Litigation Commons^™

What’S In A Name? The Story Of The Utah Wilderness Reinventory, James R. Rasband

The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

14 pages.

Includes bibliographical references

"James R. Rasband, Associate Dean of Research & Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University"

Some Preliminary Thoughts On Contrasts And Convergence In Environmental And Natural Resources Law, Karin P. Sheldon

The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

16 pages.

Includes bibliographical references

Against Genetic Exceptionalism: An Argument In Favor Of The Viability Of Preconception Genetic Torts, Daniel S. Goldberg

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

The Fda Preamble: A Backdoor To Federalization Of Prescription Warning Labels?, 41 J. Marshall L. Rev. 161 (2007), Cristina Rodríguez

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Of Frivolous Litigation And Runaway Juries: A View From The Bench, Thomas A. Eaton

Scholarly Works

The political case for tort reform is based in large measure on the perception that there are too many frivolous law suits and too many excessive jury awards. Where there is considerable empirical evidence casting doubt on both these propositions, they remain the linchpins of the tort reform movement. Scholars, lobbyists, and legislators all have had a voice in the tort reform debates. The viewpoints of trial judges, however, have been largely absent. This is unfortunate because trial judges are the government officials with the closest view of the tort litigation system. They are the ones who see tort litigation …

Negligence In The Air: The Duty Of Care In Climate Change Litigation, David Hunter, James Salzman

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Judicial Treatment Of Noneconomic Compensatory Damages In The 19th Century, Ronald J. Allen, Alexia Brunet

Publications

Do high verdicts for tort cases containing noneconomic damages have historical precedent? We present the results of our empirical inquiry into the treatment of noneconomic compensatory damages by the courts from 1800-1900. Using 1,175 tort cases from this era, we show that, notwithstanding constant reiteration of jury discretion over damages, courts tightly controlled awards. In fact, no case prior to 1900 permitted a noneconomic compensatory damages award exceeding $450,000 in current dollars. Logistic regression results reveal that an increase in total monetary damages is positively and significantly related to the probability of reversal when noneconomic damages were claimed, and that …

An External Perspective On The Nature Of Noneconomic Compensatory Damages And Their Regulation, Ronald J. Allen, Alexia Brunet, Susan Spies Roth

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reassessing Charitable Immunity In Virginia, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Daubert And The Disappearing Jury Trial, Allan Kanner

ExpressO

Since being decided by the Supreme Court in 1993, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals has earned its place as one of the most misinterpreted and misapplied decisions in modern history. Meant to liberalize the standards for admissions of proof, the decision has had the opposite effect. The gatekeeper powers given to judges via Daubert, coupled with the internal and external incentives to prevent jury trials, has placed our entire civil justice system at risk.

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Airline Liability For Loss, Damage Or Delay Of Passenger Baggage, M. R. Franks

ExpressO

The article discusses remedies and methods of enforcing airline liability for loss, damage or delay of passenger baggage. The article includes a discussion of the law as it relates both to domestic flights and to international flights where passenger luggage is lost, damaged or delayed. The article includes a discussion of the Warsaw Convention as it relates to international flights and of the Federal Aviation Regulations applicable in the case of domestic flights.

Chasing The Illusory Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Rainbow: Negligence And Strict Liability In Design Defect Litigation, Aaron D. Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

Information, Litigation, And Common Law Evolution, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

It is common in the legal academy to describe judicial decision trends leading to new common law rules as resulting from conscious judicial effort. Evolutionary models of litigation, in contrast, treat common law as resulting from pressure applied by litigants. One apparent difficulty in the theory of litigation is explaining how trends in judicial decisions favoring one litigant, and biasing the legal standard, could occur. This article presents a model in which an apparent bias in the legal standard can occur in the absence of any effort toward this end on the part of judges. Trends can develop favoring the …

Reverse Bifurcation, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Reverse bifurcation is a trial procedure in which the jury determines damages first, before determining liability. The liability phase of the trial rarely occurs, because the parties usually settle once they know the value of the case. This procedure is already being used in thousands of cases – nearly all the asbestos and Fen-phen cases – but this is the first academic article devoted to the subject. This article explains the history of the procedure and analyzes why it encourages settlements, simplifies jury instructions, and produces better outcomes for the parties.

The Overlapping Magisteria Of Law And Science: When Litigation And Science Collide, William G. Childs

ExpressO

The Supreme Court’s 1993 decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals transformed courts’ evaluation of expert testimony. Many courts, applying Daubert, focus extensively on whether the purported expert’s methodology has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This focus on peer review results in two unintended consequences that have triggered criticism: litigation-driven scholarship and litigants taking discovery into the peer review process. Critics contend that litigation-driven scholarship is irredeemably biased and that peer review discovery is too often an effort to intimidate scholars from speaking on subjects of public concern.

