Law Commons^™

A Mixed Bag For Chicken Little: Analyzing Year 2000 Claims And Insurance Coverage, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

A visitor from another planet reading the popular and insurance trade press would probably conclude that the world stands on the abyss of a business, tort, and insurance crisis of unprecedented proportion. Media coverage of an impending Year 2000 “crisis” has reached a fevered pitch, with predictions of both a gigantic volume of Year 2000 claims and a correspondingly large amount of insurance coverage litigation. Many predict that the Year 2000 problem (also known as the “Y2K” or “Millennium Bug” problem) will create coverage controversies and costs dwarfing major insurance battles of the late twentieth century such as those concerning …

Domtar Baby: Misplaced Notions Of Equitable Apportionment Create A Thicket Of Potential Unfairness For Insurance Policyholders, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Minnesota has an enduring reputation as a progressive, even liberal state hospitable to the underdog and concerned for fairness. This is hardly a surprise for the home state of prominent liberal politicians such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy and Paul Wellstone. The perception of Minnesota liberalism, populism, or pro-plaintiff sympathies extends to the technical legal realm as well. Lawyers know about prominent Minnesota cases favoring claimants. Many are reprinted in casebooks or otherwise disproportionately well-known. Most recently, Minnesota was again in the news as the state unwilling to join in a proposed national settlement of claims against the …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance law in the year 1998-1999.

The Effect Of Offer-Of-Settlement Rules On The Terms Of Settlement, Lucian Arye Bebchuk, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

State Immunity Waivers For Suits By The United States, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

The Supreme Court closed this millennium with a virtual celebration of state sovereignty, protecting state authority from the reach of congressional power in several significant ways. In a pair of cases, Seminole Tribe v. Florida1 and Alden v. Maine,2 the Court held that states enjoy a constitutional immunity from being sued without their consent. In Seminole Tribe, the Court opined that "the background principle of state sovereign immunity embodied in the Eleventh Amendment"3 protects states from unconsented suits in federal court. In Alden, the Court held that this principle is not merely embodied in the Eleventh Amendment but rather is …

The Uniqueness Of Federal Prosecutors, Fred C. Zacharias, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Higher Burden For Ada Plaintiffs, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Plaintiffs in Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) cases have a signigicantly higher burden to show a disability due to a triliogy of recent decisions. This article examines this recent case law.

Precedent Lost: Why Encourage Settlement, And Why Permit Non-Party Involvement In Settlements?, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Do The Haves Come Out Ahead In Alternative Justice Systems? Repeat Players In Adr, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Marc Galanter's essay, Why the "Haves" Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change (Why the "Haves" Come out Ahead), published twenty-five years ago, set an important agenda for those who care about the distributive effects of legal processes, including those of us who have been engaged in jurisprudential, intellectual, and empirical debates about the relative advantages and disadvantages of alternative and conventional legal procedures. As a document of legal intellectual history, this Article was formed in the crucible of the Legal Mobilization and Modernization program at Yale Law School that spawned so many "law and . …

Taking Fiction Seriously: The Strange Results Of Public Officials' Individual Liability Under Bivens, Cornelia T. Pillard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article argues that the Supreme Court's decision to place liability on federal officials in their personal capacity--what Professors Fallon and Meltzer call Bivens's "genius"--is in fact its Achilles' heel. Individual liability under Bivens has become fictional because it is the government, and not the individual personally, that is in fact liable in Bivens cases. The individual liability fiction has ended up helping the federal government more than the Bivens plaintiff in various ways, and has contributed to the low rate of recovery under Bivens.

It may seem odd to attribute the low rate of Bivens recoveries to the individual …

Markets As Monitors: A Proposal To Replace Class Actions With Exchanges As Securities Fraud Enforcers, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Fraud in the securities markets has been a focus of legislative reform in recent years. Corporations-especially those in the high-technology industry-have complained that they are being unfairly targeted by plaintiffs' lawyers in class action securities fraud lawsuits. The corporations' complaints led to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("Reform Act"). The Reform Act attempted to reduce meritless litigation against corporate issuers by erecting a series of procedural barriers to the filing of securities class actions. Plaintiffs' attorneys warned that the Reform Act and the resulting decrease in securities class actions would leave corporate fraud unchecked and deprive defrauded …

Buckley V. Valeo: A Landmark Of Political Freedom, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Note On Presumptions With Sequential Litigation, Antonio E. Bernardo, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This note extends the Bernardo, Talley & Welch (1999) model of legal presumptions to study situations where litigation efforts are spent sequentially rather than simultaneously. The equilibria of the litigation stage are presented as functions of the underlying presumption. The equilibria and comparative statics are shown to be qualitatively similar to those of the simultaneous version. However, sequentiality allows the principal to pre commit to a litigation strategy, and thus possibly preempt any litigation effort whatsoever by the agent.