Law Commons^™

Good Representatives, Bad Objectors, And Restitution In Class Settlements, Jay Tidmarsh, Tladi Marumo

Journal Articles

his Article uses two recent decisions -one prohibiting incentive awards to class representatives and one permitting disgorgement of side payments to class objectors - to explore deeper connections between class­action settlements and the law of restitution. The failure to correctly apply the law of restitution led both courts astray. First, courts can approve incentive awards, as long as an award properly reflects the benefit that the representative's efforts bestowed on the class. Second, restitution provides a basis to disgorge improper side payments to objectors, but only under conditions different from those that the court described. More broadly, attention to the …

The Parable Of The Forms, Samuel L. Bray

Journal Articles

This is a parable about the forms of action, code pleading, and the "civil action" of the Federal Rules.

Opting Out Of Discovery, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article proposes a system in which both parties are provided an opportunity to opt out of discovery. A party who opts out is immunized from dispositive motions, including a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim or a motion for summary judgment. If neither party opts out of discovery, the parties waive jury-trial rights, thus giving judges the ability to use stronger case-management powers to focus the issues and narrow discovery. If one party opts out of discovery but an opponent does not, the cost of discovery shifts to the opponent. This Article justifies this proposal in …

The English Fire Courts And The American Right To Civil Jury Trial, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article uncovers the history of a long-forgotten English court system, the “fire courts,” which Parliament established to resolve dispute between landlords and tenants in urban areas destroyed in catastrophic fires. One of the fire courts’ remarkable features was the delegation of authority to judges to adjudicate disputes without juries. Because the Seventh Amendment’s right to a federal civil jury trial depends in part on the historical practice of English courts in 1791, this delegation bears directly on the present power of Congress to abrogate the use of juries in federal civil litigation.

Parliament enacted fire-courts legislation on eight occasions …

Diagnosis And Treatment Of The "Superiority Problem", Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Christine Bartholomew has provided a brilliant diagnosis of the "superiority problem" in class-action law, although I am not convinced that her plan to treat the will cure the patient. If superiority is to be eliminated, predominance must also be abandoned. Some new formula must replace Rule 23(b)(3) in its entirety. The problem of Rule 23(b)(3) is that the factors (especially superiority) give too much power to courts to get the results they want. Unless the ills that Professor Bartholomew documents are to be repeated in a new form, any replacement for Rule 23(b)(3) must be far more specific and concrete …

The Future Of Oral Arguments, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The civil-justice literature is replete with discussions of two phenomena: case management and the vanishing trial. These two phenomena are not unrelated. One commonly state goal of case management is to find ways, other than trial, to resolve civil disputes that find their way into court. Some observers find the movements toward case management and away from trial to be salutary; others find them disquieting. Regardless of the merits of this debate, the delivery of civil justice is undeniably evolving.

This evolution affects and changes many of the traditional attributes of American-style civil justice. The Essay examines one of these …

Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

“Trial by statistics” was a means by which a court could resolve a large number of aggregated claims: a court could try a random sample of claim, and extrapolate the average result to the remainder. In Wal-Mart, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court seemingly ended the practice at the federal level, thus removing from judges a tool that made mass aggregation more feasible. After examining the benefits and drawbacks of trial by statistics, this Article suggests an alternative that harnesses many of the positive features of the technique while avoiding its major difficulties. The technique is the “presumptive judgment”: a …

Auctioning Class Settlements, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Although they promise better deterrence at a lower cost, class actions are infected with problems that can keep them from delivering on this promise. One of these problems occurs when the agents for the class (the class representative and class counsel) advance their own interests at the expense of the class. Controlling agency cost, which often manifests itself at the time of settlement, has been the impetus behind a number of class-action reform proposals. This Article develops a proposal that, in conjunction with reforms in fee structure and opt-out rights, controls agency costs at the time of settlement. The idea …

Cy Pres And The Optimal Class Action, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article, prepared for a symposium on class actions, examines the problem of cy pres relief through the lens of ensuring that class actions have an optimal claim structure and class membership. It finds that the present cy pres doctrine does little to advance the creation of optimal class actions, and may do some harm to achieving that goal. The Article then proposes an alternative “nudge” to induce putative class counsel to structure class actions in an optimal way: set attorneys’ fees so that counsel is compensated through a combination of an hourly market rate and a percentage of the …

