Legal Remedies Commons^™

Concurrent Damages, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Imagine that a hacker is working for a university official secretly spying on faculty members – say, to find out who has been leaking information to the press about internal disciplinary matters. The injuries to a given victim of the hacking might follow a classic learning curve: The first few intrusions into her e-mail account reveal a storehouse of personal secrets, but further break-ins yield less and less new information. One might say there is diminishing marginal harm.

There is no such leveling off, however, in the compensation that would be awarded to that victim. The electronic privacy law …

Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Damages can add up to super-punitive amounts in unintended ways. To take a textbook example: The Defendant has caused an industrial accident or other mass tort. Plaintiff 1 sues, winning punitive damages based on the reprehensibility of that original act. Plaintiff 2 also sues – and also wins punitive damages on the same grounds. So do Plaintiff 3, Plaintiff 4, and so forth. If each of these punitive awards is directed at the same general badness of that original act, then these punishments are redundant. When such redundancy occurs, even damages that are meant to be punitive can reach surprisingly …

Constitutional Regulation Of Provisional Creditor Remedies: The Cost Of Procedural Due Process, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years a series of Supreme Court decisions has purported to envelop the rights of defaulting debtors in an enlarged concept of procedural due process. The central theme underlying this development is clearly an attempt by the Court to impose some degree of constitutional control on the exercise of provisional creditor remedies. The path that leads from Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp. to North Georgia Finishing, Inc. v. Di-Chem, Inc., is however, far from clear and the cases have provoked serious questioning of the meaning and impact of this doctrine. Due process as reflected in Sniadach and Fuentes …