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Rough Justice, Alexandra Lahav
Rough Justice, Alexandra Lahav
Alexandra D. Lahav
This Essay offers a new justification for rough justice. Rough justice, as I use the term here, is the attempt to resolve large numbers of cases by using statistical methods to give plaintiffs a justifiable amount of recovery. It replaces the trial, which most consider the ideal process for assigning value to cases. Ordinarily rough justice is justified on utilitarian grounds. But rough justice is not only efficient, it is also fair. In fact, even though individual litigation is often held out as the sine qua non of process, rough justice does a better job at obtaining fair results for …
Bellwether Trials, Alexandra Lahav
Bellwether Trials, Alexandra Lahav
Alexandra D. Lahav
At the core of the controversy over mass torts lies a fundamental question: what justifies collective litigation? Scholars considering this question make one of two arguments. They either argue that collective justice must be limited by a process-based right to participation based on autonomy values, or they argue that collective justice is justified by utilitarian values and dismiss participation altogether. This Article presents a third alternative: that the democratic nature of the jury trial validates “group typical” justice, a subset of collective justice. The Article re-envisions the trial as a democratic enterprise, rather than solely an atomistic one. An innovative …