Law Commons^™

Dismissing Provenance: The Use Of Procedural Defenses To Bar Claims In Nazi-Looted Art And Securitized Mortgage Litigation, Christian J. Bromley

Christian J Bromley

The litigation surrounding an estimated 650,000 works looted by the Nazis in the Second World War and the millions of securitized mortgages foreclosed in the wake of the Great Recession converge on a fundamental legal principle: who really holds rightful title? Seemingly worlds apart, these separate yet remarkably similar forms of property challenge the American judiciary to allocate property rights between adversaries steadfast in their contention of rightful ownership. The legal fulcrum in this allocation often rests not on the equity or righteousness of either parties’ claim—whether museum versus heir or bank versus former homeowner—but instead on procedural defenses that …

Neither Savior Nor Bogeyman: What Waits Behind The Door Of Third-Party Litigation Financing?, Jeremy Kidd

Jeremy Kidd

The arguments for and against third-party litigation financing are based on incorrect assumptions regarding the impacts on total litigation. A formal model incorporating the choices of plaintiff, lawyer, and financier shows only minimal impact on total litigation, largely positive. However, after addressing the potential for long-term, strategic behavior by financiers, it is obvious that some dangers remain. Divorced from the dramatic claims of proponents and opponents, litigation financing is merely a tool that can be used for good or bad, and differentiating by types of claims and the incentives of the parties allows that tool to be appropriately used.

A Guide To The Independent Medical Examination, Samuel D. Hodge Jr.

Samuel D. Hodge Jr.

Independent medical examinations (IMEs) are physicals conducted at the request of a third party. An example is the physical examination of a workers’ compensation claimant or life insurance applicant, but IMEs are common in bodily injury claims. These examinations are very important since they can help decide whether a claimant is entitled to compensation or qualifies for life insurance or a job. Most defense attorneys have relied on medical reports and expert testimony from an independent medical examiner but little is known about the limitations or parameters of this assessment. In fact, there are a multitude of legal issues surrounding …

Facts Can Be Stubborn: The Importance Of The Fact Section In Environmental Law, L.A. County Flood Control Dist. V. Natural Res. Def. Council, 133 S. Ct. 710 (2013), Aaron Schaer

Aaron Schaer

L.A. County is a perfect example of a difficulty that underlies many environmental cases. The facts are often incredibly complex, and based on science that even the PhDs among us struggle to comprehend. And if this were not enough, the environmental laws that these facts are siphoned through are no walk in the park themselves. Quite the opposite, as should be expected from political compromises over intricate, ever-evolving science. Environmental laws are rife with jargon and compound terms that are best left to acronyms like NAAQS and NPDES. This itself has become food for fodder, as these laws have been …

Timeless Trial Strategies And Tactics: Lessons From The Classic Claus Von Bülow Case, Daniel M. Braun

Daniel M Braun

In this new Millennium -- an era of increasingly complex cases -- it is critical that lawyers keep a keen eye on trial strategy and tactics. Although scientific evidence today is more sophisticated than ever, the art of effectively engaging people and personalities remains prime. Scientific data must be contextualized and presented in absorbable ways, and attorneys need to ensure not only that they correctly understand jurors, judges, witnesses, and accused persons, but also that they find the means to make their arguments truly resonate if they are to formulate an effective case and ultimately realize justice. A decades-old case …

Arbitral Autonomy, Liaquat Ali Khan

Ali Khan

This Article presents concrete proposals to amend the current arbitration law for minimizing court intervention into arbitration proceedings and enforcement of arbitral awards. As a method of dispute resolution, arbitration offers an alternative to litigation. Yet arbitration is frequently interspersed with litigation. As a true alternative, arbitration should be, and can be, autonomous, that is, litigation-free. Arbitral autonomy fails when parties go to court to challenge validity of the arbitration agreement, to obtain emergency relief, or to contest enforceability of the award, among other reasons. To accomplish litigation-free arbitration, first, the need to go to court must be minimized; second, …

Google Law?, F.E. Guerra-Pujol

F.E. Guerra-Pujol

In this paper, we discuss the details of our proposed "Google law" or "turing trial" experiment and offer a tentative proof of concept for our alternative model for trying cases and resolving disputes; that is, we tentatively specify the conditions under which our alternative model of justice would work in practice. In addition, we assume the role of a justice entrepreneur and propose the creation of a competitive justice market in place of state-owned courts and the existing government monopoly over the supply of justice. To this end, we explain why a competitive market for justice is not only feasible …

Legal Applications Of Modern Finance, Matthew E. Cavanaugh Mba Cpa Esq.

Matthew E. Cavanaugh MBA CPA Esq.

While scholars and practitioners have applied economics to law successfully for decades, there has been almost no similar application of modern finance. Courts have used the central concept of classical finance, time value of money, for many years, but their use is still unsophisticated.

This article details two ways to apply modern finance to law. This article first describes a method of improving courts’ time value of money calculations, by using a systematically complete four factor analysis to determine the appropriate discount rate. This article then describes a method of calculating future damages that uses market price of risk, based …

How Shareholder Litigations Deter Directors And Officers. U.S. And Italy, A Comparative Analysis, Federico Pastre

Federico Pastre

This paper focuses on the issue of whether shareholder litigations brought in the U.S. - namely, derivative suits and securities class actions – and their equivalent in the Italian law system, achieve their principal regulatory goal of deterring corporate directors and officers from engaging in unlawful conduct, in addition to compensating shareholders and investors for the harm they suffered.

In the U.S., effective derivative suits and securities class actions, contingency fees, and the rule concerning legal expenses, create an entrepreneurial system in which directors and officers are ultimately deterred by the private enforcement of the law. Nevertheless, the presence of …

Secondary Liability For Securities Fraud: Gatekeepers In State Court, Jennifer J. Johnson

Jennifer J Johnson

This paper discusses gatekeeper liability under state securities laws for professionals and other secondary participants in securities transactions. The recent economic meltdown exposed numerous Ponzi schemes from Madoff to Medical Capital that were no longer able to masquerade as profitable enterprises. When promoters of fraudulent ventures are unable to provide restitution to their victims, plaintiffs seek out other sources of repayment including professionals and other secondary participants in the transactions that precipitated their losses. Although most scholars agree that professionals can perform an important role in deterring securities fraud, scholarly opinions vary widely on the appropriate liability regime, if any, …

The Geography Of Climate Change Litigation Part 2: Narratives Of Nation-States And Thirdspace, Hari M. Osofsky

Hari Osofsky

This article aims to interweave two current crises for law and policy in the United States: (1) the extent of our commitment to international law and (2) the approach we will take to regulating global climate change. It argues that achieving progress on both fronts requires interrogating the geographic assumptions in major conceptual approaches to international legal theory and the implications of those assumptions for their narratives of climate change litigation. To that end, it develops a taxonomy of international legal theory based on how those approaches view nation-state spaces—Westphalian, modified Westphalian, pluralist, and critical—and considers how a law and …