In this Article, I explore these phenomena and the criticisms of …

"For It's One, Two, Three Strikes, You're Out . . .", 39 J. Marshall L. Rev. 493 (2006), Kaycee Hopwood

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Negligent Infliction Of Emotional Distress: Recovery Is Foreseeable, 39 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1019 (2006), Jeffrey Hoskins

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hurricane Katrina And The Toxic Torts Implications Of Environmental Injustice In New Orleans, 40 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1 (2006), L. Darnell Weeden

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Assessing The Coverage Carnage: Asbestos Liability And Insurance After Three Decades Of Dispute, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Often overlooked are the insurance issues related to asbestos and the degree to which the asbestos mass tort has changed the face of liability insurance and liability insurance law. The asbestos mass tort brought insurance coverage litigation into the big leagues of litigation, adjudication, and scholarly examination (although even the most rabid insurance coverage junkie would concede this is not much silver lining to the asbestos cloud). But after 30 years of big-time liability insurance coverage litigation involving asbestos or influenced by asbestos, what is the outcome? My assessment is:

1. Despite their protestations, insurers have not been unfairly treated …

Improving The Construction And Litigation Resolution Process: The 2005 Amendments To The Washington Condominium Act Are A Win-Win For Homeowners And Developers, Mark F. O'Donnell, David E. Chawes

Seattle University Law Review

On August 1, 2005, significant amendments to the Washington Condominium Act (WCA) became effective. These amendments were intended to substantially reduce water infiltration in multiunit residential buildings and to simplify the condominium construction dispute resolution process. The heart of the amendments is the implementation of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedures, as well as fee-shiftingprovisions which require the non-prevailing party to pay the attorney fees and costs of the prevailing party. A decade of lawsuits brought under the WCA by condominium owners associations against builders and developers, and in turn by builders against subcontractors, alleging defects in the ability of the …

Innovation Through Intimidation: An Empirical Account Of Defamation Litigation In China, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Consider two recent defamation cases in Chinese courts. In 2004, Zhang Xide, a former county-level Communist Party boss, sued the authors of a best selling book, An Investigation into China's Peasants. The book exposed official malfeasance on Zhang's watch and the resultant peasant hardships. Zhang demanded an apology from the book's authors and publisher, excision of the offending chapter, 200,000 yuan (approximately U.S.$25,000) for emotional damages, and a share of profits from sales of the book. Zhang sued in a local court on which, not coincidentally, his son sat as a judge.

In 2000, Song Dianwen, a peasant, sued …

Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Potential defendants faced with the prospect of tort or tort-like damage actions can reduce their liability exposure in a number of ways. Prior scholarship has dwelled primarily on the possibility that they may respond to the threat of liability by augmenting the amount of care they take.1 Defendants (I limit myself to defendants for simplicity) will increase their expenditures on care, so the theory goes, when those expenditures yield sufficient liability-reducing dividends; more care decreases liability exposure by simultaneously making it less likely that the actors will be found to have behaved tortiously in the event of an accident and …

Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study Of Jail And Prison Court Orders, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Lawyers obtained the first federal court orders governing prison and jail conditions in the 1960s. This and other types of civil rights injunctive practice flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a conventional wisdom has developed that such institutional reform litigation peaked long ago and is now moribund. This Article's longitudinal account of jail and prison court-order litigation establishes that, to the contrary, correctional court-order litigation did not decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, there was essential continuity from the early 1980s until1996, when enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reduced both the stock …

Texas Plaintiffs’ Practice In The Age Of Tort Reform: Survival Of The Fittest — It’S Even More True Now, Stephen Daniels, Joanne Martin

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Blame It On The Bee Gees: The Attack On Trial Lawyers And Civil Justice, Robert S. Peck, John Vail

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lashing Reason To The Mast: Understanding Judicial Constraints On Emotion In Personal Injury Litigation, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Arguing from the premise that personal injury plaintiffs and injury evidence do not taint proceedings by encouraging jurors to adjudicate based on emotion rather than evidence, this article reviews and challenges judicial attempts to constrain jurors' emotive responses to an injured plaintiff in three areas of personal injury litigation: voir dire, admissibility of evidence, and restrictions on damages arguments and assessment. The judicial abhorrence of sympathy as a ground for substantive decision making during some phases of the trial clashes with judicial tolerance of the emotion during others, giving rise to a pattern of sympathy in, sympathy out where the …

Book Review: Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth, Barbara A. Noah

Faculty Scholarship

The Author reviews THE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE MYTH by Tom Baker, published by University of Chicago Press, 2005. Baker’s book confronts the idea that medical malpractice litigation is exploding and underserving plaintiffs and that their attorneys receive unjustified rewards while physicians struggle under the burden of high costs. The book strives to debunk the various aspects of this myth and offers directions for reform. Throughout the book, Baker very effectively connects the legal arguments and the insurance and litigation data to his broader points about the politics of tort reform. Baker’s style is concise, lively, and very readable. He effectively weaves …

Opting Out Of Liability: The Forthcoming, Near-Total Demise Of The Modern Class Action, Myriam Gilles

Michigan Law Review

It is reasonable to expect that courts will demonstrate great solicitude for the recent innovation that I term "collective action waivers" - i.e., contractual provisions contained within arbitration agreements whereby consumers and others waive their rights to participate in any form of collective litigation or class arbitration. The history of mass tort class actions and the hegemonic expansion of pro-arbitration jurisprudence compel this conclusion. And, as the now-dominant economic model of contract law has moved the focus of courts from the value of consent to the value of efficiency, arbitration agreements found in all manner of shrink-wrap, scroll-text and bill-stuffer …