Law Commons^™

Class Wars: The Dilemma Of The Mass Tort Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Legal change – like organic evolution – can occur at varying paces. Long periods of gradual evolution are sometimes punctuated by brief moments of rapid, irregular change. Recent developments in class action practice bear witness to this phenomenon: during the 1990s, evolution has given way to mutation. At least with respect to mass torts, the development of the class action had been slow and halting. Well into the 1980s, federal courts uniformly resisted attempts to certify such mass tort class actions, largely out of concern that the interests of the individual litigant would be submerged within any large-scale proceeding. By …

Lani Guinier And The Dilemmas Of American Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Lani Guinier, an experienced voting rights litigator and a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, first came to national attention in the spring of 1993 when President Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Labelled a "quota queen" by the Wall Street Journal, Guinier became the target of a fervent campaign to block her nomination. For several weeks, Guinier's law review articles on voting rights were the focus of a fierce national debate. Politicians and pundits expounded on her publications and spread snippets from her scholarship across the front pages and opinion …

Putting Cars On The "Information Superhighway": Authors, Exploiters, And Copyright In Cyberspace, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of the "Information Superhighway" has sparked much speculation about the roles of authorship, of readership, and of literary property in the vast system of interlinked computer networks that has come to be known as "cyberspace." Through computers linked to a digital network, users can access and add to vast quantities of material. At least in theory, every computer user can become his, or her own publisher, and every terminal can become a library, bookstore, or audio and video jukebox.

The prospect of pervasive audience access to and ability to copy and further disseminate works of authorship challenges the …

Paint-By-Numbers Tax Lawmaking, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Although their meaning and contours have long been controversial, the general criteria for evaluating changes in tax law enjoy both stability and consensus. At least since Adam Smith, there has been virtually universal agreement that the nation's tax law should be fair, economically efficient, and simple to comply with and to administer. Tax law changes should be designed to make the law more equitable, easier to comply with, more conducive to economic growth, and less likely to interfere with private economic decisionmaking.

Precisely what these criteria imply for policymaking is controversial, however. Fairness is often said to require that people …

Reflections On A Case (Of Motherhood), Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

She surveyed my office for signs of conspiracy. We had had two or three telephone conversations that had conveyed my ambivalence about representing her. A former colleague had urged her to call the clinic for help but I was reluctant to accept her case for the clinic: we rarely represented foster parents and the procedural complexity of the case convinced me that I would be unable to assign students to represent this client so late in the semester. I was resigned, however, to help her find a lawyer, both because a former colleague had sent her and because the snippets …