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The Regulation Of Entrepreneurial Litigation: Balancing Fairness And Efficiency In The Large Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.
The Regulation Of Entrepreneurial Litigation: Balancing Fairness And Efficiency In The Large Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
Just as war is too important to be left to generals, civil procedure – with apologies to Clemenceau – is too important to be left to proceduralists. Although it would be a serious overstatement to claim that all civil procedure scholars are confined by a tunnel vision focused only on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, they have as a group been reluctant to engage explicitly in incentive-based reasoning and seem particularly hesitant to reexamine what they must know to be a noble myth: namely, that the client can and should control all litigation decisions. Within an important and expanding …
Rethinking The Class Action: A Policy Primer On Reform, John C. Coffee Jr.
Rethinking The Class Action: A Policy Primer On Reform, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
Today, virtually everyone has a proposal for "reforming" class action litigation but both consensus and coherence are lacking. Some proposals are bluntly restrictive. For example, the Reagan Administration would reduce attorney's fees, place a ceiling on product liability, and partially repeal treble damage statutes. In the same vein, the United States Supreme Court has shown itself parsimonious on the question of fee awards, by authorizing fee waivers, approving offers of settlement that seemingly permit fee shifting against the plaintiff's attorney, and curtailing the traditional bases on which a fee award may be enhanced. Other proposals have offered essentially neutral procedural …