Law Commons^™

"It's Not About The Money!": A Theory On Misconceptions Of Plaintiffs' Litigation Aims, Tamara Relis

Scholarly Works

This Article examines from a new angle a long-standing debate on a central question of the legal system: why plaintiffs sue and what they seek from litigation. Legal research has documented various extra-legal aims or non-economic agendas of plaintiffs who commence legal proceedings for various case-types. However, current debates have failed to address this issue in depth from the perspectives of plaintiffs themselves, subsequent to lawyers conditioning them on legal system realities and translating their disputes into legally cognizable compartments. Nor have understandings of plaintiffs' aims been examined from the perspectives of defense lawyers. These are significant gaps in the …

Mixing Oil And Water: Reconciling The Substantial Factor And Results-With-In-The-Risk Approaches To Proximate Cause, Peter Zablotsky

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Judicial Expedience On Attorney Fees In Class Actions, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Judges facing exogenous constraints on their pecuniary income have an incentive to reduce their workload to increase their private welfare. In the face of an increase in caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases more rapidly. In class action cases, failing to grant an attorney fee request will delay termination. This conflict is likely to lead judges to authorize higher fees as court congestion increases. Using two data sets of class action settlements, we show that attorney fees are significantly and positively related to the congestion level of the court hearing the case.

Post-Realist Blues: Formalism, Instrumentalism, And The Hybrid Nature Of Common Law Jurisprudence, Marin Roger Scordato

Scholarly Articles

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that appellate courts determined the outcome of disputed issues of law predominately by the application of pre-existing precedent and time honored legal maxims. The primary work of the common law courts was thought to be this distinctive identification, maintenance, inductive development and case specific deductive application of the body of precedent in its jurisdiction, sometimes known as formalism.

Starting with the influence of the legal realists in the 1920s, a profound shift took place in the dominant conception of the nature of common law jurisprudence. Here, at the beginning …

The International Legal Environment For Serious Political Reporting Has Fundamentally Changed: Understanding The Revolutionary New Era Of English Defamation Law, Marin Roger Scordato

Scholarly Articles

On October 11, 2006, Britain's highest court, the House of Lords, issued a blockbuster ruling that completely changed the landscape of libel law and press freedoms in the United Kingdom. The Times of London described the case, Jameel v. Wall Street Journal, as, "a judgment that lawyers predict will usher in a new era of journalism." Given England's reputation as an attractive jurisdiction for defamation plaintiffs and a frequent destination for "libel tourism," this case is likely to alter the environment for serious political journalism throughout Europe and North America.

This article carefully describes the case, including its key holdings …

“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk

Faculty Scholarship

A legal ideology emerged in the 1870s that celebrated contract as the body of law with the particular purpose of facilitating the formation of productive exchanges that would enrich the parties to the contract and, therefore, society as a whole. Across the spectrum of intellectual property, courts used the legal fiction of implied contract, and a version of it particularly emphasizing liberty of contract, to shift control of workplace knowledge from skilled employees to firms while suggesting that the emergence of hierarchical control and loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for creative workers was consistent with the free labor ideology that dominated …

Privacy's Other Path: Recovering The Law Of Confidentiality, Daniel J. Solove, Neil M. Richards

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The familiar legend of privacy law holds that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis invented the right to privacy in 1890, and that William Prosser aided its development by recognizing four privacy torts in 1960. In this article, Professors Richards and Solove contend that Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser did not invent privacy law, but took it down a new path. Well before 1890, a considerable body of Anglo-American law protected confidentiality, which safeguards the information people share with others. Warren, Brandeis, and later Prosser turned away from the law of confidentiality to create a new conception of privacy based on the …

Doing Katrina Time, Pamela R. Metzger

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article explores one Katrina-law problem: the plight of the poor, unrepresented and uncharged prisoners. It attempts to explain why these detainees were unrepresented and abandoned and how we might better guarantee the quality of justice for future detainees. Katrina has proved that bright-line rules are the best lines of defense for the poor; criminal justice systems honor concrete rules more readily than abstract imperatives. Katrina also proved that good lawyering on behalf of poor people can bring joy in the midst of despair.

Reservoirs Of Danger: The Evolution Of Public And Private Law At The Dawn Of The Information Age, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

A defining problem at the dawn of the Information Age will be securing computer databases of ultra-sensitive personal information. These reservoirs of data fuel our Internet economy but endanger individuals when their information escapes into the hands of cyber-criminals. This juxtaposition of opportunities for rapid economic growth and novel dangers recalls similar challenges society and law faced at the outset of the Industrial Age. Then, reservoirs collected water to power textile mills: the water was harmless in repose but wrought havoc when it escaped. After initially resisting Rylands v. Fletcher's strict liability standard as undermining economic development, American courts and …

Reflecting On Negligence Law And The Catholic Experience: Comparing Apples And Elephants, Randy Lee

Randy Lee

No abstract provided.

Torts Rationales, Pluralism, And Isaiah Berlin, Christopher J. Robinette

Christopher J Robinette

Acts And Omissions As Positive And Negative Causes, Richard W. Wright

Richard W. Wright

No abstract provided.

Healthcare Intermediaries, Alex Stein

Alex Stein

This article identifies various factors — legal and economic — that reduce the quality of medical care under the MCO framework. Specifically, it identifies MCOs’ functioning as platforms in a two-sided economy and the virtual absence of incentives on the part of MCOs and their doctors to compete with each other over the quality of medical care. The article also develops a law reform proposal that would unlock that competition.

The Myth Of Individualism And The Appeal Of Tort Reform, Martin A. Kotler

Martin A. Kotler

This Article examines the relationship between the American political culture of individualism and long-standing, well-established tort doctrine. Although much of the doctrine in the abstract is obviously reflective of the prevailing political culture, there remains a certain ambivalence. Thus, when judges and jurors are faced with deciding concrete cases before them, they frequently abandon their professed commitment to mythological notions of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility and find the injured plaintiff to be entitled to compensation.

The modern American tort reform movement’s recognition of this ambivalence underlies the essential strategy for reform. The reformers’ goals are more far reaching than the …

Phantom Parties And Other Practical Problems With The Attempted Abolition Of Joint And Several Liability, Nancy C. Marcus

Nancy C Marcus

In recent years, the allocation of responsibility to multiple tortfeasors and corresponding limitations on joint and several liability have been mired with uncertainty and change. This article describes the various forms of tort reform legislation limiting joint and several liability, explaining that some states limit joint and several liability according to the proportionality of the plaintiff's comparative fault, explaining that there is no clear majority approach to joint and several liability legislation and its interpretation by the courts, that a number of states have resisted the trend toward modifying joint and several liability, and that no state has enacted legislation …