Superiority As Unity, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

One of Professor Redish’s many important contributions to legal scholarship is his recent work on class actions. Grounding his argument in the theory of democratic accountability that has been at the centerpiece of all his work, Professor Redish suggests that, in nearly all instances, class actions violate the individual autonomy of litigants and should not be used by courts. This Essay, prepared for a festschrift in honor of Professor Redish, begins from the opposite premise: that class actions should be grounded in the notion of social utility rather than autonomy so that class actions should be used whenever they achieve …

Procedure, Substance, And Erie, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article examines the relationship between procedure and substance, and the way in which that relationship affects Erie questions. It first suggests that "procedure" should be understood in terms of process-in other words, in terms of the way that it changes the substance of the law and the value of legal claims. It then argues that the traditional view that the definitions of "procedure" and "substance" change with the context-a pillar on which present Erie analysis is based-is wrong. Finally, it suggests a single process based principle that reconciles all of the Supreme Court's "procedural Erie" cases: that federal courts …

Optimal Class Size, Opt-Out Rights, And "Indivisible" Remedies, Jay Tidmarsh, David Betson

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on the ALI’s Aggregate Litigation Project, this paper examines the ALI’s proposal to permit opt-out rights when remedies and “divisible,” but not to permit them when remedies are “indivisible.” Starting from the ground up, the paper employs economic analysis to determine what the optimal size of a class action should be. We demonstrate that, in some circumstances, the optimal size of a class is a class composed of all victims, while in other cases, the optimal size is smaller. We further argue that courts should consider optimal class size in determining whether to certify a class, …

Shedding Light On Shady Grove: Further Reflections On The Erie Doctrine From A Conflicts Perspective, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

This Article, a contribution to the Notre Dame Law Review symposium issue on the Supreme Court’s recent Shady Grove decision, is a follow-up to an article published in the same journal eleven years ago, in which I suggested that the Erie doctrine could be usefully informed by drawing on caselaw and jurisprudence from the horizontal choice of law setting. Shady Grove addressed the question of whether a New York state law, barring the assertion of claims for statutory damages, was binding in an action brought in the federal courts, or whether Federal Rule 23, which does not contain a similar …

Exiting Litigation, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The American judicial system will face significant challenges in the twenty-first century. One of its immediate challenges is adapting the rules of civil procedure to the stresses under which the civil-justice system operates. Some of the most notable pressures arise from transnational litigation, mass litigation, proliferation of claims against governmental and corporate institutions, and competition from methods of alternative dispute resolution that promise to dispense cheaper, faster, and more satisfying justice.

Resolving Cases On The Merits, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on Civil Justice Reform, this essay examines the role of the “on the merits” principle in modern American procedure. After surveying the possible meanings of the phrase, the essay critiques its most common understanding due to its economic inefficiency and its lack of strong philosophical support. Relying on the recent work of Amartya Sen, the essay proposes that the principle be replaced with a “fair outcome” principle that melds both “procedural” and “substantive” concerns.

Rethinking Adequacy Of Representation, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This article questions the usefulness of traditional tests for adequacy of representation in class action proceedings. When determining whether to certify a class, courts have sought to avoid endorsing those classes marred by conflicting interests or the possibility of collusion. Yet, such conflicts of interest are an intrinsic characteristic of class actions, stemming from the very policy rationales that have prompted the judiciary to allow litigation by classes. As a result, the current doctrine of adequate representation has left the courts without a bright-line rule; instead, the courts' inquiries into adequacy of representation must focus primarily on the degree of …

Pound's Century, And Ours, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

On August 29, 1906, a little known Nebraska lawyer climbed to the podium at the twenty-ninth American Bar Association convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, and commenced the most thoroughly successful revolution in American law. The lawyer was Roscoe Pound, and the title of his address was The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice. The speech was hardly popular in its own time. The ABA nearly refused to publish the remarks. Thirty-two years would pass before Pound's seeds fully flowered. Even today, many of Pound's criticisms of our adversarial civil justice system ring as true as the day …

The Supervisory Power Of The Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

Relying on something it calls supervisory power or supervisory authority, the Supreme Court regularly prescribes rules of procedure and evidence for inferior courts. Both scholars and the Court have treated the Court's exercises of this authority as unexceptional exercises of the inherent authority that Article III grants every federal court to regulate procedure in the course of adjudication. Article III's grant of inherent authority, however, is conventionally understood as permitting a federal court to regulate its own proceedings. When the Supreme Court exercises supervisory power, it regulates the proceedings of other federal courts. More than a reference to every court's …

Wrongful Conviction, Lawyer Incompetence And English Law - Some Recent Themes, Geoffrey Bennett

