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Articles 151 - 180 of 816

Full-Text Articles in Litigation

Arguing On The Side Of Culture, Debra Chopp, Robert Ortega, Frank E. Vandervort Sep 2014

Arguing On The Side Of Culture, Debra Chopp, Robert Ortega, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Human service professions are increasingly acknowledging the ubiquitous role of culture in the human experience. This is evidenced in professional codes of ethics, professional school accreditation standards, licensing, and in some cases through state statutes regarding professional codes of conduct. Across professions, concerted efforts are being made to infuse standards of culturally responsive practice into curricular content and training. For example, instruction on cultural competence is expected in business and medical education.1 Psychology and social work both require their professionals to exercise cultural competence. When it comes to cultural competence/ though, the legal codes of ethics and professional practice are …


Trial And Settlement: A Study Of High-Low Agreements, J. J. Prescott, Kathryn E. Spier, Albert Yoon Aug 2014

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, …


The Two Faces Of Janus: The Jurisprudential Past And New Beginning Of Rule 10b-5, John Patrick Clayton Apr 2014

The Two Faces Of Janus: The Jurisprudential Past And New Beginning Of Rule 10b-5, John Patrick Clayton

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and its implementing Rule 10b-5 are the primary antifraud provisions for both private and public enforcement of the federal securities laws. Neither the statute nor the rule expressly provides for a private right of action, but federal courts have long recognized such an implied right, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has supported the implied private right of action as a “necessary supplement” to its own efforts. However, after a decade of applying an expansive interpretation to Section 10(b), in the early 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrowly interpret this implied …


Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar Apr 2014

Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar

Michigan Law Review

The bombing that killed at least 169 people became an event by which time was thereafter measured — at least in Oklahoma. Ninety minutes after the bombing, a state trooper arrested Timothy McVeigh on a traffic charge; within hours, he was linked to the bombing, and the legal process began. Terry Nichols, who had met McVeigh when they were in the army together, was arrested in Herington, Kansas, where he lived with his wife and daughter. The Tenth Circuit chief judge designated Richard Matsch, chief judge for the District of Colorado, to preside over the case. Judge Matsch came to …


Responding To Independent Juror Research In The Internet Age: Positive Rules, Negative Rules, And Outside Mechanisms, Robbie Manhas Mar 2014

Responding To Independent Juror Research In The Internet Age: Positive Rules, Negative Rules, And Outside Mechanisms, Robbie Manhas

Michigan Law Review

Independent juror research is an old problem for jury trials. It invites potentially prejudicial, irrelevant, and inaccurate information to guide jury decisionmaking. At the same time, independent juror research compromises our adversarial system by preventing parties from responding to all the evidence under consideration and obfuscating the record on which the jury’s decision is made. These threats have only increased in the internet age, where inappropriate sources of information are ubiquitous and where improper access is hard to detect. Nevertheless, courts and parties continue to engage in the same inhibitory measures they have employed for decades. This Note argues for …


Toward A Child-Centered Approach To Evaluating Claims Of Alienation In High-Conflict Custody Disputes, Allison M. Nichols Feb 2014

Toward A Child-Centered Approach To Evaluating Claims Of Alienation In High-Conflict Custody Disputes, Allison M. Nichols

Michigan Law Review

Theories of parental alienation abound in high-conflict custody cases. The image of one parent brainwashing a child against the other parent fits with what we think we know about family dynamics during divorce. The concept of a diagnosable “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (“PAS”) developed as an attempt to explain this phenomenon, but it has been widely discredited by mental health professionals and thus fails the standard for evidentiary admissibility. Nevertheless, PAS and related theories continue to influence the decisions of family courts, and even in jurisdictions that explicitly reject such theories, judges still face the daunting task of resolving these volatile …


Holding Up And Holding Out, Colleen V. Chien Jan 2014

Holding Up And Holding Out, Colleen V. Chien

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Patent “hold-up” and patent “hold-out” present important, alternative theories for what ails the patent system. Patent “hold-up” occurs when a patent owner sues a company when it is most vulnerable—after it has implemented a technology—and is able wrest a settlement because it is too late for the company to change course. Patent “hold-out” is the practice of companies routinely ignoring patents and resisting patent owner demands because the odds of getting caught are small. Hold-up has arguably predicted the current patent crises, and the ex ante assertion of technology patents whether in the smartphone war, standards, or patent “troll” context. …


Gender-Conscious Confrontation: The Accuser-Obligation Approach Revisited, Michael El-Zein Jan 2014

Gender-Conscious Confrontation: The Accuser-Obligation Approach Revisited, Michael El-Zein

