, even accidental. So too are our assumptions about the best way to arrive at truth.
Accordingly, we suggest that courts ought …