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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Law
Making A Buck While Making A Difference, Alphonse A. Gerhardstein
Making A Buck While Making A Difference, Alphonse A. Gerhardstein
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
It is not right for children to die before their parents. It is not right for peaceful, unarmed citizens to die at the hands of the police. In my civil rights practice, I have met many mothers, fathers, and family members who are struggling to recover after a law enforcement officer caused the death of their loved one. Sure, they want fair compensation. But money does little to reduce their loss or make the grief more bearable. They often want to do something that will ensure that their loved one did not die in vain. They want to prevent other …
Prisoners' Rights Lawyers' Strategies For Preserving The Role Of The Courts, Margo Schlanger
Prisoners' Rights Lawyers' Strategies For Preserving The Role Of The Courts, Margo Schlanger
Articles
This Article is part of the University of Miami Law Review’s Leading from Below Symposium. It canvasses prisoners’ lawyers’ strategies prompted by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PLRA”). The strategies comply with the statute’s limits yet also allow U.S. district courts to remain a forum for the vindication of the constitutional rights of at least some of the nation’s millions of prisoners. After Part I’s introduction, Part II summarizes in several charts the PLRA’s sharp impact on the prevalence and outcomes of prison litigation, but demonstrates that there are still many cases and situations in which courts continue to …
Trial And Settlement: A Study Of High-Low Agreements, J. J. Prescott, Kathryn E. Spier, Albert Yoon
Trial And Settlement: A Study Of High-Low Agreements, J. J. Prescott, Kathryn E. Spier, Albert Yoon
Articles
This article presents the first systematic theoretical and empirical study of highlow agreements in civil litigation. A high-low agreement is a private contract that, if signed by litigants before trial, constrains any plaintiff’s recovery to a specified range. In our theoretical model, trial is both costly and risky. When litigants have divergent subjective beliefs and are mutually optimistic about their trial prospects, cases may fail to settle. In these cases, high-low agreements can be in litigants’ mutual interest because they limit the risk of outlier awards while still allowing mutually beneficial speculation. Using claims data from a national insurance company, …
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Mass Torts?, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
Twenty years ago, Deborah Hensler and a team of scholars at the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice issued a report entitled Trends in Tort Litigation: The Story Behind the Statistics. Pressure had been mounting both in the business community and the Republican Party to "reform" tort law throughout the 1980s. There was concern that Americans "egged on by avaricious lawyers, sue[d] too readily, and irresponsible juries and activist judges wayla[id] blameless businesses at enormous cost to social and economic well-being." The RAND report argued that the real risk of a torts "explosion" came from the world of mass …
A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White
A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White
Articles
The following essay is based on the talk "Government, Citizens, and Injurious Industries: A Case Study of the Tobacco Litigation," delivered by Hanoch Dagan last May to the Detroit Chapter of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and on the article "Governments, Citizens, and Injurious Industries," by Dagan and James J. White, '62, which appeared in 75.2 New York University Law Review 254-428 (May 2000). The authors hold conflicting view on the underlying issue of this topic: tobacco company product liability. Professor Dagan holds the position that tobacco companies are liable for harm done by their products; Professor …
Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White
Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White
Articles
In this Article, Professors Hanoch Dagan and James White study the most recent challenge raised by mass torts litigation: the interference of governments with the bilateral relationship between citizens and injurious industries. Using the tobacco settlement as their case study, Dagan and White explore the important benefits and the grave dangers of recognizing governments' entitlement to reimbursement for costs they have incurred in preventing or ameliorating their citizens' injuries. They further demonstrate that the current law can help capture these benefits and guard against the entailing risks, showing how subrogation law can serve as the legal foundation of the governments' …
Why Civil Cases Go To Trial: Strategic Bargaining And The Desire For Vindication, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Why Civil Cases Go To Trial: Strategic Bargaining And The Desire For Vindication, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Articles
When negotiations break down and a dispute cannot be settled, attorneys commonly blame their adversaries, often questioning their ethics or their judgment. After interviewing many attorneys, we have come to believe much of the criticism is directed at strategic moves in negotiation. But strategic ploys are not the only reason dispute resolution fails. Rather, our research also suggest that a genuine desire for vindication through trial or other formal process may be very significant in some types of cases where bargaining breaks down.