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The Supreme Court’s recent Confrontation Clause decisions have had a dramatic effect on domestic violence prosecution throughout the United States, sparking debate about possible solutions to an increasingly difficult trial process for prosecutors and the survivors they represent. In this Note, I revisit and reinterpret the suggestion by Professor Sherman J. Clark in his article, An Accuser-Obligation Approach to the Confrontation Clause,1 that we should view the Confrontation Clause primarily as an obligation of the accuser rather than a right of the accused. Specifically, I reevaluate Clark’s proposition using a gendered lens, ultimately suggesting a novel solution to the problem …


Parallel Justice: Creating Causes Of Action For Mandatory Mediation, Marie A. Failinger Jan 2014

Parallel Justice: Creating Causes Of Action For Mandatory Mediation, Marie A. Failinger

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The American common law system should adopt court-connected mandatory mediation as a parallel system of justice for some cases that are currently not justiciable, such as wrongs caused by constitutionally protected behavior. As evidence that such a system is practical, this Article describes systemic and ethical parallels between court-connected mediation and the rise of the equity courts in medieval England, demonstrating that there are no insurmountable practical objections to the creation of “mediation-only” causes of action. The Article then explores the constitutional concerns surrounding the idea of “mandatory mediation-only” causes of action, using constitutional hate speech and invasion of privacy …


Training The New Litigator: Some Assembly Required, Leonard M. Niehoff Jan 2014

Training The New Litigator: Some Assembly Required, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

The financial crisis of 2008 brought the legal profession to a crossroads. Indeed, it brought the profession to so many crossroads that we awoke to find ourselves in a surreal cityscape that seemed to consist of nothing but dangerous intersections. Law firms faced tough decisions about which way to go: Should we get smaller, or stay the course, or take advantage of the buyer's market for new and lateral hires? Should we jettison struggling clients or stand beside them? Should we cut budgets for business development, or do we need them now more than ever? Should we pursue some practice …


Can We Calculate Fairness And Reasonableness? Determining What Satisfies The Fair Cross-Section Requirement Of The Sixth Amendment, Colleen P. Fitzharris Dec 2013

Can We Calculate Fairness And Reasonableness? Determining What Satisfies The Fair Cross-Section Requirement Of The Sixth Amendment, Colleen P. Fitzharris

Michigan Law Review

The Impartial Jury Clause of the Sixth Amendment requires that the venire from which the state and the defendant draw a twelve-person petit jury be a fair cross-section of the community. The Supreme Court announced a three-prong test in Duren v. Missouri to help courts determine whether there has been a Sixth Amendment violation: (1) whether a distinctive group in the community was excluded; (2) whether the venire was not a fair and reasonable representation of the county population as a whole; and (3) whether that underrepresentation was the result of systematic exclusion. When evaluating the second prong, courts routinely …


An Implausible Standard For Affirmative Defenses, Stephen Mayer Nov 2013

An Implausible Standard For Affirmative Defenses, Stephen Mayer

Michigan Law Review

In the wake of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the federal district courts split over whether to apply Twombly’s plausibility standard to the pleading of affirmative defenses. Initially, a majority of district courts extended Twombly to defense pleadings, but recently the courts that have declined to extend the plausibility standard have gained majority status. This Note provides a comprehensive analysis of each side of the plausibility split, identifying several hidden assumptions motivating the district courts’ decisions. Drawing from its analysis of the two opposing positions, this Note responds to the courts that have applied plausibility pleading …


Adaptation And The Courtroom: Judging Climate Science, Kirsten Engel, Jonathan Overpeck Sep 2013

Adaptation And The Courtroom: Judging Climate Science, Kirsten Engel, Jonathan Overpeck

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Climate science is increasingly showing up in courtroom disputes over the duty to adapt to climate change. While judges play a critical role in evaluating scientific evidence, they are not apt to be familiar with the basic methods of climate science nor with the role played by peer review, publication, and training of climate scientists. This Article is an attempt to educate the bench and the bar on the basics of the discipline of climate science, which we contend is a distinct scientific discipline. We propose a series of principles to guide a judge’s evaluation of the reliability and weight …


Walking The Class Action Maze: Toward A More Functional Rule 23, Robert G. Bone Jun 2013

Walking The Class Action Maze: Toward A More Functional Rule 23, Robert G. Bone

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over roughly the past fifteen years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have limited access to class actions. Many of the more restrictive decisions-such as Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., and Wal- Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes-are based on interpretations of Rule 23 and thus fall within the power of the Advisory Committee and rulemaking process to modify. This Article proposes revisions to Rule 23 designed to deal with some of these decisions and to make the class action a more pragmatic and functional device. It focuses on two areas: (1) the constraints imposed by …


