Law Commons^™

Rediscovering The Issue Class In Mass Tort Mdls, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

For the past twenty-plus years, MDL transferee judges have essentially regarded the class device as unavailable as they struggle to organize masses of tort actions sent their way by the JPML. Even the badges and incidents of class practice, in the form of common-fund-based approaches to attorney compensation and lead-counsel structures for case organization, have come under attack from commentators who insist that mass-tort MDLs should not be treated as “quasi-class actions,” and that Rule 23 does not present a “grab bag” from which MDL judges may pick and choose the most convenient implements. Leading lights of the complex litigation …

Asymmetric Normalcy, Deborah Pearlstein

Online Publications

Say what you will about sports metaphors in legal writing, but Professor Mark Tushnet’s “constitutional hardball” descriptor has proven remarkably useful in capturing one of the most vexing political dynamics of our time: the political parties’ resort to “claims and practice…that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with…the ‘go without saying’ assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government.”

Tribute To Judge Robert Katzmann, Lindsay Nash

Articles

No abstract provided.

Measuring Selection Bias In Publicly Available Judicial Opinions, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

To have an informed discussion about judicial performance and efficiency, we will sometimes want to explore what judges actually do on an everyday level. But in many ways, courts have not always been paragons of transparency. Often the parties are the only people who are aware of what action a court has taken in a case.

This paper explores that dynamic, in the context of decisions made by federal trial courts at one particular procedural stage--decisions made on motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim--Rule 12(b)(6) motions. There is growing interest in the work of federal trial courts, …