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Full-Text Articles in Law

Living In Cafa's World, Jay Tidmarsh Nov 2013

Living In Cafa's World, Jay Tidmarsh

Jay Tidmarsh

This Article, prepared for a conference on the Class Action Fairness Act, examines the effect of CAFA on our understanding about the benefits and drawbacks of class actions. The Article describes the vision of class actions that imbues CAFA, and demonstrates how many subsequent developments in the law of class actions — including the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, and Shady Grove Orthopedics v. Allstate Insurance — have advanced CAFA’s restrictive vision about the role of class actions in modern American litigation. The Article demonstrates that competing visions about the role of class actions …


National Juries For National Cases: Preserving Citizen Participation In Large-Scale Litigation, Laura G. Dooley Jun 2013

National Juries For National Cases: Preserving Citizen Participation In Large-Scale Litigation, Laura G. Dooley

Laura Dooley

Procedural evolution in complex litigation seems to have left the civil jury behind. Reliance on aggregating devices, such as multidistrict litigation and class actions, as well as settlement pressure created by “bellwether” cases, has resulted in cases of national scope being tried by local juries. Local juries thus have the potential to impose their values on the rest of the country. This trend motivates parties to forum-shop, and some commentators suggest eliminating jury trials in complex cases altogether. Yet the jury is at the heart of our uniquely American understanding of civil justice, and the Seventh Amendment mandates its use …


An Illusion Of Sacrifice: The Incompatibility Of Binding Stipulations In Cafa Cases , Ryan S. Killian Jan 2013

An Illusion Of Sacrifice: The Incompatibility Of Binding Stipulations In Cafa Cases , Ryan S. Killian

Pepperdine Law Review

Ever since the enactment of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), plaintiffs attorneys have sought to circumvent it. Because class certification is more difficult to obtain in federal court than it is in certain state courts, plaintiffs typically prefer to litigate in state court. One method of avoiding CAFA’s removal provision is to limit damages to less than $5 million, thus rendering the action too small to be subjected to the statute. And plaintiffs attorneys have proven willing to stipulate to such diminished damages even where the action is far more valuable. This Note examines whether such stipulations …


Living In Cafa's World, Jay Tidmarsh Jan 2013

Living In Cafa's World, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article, prepared for a conference on the Class Action Fairness Act, examines the effect of CAFA on our understanding about the benefits and drawbacks of class actions. The Article describes the vision of class actions that imbues CAFA, and demonstrates how many subsequent developments in the law of class actions — including the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, and Shady Grove Orthopedics v. Allstate Insurance — have advanced CAFA’s restrictive vision about the role of class actions in modern American litigation. The Article demonstrates that competing visions about the role of class actions …


Managerial Judging And Substantive Law, Tobias Barrington Wolff Jan 2013

Managerial Judging And Substantive Law, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

The figure of the proactive jurist, involved in case management from the outset of the litigation and attentive throughout the proceedings to the impact of her decisions on settlement dynamics -- a managerial judge -- has displaced the passive umpire as the dominant paradigm in the federal district courts. Thus far, discussions of managerial judging have focused primarily upon values endogenous to the practice of judging. Procedural scholarship has paid little attention to the impact of the underlying substantive law on the parameters and conduct of complex proceedings.

In this Article, I examine the interface between substantive law and managerial …