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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
This essay gives an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders during 2003-2013.
The study confirms the commonsense view that plaintiffs have tended to …
Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly
Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly
Faculty Scholarship
According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.”
However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument …
Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber
Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Transactional class and derivative actions have long been controversial in both the popular and the academic literatures. Yet, the debate over such litigation has thus far neglected to consider a change in legal technology, adopted in Delaware a dozen years ago, favoring selection of institutional investors as lead plaintiffs in these cases. This Article fills that gap, offering new insights into the utility of mergers and acquisitions litigation. Based on a hand-collected dataset of all Delaware class and derivative actions filed from November 1, 2003 to December 31, 2009, I find that institutional investors play as large of a role …
It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce
It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction And Oversight In Mass Torts, Tanya Pierce
Faculty Scholarship
In 2004, just five years after introducing the drug, Vioxx, pharmaceutical company, Merck, voluntarily withdrew the prescription pain-killer after a clinical study suggested that the drug increased the risk of heart attack and stroke. But in that relatively short time, an estimated 20 million Americans had already taken the drug. By late 2007, Merck announced it would pay $4.85 billion — the largest drug settlement ever — in “global settlements” for Vioxx-related claims. These settlements ultimately included roughly 47,000 individual lawsuits and about 265 potential class actions, but the Vioxx settlements were far from global.
In 2012, a purported parallel …