Law Commons^™

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

Publications

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 …

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

Publications

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 …

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

Publications

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 …

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

Publications

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 …

In-Kind Class Action Settlements, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

No abstract provided.

Foreword, J. Dennis Hynes

Publications

No abstract provided.

Agenda: Moving The West's Water To New Uses: Winners And Losers, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Moving the West's Water to New Uses: Winners and Losers (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado Law School professors Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Mark Squillace.

Moving the West's Water to New Uses: Winners and Losers will be the theme for this year's water conference, June 6-8 at the Law School in Boulder. The conference will consider the changing demands for water in the West and the need to reallocate a portion of the existing uses of water to new uses.

The first day will provide the background by looking at the most likely sources of water to meet these demands, including agriculture, federal water projects, interstate transfers, and …

Agenda: Boundaries And Water: Allocation And Use Of A Shared Resource, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Boundaries and Water: Allocation and Use of a Shared Resource (Summer Conference, June 5-7)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors David H. Getches, Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Charles F. Wilkinson.

Boundaries and Water: Allocation and Use of a Shared Resource is the topic of the Center's annual summer program on water this June. Most of the major rivers in the western United States are shared between two or more states. Often tribal governments play an important role in water allocation and use decisions. International considerations also may be involved in some cases. These interjurisdictional issues extend to groundwater as well as surface water.

This conference will provide the …

Flpma As It Affects The Mining Industry, William R. Marsh

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

67 pages.

11 pages of text with appendices.

Comparative Approaches To Groundwater Management, Robert D. Hayton

Groundwater: Allocation, Development and Pollution (Summer Conference, June 6-9)

38 pages.

Ground Water Monitoring System And Procedures At Kin-Buc I Landfill Middlesex County New Jersey, Dan D. Raviv

Groundwater: Allocation, Development and Pollution (Summer Conference, June 6-9)

37 pages (includes illustrations and map).

Agenda: Groundwater: Allocation, Development And Pollution, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Groundwater: Allocation, Development and Pollution (Summer Conference, June 6-9)

Even before the [Natural Resources Law] Center was established [in the fall of 1981], the [University of Colorado] School of Law was organizing annual natural resources law summer short courses. To date four programs have been presented:

- July 1980: "Federal Lands, Laws and Policies-and the Development of Natural Resources"

- June 1981: "Water Resources Allocation: Laws and Emerging Issues"

- June 1982: "New Sources of Water for Energy Development and Growth: lnterbasin Transfers"

- June 1983: "Groundwater: Allocation; Development and Pollution"

(Reprinted from Resource Law Notes, no. 1, Jan. 1984, at 1.)

University of Colorado School of Law professors …