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Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Scholarly Works
This Article identifies a market-based solution for monitoring large-scale litigation proceeding outside of Rule 23’s safeguards. Although class actions dominate the scholarly discussion of mass litigation, the ever increasing restrictions on certifying a class mean that plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely rely on aggregate, multidistrict litigation to seek redress for group-wide harms. Despite sharing key features with its class action counterpart—such as attenuated attorney-client relationships, attorneyclient conflicts of interest, and high agency costs—no monitor exists in aggregate litigation. Informal group litigation not only lacks Rule 23’s judicial protections against attorney overreaching and self-dealing, but plaintiff’s themselves cannot adequately supervise their attorneys’ behavior. …
Who Owes How Much? Developments In Apportionment And Joint And Several Liability Under O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33, Thomas A. Eaton
Who Owes How Much? Developments In Apportionment And Joint And Several Liability Under O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33, Thomas A. Eaton
Scholarly Works
Without question, O.C.G.A. 51-12-13 as construed in McReynolds and Couch ushers in a new era in Georgia tort law. It topples the old regime in which multiple tortfeasors were held jointly liable when their combined acts of negligence injured an innocent plaintiff. The new regime is one of apportionment and liability limited to one's personal share of fault. Fault may be apportioned when it previously could not. It may be apportioned to those who are immune, to those who are unknown, and even to those who intentionally injure an innocent plaintiff. The practical consequence of this regime change is to …
Who Owes How Much? Developments In Apportionment And Joint And Several Liability Under O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33, Thomas A. Eaton
Who Owes How Much? Developments In Apportionment And Joint And Several Liability Under O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33, Thomas A. Eaton
Scholarly Works
For most of its history, Georgia followed the traditional common law rule of joint and several liability and the equally well-settled principle that negligence could not be compared with intent when apportioning liability. Both of those propositions were dramatically altered by the enactment of the 2005 amendments to the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (O.C.G.A.) section 51-12-33 as construed by the Georgia Supreme Court in two recent opinions.
Civil Recourse, Damages-As-Redress, And Constitutional Torts, Michael Wells
Civil Recourse, Damages-As-Redress, And Constitutional Torts, Michael Wells
Scholarly Works
In Torts as Wrongs, Professors John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky discuss the connection between "tortious wrongdoing" and "civil recourse." Their civil recourse theory "sees tort law as a means for empowering individuals to seek redress against those who have wronged them." Goldberg and Zipursky show that modern tort theory is dominated by "loss allocation," which uses liability and damages as instruments for assigning losses to deter unwanted behavior and to compensate the plaintiff. Under loss allocation, the central principle of damages is full compensation that is, to make the plaintiff whole. The core component of damages, though not the only …