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The Reduced Form Of Litigation Models And The Plaintiff's Win Rate, Jonah B. Gelbach
The Reduced Form Of Litigation Models And The Plaintiff's Win Rate, Jonah B. Gelbach
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In this paper I introduce what I call the reduced form approach to studying the plaintiff's win rate in litigation selection models. A reduced form comprises a joint distribution of plaintiff's and defendant's beliefs concerning the probability that the plaintiff would win in the event a dispute were litigated; a conditional win rate function that tells us the actual probability of a plaintiff win in the event of litigation, given the parties' subjective beliefs; and a litigation rule that provides the probability that a case will be litigated given the two parties' beliefs. I show how models with very different-looking …
Can We Learn Anything About Pleading Changes From Existing Data?, Jonah B. Gelbach
Can We Learn Anything About Pleading Changes From Existing Data?, Jonah B. Gelbach
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In light of the gateway role that the pleading standard can play in our civil litigation system, measuring the empirical effects of pleading policy changes embodied in the Supreme Court's controversial Twombly and Iqbal cases is important. In my earlier paper, Locking the Doors to Discovery, I argued that in doing so, special care is required in formulating the object of empirical study. Taking party behavior seriously, as Locking the Doors does, leads to empirical results suggesting that Twombly and Iqbal have had substantial effects among cases that face Rule 12(b)(6) motions post-Iqbal. This paper responds to …
Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman
Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman
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Congress may soon restrict joint and several liability for cleanup of contaminated sites under Superfund. We explore whether this change would discourage settlements and is therefore likely to increase the program 's already high litigation costs per site. Recent theoretical research by Kornhauser and Revesz finds that joint and several liability may either encourage or discourage settlement, depending on the correlation of outcomes at trial across defendants. We extend their two-defendant model to a richer framework with N defendants. This extension allows us to test the theoretical model empirically using data on Superfund litigation. We find that joint and several …