Journal Articles

Viewed from a distance the outward appearances of the English Legal System might look reassuringly stable. In fact, nothing could be further from the case. During the last ten years almost every facet of the system, even the constitutional order, has been radically overhauled, or at least significantly modified. The whole system of civil procedure has been recast, after over a hundred years of relatively little major modification, in an attempt to simplify and expedite proceedings with a new emphasis on judicial case management. Perhaps most important of all, the Human Rights Act 1998, which has been effective from October …

The Erie Doctrine Revisited: How A Conflicts Perspective Can Aid The Analysis, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

I have taught Civil Procedure for the past twenty-five years. Having returned to teaching Conflict of Laws last year, after not having taught that course since the mid-1980s, I was interested in re-examining the Erie doctrine from the vantage point of both of these subject areas. My goal was to see whether a combination of learning from these two related disciplines would introduce additional coherence into the analysis of this topic.

In one sense, the Erie doctrine and traditional choice of law determinations present analogous questions, since they both involve making a selection between competing legal rules. Choice of law …

The Compromise Of '38 And The Federal Courts Today, John H. Robinson

Journal Articles

In 1998 the legal community of the United States should stop and take stock of two epochal events in the history of the federal judicial system. One of those events, as readers of a procedure symposium do not need to be told, is the sixtieth anniversary of the introduction of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I shall have more to say about that event presently, but I want first to devote a few paragraphs to a second event, one which proceduralists ignore at their peril. The event I have in mind is the initiation of a new era of …

Civil Procedure: The Last Ten Years, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

In my view, the story of the last ten years in civil procedure is the slow but inexorable creep of ideas and solutions developed for complex cases into routine cases, and the continued effort of litigators and judges in complex cases to develop ideas and solutions that push the procedural envelope still farther out-thus setting the agenda for the next generation of procedural reform.

I do not want to overstate my claim. The procedures for a lawsuit are still basically the same: a short pleading stage followed by a lengthy discovery stage followed by a culminating event of trial. But …

Rule 11 In The Constitutional Case, Gary J. Saalman, Kenneth Ripple

Journal Articles

The 1983 amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure arose from concern over the flood of litigation in recent years and its high costs to both litigants and the court system. Although the causes of this litigation explosion and the remedies are both many and complex, the pretrial stage of litigation and the standards governing attorney responsibility were considered major contributors to the problem and prime areas for reform. The drafters of the 1983 amendments sought to streamline the litigation process by increasing judicial oversight and deterring abusive or dilatory tactics by the bar. Some of the most significant changes …

Schiavone: An Un-Fortune-Ate Illustration Of The Supreme Court's Role As Interpreter Of The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Let me identify the two basic theses of this paper. First, I believe that in the recent Schiavone v. Fortune case, the Supreme Court gave the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure under consideration there, Rule 15(c), an unduly restrictive reading. In this, the fiftieth year of the effective date of the Rules, it is particularly unfortunate to see any of the Rules given an unnecessarily grudging interpretation. My second assertion is that as a general matter, in interpreting the Federal Rules, courts should recognize that their role is different from the one they play in interpreting statutes or in applying …

Religion And Procedure, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

God has no use for procedural rules since He knows the full truth and is able to exercise absolute justice simultaneously alongside complete mercy. This paper discusses the religious significance of legal rules of procedure in light of this truth. It finds that since we, unlike God, are inherently fallible, we are forced to implement procedures in the legal pursuit of our goals of truth, justice, and mercy. These procedures remain imperfect in implementing these goals, as compromises must often be made between competing values such as mercy on one hand and justice on the other. Nevertheless, though legal procedure …

Appellate Courts And Prejudiced Verdicts, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Professor Shaffer maintains that the preservation of fair trial in civil cases requires an increased Bench and Bar effort to control prejudicial trial conduct. To support this assertion, he investigates sources of jury prejudice, available and proposed court devices for remedying inadvertent and intentional misconduct by trial attorneys, and appellate court avoidance of corrective sanctions.

Book Review, William Burns Lawless

Journal Articles

Reviewing: Civil Justice and the Jury by Charles W. Joiner (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962).

Service Of Process On Non-Resident Motorists, Thomas Frank Konop

Journal Articles

Is it constitutional to remotely serve a defendant process? Traditionally there have been four ways to serve process; personally, constructively, substituted, and the statutorily. Several states have enacted statutes that enable motorist to be served process despite being non-residents of the state. This note explores the constitutionality of service of process for non-resident motorist in light of contemporary decisions handed down from the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme courts of the several states.