Law Commons^™

Procedural Law, The Supreme Court, And The Erosion Of Private Rights Enforcement, Suzette M. Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

A Pragmatic Approach To Interpreting The Federal Rules, Suzette M. Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

Check Please: Using Legal Liability To Inform Food Safety Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

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Food safety is a hotly debated issue. While food nourishes, sustains, and enriches our lives, it can also kill us. At any given meal, our menu comes from a dozen different sources. Without proper incentives to encourage food safety, microbial pathogens can, and do enter the food source--so much so that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans (or forty-eight million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. What is the optimal way to prevent unsafe foods from entering the marketplace?

Safety in the food …

The Overhyped Path From Tinker To Morse: How The Student Speech Cases Show The Limits Of Supreme Court Decisions--For The Law And For The Litigants, Scott A. Moss

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Each of the Supreme Court's high school student speech cases reflected the social angst of its era. In 1965's Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, three Iowa teens broke school rules to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War. In 1983, amidst parental and political upset about youth exposure to sexuality in the media, Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser and Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier allowed the censorship of an innuendo-filled student government speech and a school newspaper article on teen pregnancy and parental divorce. In 2007, Morse v. Frederick paralleled the rise of reality television …

Litigation Discovery Cannot Be Optimal But Could Be Better: The Economics Of Improving Discovery Timing In A Digital Age, Scott A. Moss

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Cases are won and lost in discovery, yet discovery draws little academic attention. Most scholarship focuses on how much discovery to allow, not on how courts decide discovery disputes--which, unlike trials, occur in most cases. The growth of computer data--e-mails, lingering deleted files, and so forth--increased discovery cost, but the new e-discovery rules just reiterate existing cost-benefit proportionality limits that draw broad consensus among litigation scholars and economists. But proportionality rules are impossible to apply effectively; they fail to curb discovery excess yet disallow discovery that meritorious cases need. This Article notes proportionality's flaws but rejects the consensus blaming bad …

State Courts Unbound, Frederic M. Bloom

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We may not think that state courts disobey binding Supreme Court precedent, but occasionally state courts do. In a number of important cases, state courts have actively defied apposite Supreme Court doctrine, and often it is the Court itself that has invited them to.

This Article shows state courts doing the unthinkable: flouting Supreme Court precedent, sometimes at the Court's own behest. The idea of state court defiance may surprise us. It is not in every case, after all, that state courts affirmatively disobey. But rare events still have their lessons, and we should ask how and why they emerge. …

Emotional Adaptation And Lawsuit Settlements, Peter H. Huang

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In Hedonic Adaptation and the Settlement of Civil Lawsuits, Professors John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan Masur note an unexplored aspect of protracted lawsuits: During prolonged litigation tort victims can adapt emotionally to even permanent injuries, and therefore are more likely to settle--and for less--than if their lawsuits proceeded faster. This Response demonstrates that this is a facile application of hedonic adaptation with the following three points. First, people care about more than happiness: Tort victims may sue to seek justice or revenge; emotions in tort litigation can be cultural evaluations; and people are often motivated by identity and …

Disparate Impact Discrimination: The Limits Of Litigation, The Possibilities For Internal Compliance, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.

Fighting Discrimination While Fighting Litigation: A Tale Of Two Supreme Courts, Scott A. Moss

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The U.S. Supreme Court has issued an odd mix of pro-plaintiff and pro-defendant employment law rulings. It has disallowed harassment lawsuits against employers even with failed antiharassment efforts, construed statutes of limitations narrowly to bar suits about ongoing promotion and pay discrimination, and denied protection to public employee internal complaints. Yet the same Court has issued significant unanimous rulings easing discrimination plaintiffs' burdens of proof.

This jurisprudence is often miscast in simple pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant terms. The Court's duality traces to its inconsistent and unaware adoption of competing policy arguments:

Policy 1: Employees must try internal dispute resolution before suing--or …

"Peoples Distinct From Others": The Making Of Modern Indian Law, Charles Wilkinson

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No abstract provided.

The Unexpected Value Of Litigation: A Real Options Perspective, Joseph A. Grundfest, Peter H. Huang

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In this Article, we suggest that litigation can be analyzed as though it is a competitive research and development project. Developing this analogy, we present a two-stage real option model of the litigation process that involves sequential information revelation and bargaining over the surplus generated by early settlement. Litigants are risk-neutral and have no private information. The model generates results that, we believe, have analytic and normative significance for the economic analysis of litigation

From an analytic perspective, we demonstrate that negative expected value (NEV) lawsuits are analogous to out of the money call options held by plaintiffs and that …

Unconstitutional Courses, Frederic M. Bloom

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By now, we almost expect Congress to fail. Nearly every time the federal courts announce a controversial decision, Congress issues a call to rein in "runaway" federal judges. And nearly every time Congress makes a "jurisdiction-stripping" threat, it comes to nothing.

But if Congress's threats possess little fire, we have still been distracted by their smoke. This Article argues that Congress's noisy calls have obscured another potent threat to the "judicial Power": the Supreme Court itself. On occasion, this Article asserts, the Court reshapes and abuses the "judicial Power"--not through bold pronouncements or obvious doctrinal revisions, but through something more …

Lawsuit Abandonment Options In Possibly Frivolous Litigation Games, Peter H. Huang

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This paper develops a new theory of possibly frivolous litigation by focusing on a plaintiff's options to unilaterally abandon a lawsuit. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(i) and its various state law counterparts permit, under certain circumstances, a plaintiff to voluntarily dismiss her lawsuit without prejudice. This paper's options approach to litigation, including quite possibly, frivolous litigation is placed in the context of the literature of economic models about litigation in general and frivolous litigation in particular. This paper demonstrates that possibly frivolous lawsuits will be filed and settled when the values of a plaintiff's options to unilaterally abandon litigation …

Litigation Narratives: Why Jensen V. Ellerth Didn't Change Sexual Harassment Law, But Still Has A Story Worth Telling, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.

What Bush V. Gore Means For Elections In The 21st Century, Helen Norton

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No abstract provided.

Note, In-Kind Class Action Settlements, Scott R. Peppet

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No abstract provided.

Foreword, J. Dennis Hynes

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No abstract provided.

A Tribute To Thurgood Marshall, Peter N. Simon

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No abstract provided.

Girls Should Bring Lawsuits Everywhere . . . Nothing Will Be Corrupted: Pornography As Speech And Product, Marianne Wesson

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No abstract provided.

Cooperative Federalism Under The Surface Mining Control And Reclamation Act: Is This Any Way To Run A Government?, Mark Squillace

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No abstract provided.