Going To Trial: A Rare Throw Of The Die, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Going To Trial: A Rare Throw Of The Die, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Articles
If it is true, as we often hear, that we are one of the most litigious societies on earth, it is because of our propensity to sue, not our affinity for trials. Of the hundreds of thousands of civil lawsuits that are filed each year in America, the great majority are settled; of those that are not settled, most are ultimately dismissed by the plaintiffs or by the courts; only a few percent are tried to a jury or a judge. This is no accident. We prefer settlements and have designed a system of civil justice that embodies and expresses …
Turning From Tort To Administration, Richard A. Nagareda
Turning From Tort To Administration, Richard A. Nagareda
Michigan Law Review
My objective here is to challenge the notion that the recent mass tort settlements - for all their novel qualities in the mass tort area - are truly sui generis in the law. Rather, I contend that the rise of such settlements in tort mirrors the development of public administrative agencies earlier in this century - that, in both instances, powerful new institutions emerged outside preexisting channels of control to wield significant power over human lives and resources. I argue that courts usefully may draw upon familiar doctrines of judicial review in administrative law to form a conceptual framework for …
Don't Try: Civil Jury Verdicts In A System Geared To Settlement, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Don't Try: Civil Jury Verdicts In A System Geared To Settlement, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Articles
If it is true, as we often hear, that we are one of the most litigious societies on earth, it is because of our propensity to sue, not our affinity for trials. Of the hundreds of thousands of civil lawsuits that are filed each year in America, the great majority are settled; of those that are not settled, most are ultimately dismissed by the plaintiffs or by the courts; only a few percent are tried to a jury or a judge. This is no accident. We prefer settlements and have designed a system of civil justice that embodies and expresses …
The Recognition Of Judgments In The European Community: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Of The Brussels Convention, Robert C. Reuland
The Recognition Of Judgments In The European Community: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Of The Brussels Convention, Robert C. Reuland
Michigan Journal of International Law
This article is directed at two objectives. It will first provide, in Part I, an outline of the history of the Brussels Convention from its inception to the present day. It will examine the growth of the Convention from a vague undertaking of the six original Member States of the EC, through various treaties of accession and the 1988 Lugano Convention with the EFTA, and finally to the text currently in force. Part II will discuss the nature of the Convention and the philosophy behind it. The second purpose of this article is a more pragmatic one: to provide the …
Getting To No: A Study Of Settlement Negotiations And The Selection Of Cases For Trial, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Getting To No: A Study Of Settlement Negotiations And The Selection Of Cases For Trial, Samuel R. Gross, Kent D. Syverud
Articles
A trial is a failure. Although we celebrate it as the centerpiece of our system of justice, we know that trial is not only an uncommon method of resolving disputes, but a disfavored one. With some notable exceptions, lawyers, judges, and commentators agree that pretrial settlement is almost always cheaper, faster, and better than trial. Much of our civil procedure is justified by the desire to promote settlement and avoid trial. More important, the nature of our civil process drives parties to settle so as to avoid the costs, delays, and uncertainties of trial, and, in many cases, to agree …
Claim Requirements Of The Federal Tort Claims Act: Minimal Notice Or Substantial Documentation?, Michigan Law Review
Claim Requirements Of The Federal Tort Claims Act: Minimal Notice Or Substantial Documentation?, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
This Note finds both the Adams and Swift positions unsatisfactory. Part I contends that Adams misconstrued the legislative history of the FTCA amendments by applying a minimal notice standard and then argues that Swift contravenes the amendments' fairness policy by permitting ambiguous, overreaching documentation requests. Part II contends that courts should interpret section 2675's "presented the claim" language as an accommodation between two competing Congressional objectives: presuit claims settlement and fair treatment of claimants. The Note proposes that until the Department of Justice modifies its current claims regulations, courts should toll the statute of limitations whenever an individual's claim includes …