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Full-Text Articles in Law
Dignity Takings, Dignity Restoration: A Tort Law Perspective, Valerie P. Hans
Dignity Takings, Dignity Restoration: A Tort Law Perspective, Valerie P. Hans
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Money damages can operate to restore the dignity of a person who has been injured in tort or deprived of property. A financial award or settlement conveys an acknowledgment of the wrong and signals the reestablishment of equity between defendant and plaintiff. Whether the award is seen as adequate to fully restore dignity is influenced by context, especially comparison cases. And financial compensation directly provided by the defendant holds greater promise for dignity restoration.
Can Judges Make Reliable Numeric Judgments? Distorted Damages And Skewed Sentences, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich, Chris Guthrie
Can Judges Make Reliable Numeric Judgments? Distorted Damages And Skewed Sentences, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich, Chris Guthrie
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
In a series of studies involving over six hundred trial judges in three countries, we demonstrate that trial judges' civil damage awards and criminal sentences are subject to influences that make them erratic. We found that the presence of misleading numeric reference points (or "anchors") affected judges' decisions in a series of hypothetical cases. Specifically, judges imposed shorter sentences when assigning sentences in months rather than in years; awarded higher amounts of compensatory damages when informed of a cap on damage awards; imposed different sentences depending upon the sequence in which criminal cases were presented to them; and were influenced …
Four Decades Of Federal Civil Rights Litigation, Theodore Eisenberg
Four Decades Of Federal Civil Rights Litigation, Theodore Eisenberg
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Civil rights cases constitute a substantial fraction of the federal civil docket but that fraction has substantially declined from historic peaks. Trial outcomes, as in other areas of law, constitute a small fraction of case terminations and have changed over time. The number of employment discrimination trials before judges has been in decline for about 30 years, a trend also evident in contract and tort cases. The number of employment trials before juries increased substantially after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 but has been in decline since 1997. In constitutional tort cases, the number of judge …
Damages Versus Specific Performance: Lessons From Commercial Contracts, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller
Damages Versus Specific Performance: Lessons From Commercial Contracts, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Specific performance is a central contractual remedy but, in Anglo-American law, generally is subordinate to damages. Despite rich theoretical discussions of specific performance, little is known about parties' treatment of the remedy in their contracts. We study 2,347 contracts of public corporations to quantify the presence or absence of specific performance clauses in several types of contracts. Although a majority of contracts do not refer to specific performance, substantial variation exists in the rates of including specific performance clauses. High rates of specific performance use in the area of corporate combinations through merger (53.4 percent) or assets sales (45.1 percent), …
What's It Worth? Jury Damage Awards As Community Judgments, Valerie P. Hans
What's It Worth? Jury Damage Awards As Community Judgments, Valerie P. Hans
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
To Dollars From Sense: Qualitative To Quantitative Translation In Jury Damage Awards, Valerie P. Hans, Valerie F. Reyna
To Dollars From Sense: Qualitative To Quantitative Translation In Jury Damage Awards, Valerie P. Hans, Valerie F. Reyna
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This article offers a new multistage account of jury damage award decision making. Drawing on psychological and economic research on judgment, decision making, and numeracy, the model posits that jurors first make a categorical gist judgment that money damages are warranted, and then make an ordinal gist judgment ranking the damages deserved as low, medium, or high. They then construct numbers that fit the gist of the appropriate magnitude. The article employs data from jury decision-making research to explore the plausibility of the model.
Nonmaterial Misrepresentation: Damages, Rescission, And The Possibility Of Efficient Fraud, Emily Sherwin
Nonmaterial Misrepresentation: Damages, Rescission, And The Possibility Of Efficient Fraud, Emily Sherwin
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Buried in the details of legal doctrine governing misrepresentation is a remedial anomaly that raises some interesting questions about how law should deal with moral wrongs such as fraud. We tend to think of deliberate deception--fraud--as a grave moral wrong. At least, we think of deception as gravely wrong when the deceiver's objective is not to avert harm or spare feelings, but to obtain someone's money or goods. Deception denies the autonomy of the person deceived and undermines the foundation of trust in human interaction. The law, however, does not penalize every instance of fraud. Moreover, the standards governing when …
Stargazing: The Future Of American Products Liability Law, James A. Henderson Jr., Aaron Twerski
Stargazing: The Future Of American Products Liability Law, James A. Henderson Jr., Aaron Twerski
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.