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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

Issue Classing--The Express Checkout Of Class Actions, Shaquille Grant Nov 2019

Issue Classing--The Express Checkout Of Class Actions, Shaquille Grant

SMU Law Review Forum

No abstract provided.


Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang Aug 2019

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

This article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence precedential lawmaking on class certification under Rule 23. We find that the partisan composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having more than double the certification rate of all-Republican panels in precedential cases. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of two females (but not one), is associated with …


Antitrust And Democracy, Spencer Weber Waller Jan 2019

Antitrust And Democracy, Spencer Weber Waller

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Our solution of the anti-monopoly problems must be in terms of our ideals-- the ideals of political and economic democracy. We want no economic or political dictatorship imposed upon us either by the government or by big business. We want no system of detailed regulation of prices by the government nor price fixing by private interests. We do not want bureaucracy or regimentation of any kind, but we will prefer governmental to private bureaucracy and regimentation, if we have to make such a choice. We cannot permit private corporations to be private governments. We must keep our economic system under …


Mootness Fees, Matthew D. Cain, Jill E. Fisch, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Randall Thomas Jan 2019

Mootness Fees, Matthew D. Cain, Jill E. Fisch, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Randall Thomas

All Faculty Scholarship

In response to a sharp increase in litigation challenging mergers, the Delaware Chancery Court issued the 2016 Trulia decision, which substantively reduced the attractiveness of Delaware as a forum for these suits. In this Article, we empirically assess the response of plaintiffs’ attorneys to these developments. Specifically, we document a troubling trend—the flight of merger litigation to federal court where these cases are overwhelmingly resolved through voluntary dismissals that provide no benefit to the plaintiff class but generate a payment to plaintiffs’ counsel in the form of a mootness fee. In 2018, for example, 77% of deals with litigation were …


Understanding The (Ir)Relevance Of Shareholder Votes On M&A Deals, Randall S. Thomas, James D. Cox, Tomas J. Mondino Jan 2019

Understanding The (Ir)Relevance Of Shareholder Votes On M&A Deals, Randall S. Thomas, James D. Cox, Tomas J. Mondino

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Has corporate law and its bundles of fiduciary obligations become irrelevant? Over the last thirty years, the American public corporation has undergone a profound metamorphosis, transforming itself from a business with dispersed ownership to one whose ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of sophisticated financial institutions. Corporate law has not been immutable to these changes so that current doctrine now accords to a shareholder vote two effects: first, the vote satisfies a statutory mandate that shareholders approve a deal, and second and significantly, the vote insulates the transaction and its actors from any claim of misconduct incident the approved …


No Longer A Second-Class Class Action? Finding Common Ground In The Debate Over Wage Collective Actions With Best Practices For Litigation And Adjudication, Scott A. Moss, Nantiya Ruan Jan 2019

No Longer A Second-Class Class Action? Finding Common Ground In The Debate Over Wage Collective Actions With Best Practices For Litigation And Adjudication, Scott A. Moss, Nantiya Ruan

Publications

Rule 23 class actions include all potential members, if granted certification. For wage claims, 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) allows not class but collective actions covering only those opting in. Courts have practiced Rule 23-style gatekeeping in collective actions – requiring certification motions, which they deny if members lack enough commonality. Our 2012 article argued against this practice. No statute or rule grants judges the § 216(b) gatekeeping power early cases assumed, and with good reason: opt-in reduces the agency problems justifying Rule 23 gatekeeping; and Congress passed § 216(b) as not a stricter, opt-in form of class action, but liberalized …


The Uncertain Path Of Class Action Law, Sergio J. Campos Jan 2019

The Uncertain Path Of Class Action Law, Sergio J. Campos

Articles

For the past ten terms the Supreme Court has increased its focus on the law of class actions. In doing so, the Court has revised the law to better accord with a view of the class action as an exception to an idealized picture of litigation. This "exceptional" view of the class action has had a profound impact not only on class action law, but on procedural and substantive law in general. However, in the October 2015 term the Court decided three class action cases that support an alternative, 'functional" view of the class action, one that does not view …


Class Actions, Indivisibility, And Rule 23(B)(2), Maureen Carroll Jan 2019

Class Actions, Indivisibility, And Rule 23(B)(2), Maureen Carroll

Articles

The federal class-action rule contains a provision, Rule 23(b)(2), that authorizes class-wide injunctive or declaratory relief for class-wide wrongs. The procedural needs of civil rights litigation motivated the adoption of the provision in 1966, and in the intervening years, it has played an important role in managing efforts to bring about systemic change. At the same time, courts have sometimes struggled to articulate what plaintiffs must show in order to invoke Rule 23(b)(2). A few years ago, the Supreme Court weighed in, stating that the key to this type of class action is the “indivisible” nature of the remedy the …


Making Rule 23 Ideal: Using A Multifactor Test To Evaluate The Admissibility Of Evidence At Class Certification, Cianan M. Lesley Jan 2019

Making Rule 23 Ideal: Using A Multifactor Test To Evaluate The Admissibility Of Evidence At Class Certification, Cianan M. Lesley

Michigan Law Review

Circuit courts are split on whether and to what extent the Daubert standard should apply at class certification. Potential plaintiffs believe that application of Daubert would make it nearly impossible to obtain class certification. For potential defendants, the application of the standard is an important way to ensure that the certification process is fair. This Note examines the incentives underlying the push to apply the Daubert standard at class certification and the benefits and drawbacks associated with that proposal. It proposes a solution that balances the concerns of both plaintiffs and defendants by focusing on three factors: the obstacles to …