The Future Of Classwide Punitive Damages, Catherine M. Sharkey Jun 2013

The Future Of Classwide Punitive Damages, Catherine M. Sharkey

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Conventional wisdom holds that the punitive damages class action is susceptiblenot only to doctrinal restraints imposed on class actions but also to constitutionaldue process limitations placed on punitive damages. Thus, it would seem that theprospects for punitive damages classes are even grimmer than for class actionsgenerally.This conventional picture misunderstands the role of punitive damages and, inparticular, the relationship between class actions and punitive damages. It eitherignores or underestimates the distinctly societal element of punitive damages, whichmakes them especially conducive to aggregate treatment. Furthermore, punitivedamages classes offer a solution to the constitutional due process problem of juriesawarding "classwide" damages in a …


The Future Of Securities Class Actions Against Foreign Companies: China And Comity Concerns, Dana M. Muir, Junhai Liu, Haiyan Xu Jun 2013

The Future Of Securities Class Actions Against Foreign Companies: China And Comity Concerns, Dana M. Muir, Junhai Liu, Haiyan Xu

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., the U.S. Supreme Court limited the application of U.S. securities fraud law in transnational situations. The Supreme Court noted that its decision was influenced by international comity considerations. In this Article, we evaluate the availability of class actions in China in cases involving alleged securities fraud. Because we find that the availability of those actions is too limited to fully protect U.S. shareholders, we argue that U.S. investors should be permitted to bring securities fraud class actions against non-U.S. companies whose securities are traded on a U.S. exchange regardless of where those investors …


Counsel's Control Over The Presentation Of Mitigating Evidence During Capital Sentencing, James Michael Blakemore May 2013

Counsel's Control Over The Presentation Of Mitigating Evidence During Capital Sentencing, James Michael Blakemore

Michigan Law Review

The Sixth Amendment gives a defendant the right to control his defense and the right to a lawyer's assistance. A lawyer's assistance, however, sometimes interferes with a defendant's control over his case. As a result, the Supreme Court, over time, has had to delineate the spheres of authority that pertain to counsel and defendant respectively. The Court has not yet decisively assigned control over mitigating evidence to either counsel or defendant. This Note argues that counsel should control the presentation of mitigating evidence during capital sentencing. First, and most importantly, decisions concerning the presentation of mitigating evidence are best characterized …


Fish And Federalism: How The Asian Carp Litigation Highlights A Decifiency In The Federal Common Law Displacement Analysis, Molly M. Watters Apr 2013

Fish And Federalism: How The Asian Carp Litigation Highlights A Decifiency In The Federal Common Law Displacement Analysis, Molly M. Watters

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

In response to the growing threat posed by the progress of Asian carp up the Mississippi River toward the Great Lakes, and with increased frustration with the federal response to the imminent problem, in 2010, five Great Lakes states sued the Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to force a more desirable and potentially more effective strategy to prevent the Asian carp from infiltrating the Great Lakes: closing the Chicago locks. This Note examines the federal common law displacement analysis through the lens of the Asian carp litigation. Both the Federal District Court …


Securities Class Actions And Bankrupt Companies, James J. Park Feb 2013

Securities Class Actions And Bankrupt Companies, James J. Park

Michigan Law Review

Securities class actions are often criticized as wasteful strike suits that target temporary fluctuations in the stock prices of otherwise healthy companies. The securities class actions brought by investors of Enron and WorldCom, companies that fell into bankruptcy in the wake of fraud, resulted in the recovery of billions of dollars in permanent shareholder losses and provide a powerful counterexample to this critique. An issuer's bankruptcy may affect how judges and parties perceive securities class actions and their merits, yet little is known about the subset of cases where the company is bankrupt. This is the first extensive empirical study …


Joinder Under The Aia: Shifting Non-Practicing Entity Patent Assertions Away From Small Businesses, Xun Liu Jan 2013

Joinder Under The Aia: Shifting Non-Practicing Entity Patent Assertions Away From Small Businesses, Xun Liu

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

When the America Invents Act ("AIA ") was signed in September 2011, many feared the law might benefit larger corporations at the expense of small businesses. This Note examines how one portion of the AIA, governing joinder in patent cases, might actually benefit small businesses by reducing patent assertions from non-practicing entities ("NPEs"). NPE assertions disproportionately affect small businesses, both because NPEs target small businesses more frequently and because patent assertions have a greater impact on individual companies. Prior to the AIA, joining multiple defendants in a single lawsuit offered important advantages for patent holders and allowed NPEs to achieve …


Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington Jan 2013

Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Two years ago I ranted against the Supreme Court's subversion of the Rules Enabling Act and its opposition to the benign aims of the twentieth-century progressive law reformers expressed summarily in Rule 1 of our Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I observed then that the majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court appeared to have joined the Chamber of Commerce, aligning themselves also with Vice President Dan Quayle's 1989 Council on Competitiveness that denounced effective civil procedure as an enemy of economic development. I was then commenting adversely on what the Court had done to transform Rule 8. I …


The Pastor, The Burning House, And The Double Jeopardy Clause: The True Story Behind Evans V. Michigan, David A. Moran Jan 2013

The Pastor, The Burning House, And The Double Jeopardy Clause: The True Story Behind Evans V. Michigan, David A. Moran

Articles

The true story behind Evans v. Michigan is that a man who was probably innocent, and who would almost certainly have been acquitted by the jury, had his trial shortened after it became obvious to the judge that the police had picked up a man who had nothing to do with the fire. In other words, the facts set forth by the Michigan Supreme Court, and repeated by Alito, were grossly misleading. And because I, like Alito, believed the Michigan Supreme Court’s version of the facts, I made a silly mistake when I agreed to take the case. That silly …


The S&P Litigation And Access To Federal Court: A Case Study In The Limits Of Our Removal Model, Gil Seinfeld Jan 2013

The S&P Litigation And Access To Federal Court: A Case Study In The Limits Of Our Removal Model, Gil Seinfeld

Articles

On June 6, 2013, the United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered the consolidation of fifteen actions filed by state attorneys general against the Standard & Poor’s rating agency for its role in the collapse of the market for structured finance securities. The cases are important: The underlying events shook markets worldwide and contributed to a global recession, the legal actions themselves take aim at foundational aspects of the way rating agencies go about their business, and the suits threaten the imposition of significant fines and penalties against S&P. So it is unsurprising that the order of the MDL …


Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger Jan 2013

Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …


Franchise Goodwill: Take A Sad Song And Make It Better, Robert W. Emerson Jan 2013

Franchise Goodwill: Take A Sad Song And Make It Better, Robert W. Emerson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The end of a franchisor-franchisee relationship is often like a divorce, with the parties engaged in a heated battle over the ownership of the franchise goodwill. In this debate, the same franchisors or franchisees often change their positions on goodwill ownership depending on current needs. This Article analyzes cases in many areas of franchise law to determine why franchisors and franchisees engage in such inconsistent reasoning, what the consequences are for franchising, and if there are ways to produce a more logical and efficient form of analysis and debate. In addressing the most contentious issues of franchising, adherence by litigants …


Is The Prosecution Of War Crimes Just And Effective? Rethinking The Lessons From Sociology And Psychology, Ziv Bohrer Jun 2012

Is The Prosecution Of War Crimes Just And Effective? Rethinking The Lessons From Sociology And Psychology, Ziv Bohrer

Michigan Journal of International Law

Should perpetrators of genocide, violent acts against civilians during war, or other massive violations of core human rights be punished? International criminal law (ICL) answers this question affirmatively, asserting that the punishment of such atrocities is just and that their effective prosecution can (and should) contribute to the prevention of such future acts. Moreover, an increasing attempt has been made in the international and domestic arenas to act in accordance with these assertions of ICL through the prosecution of war crimes. During the last two decades the role of ICL has become gradually more significant, and the fall of the …


De-Frauding The System: Sham Plaintiffs And The Fraudulent Joinder Doctrine, Matthew C. Monahan May 2012

De-Frauding The System: Sham Plaintiffs And The Fraudulent Joinder Doctrine, Matthew C. Monahan

Michigan Law Review

Playing off the strict requirements of federal diversity jurisdiction, plaintiffs can structure their suits to prevent removal to federal court. A common way to preclude removability is to join a nondiverse party. Although plaintiffs have a great deal of flexibility, they may include only those parties that have a stake in the lawsuit. Put another way, a court will not permit a plaintiff to join a party to a lawsuit when that party is being joined solely to prevent removal. The most useful tool federal courts employ to prevent this form of jurisdictional manipulation is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure …


Taking The English Right To Counsel Seriously In American Civil Gideon Litigation, Scott F. Llewellyn, Brian Hawkins Apr 2012

Taking The English Right To Counsel Seriously In American Civil Gideon Litigation, Scott F. Llewellyn, Brian Hawkins

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Courts have rejected a right to counsel for indigent civil litigants under the U.S. Constitution. But in some American states, that right arguably already exists as a matter of common law, albeit derived from centuries-old English common and statutory law. This Article analyzes the viability of arguments for incorporating the old English right to counsel in the twenty-seven American states that continue to recognize old English common and statutory law as a source of binding authority. Such "originalist" arguments may be appealing to judges who are more willing to revive a historically based right than establish a new right based …


Copyright And The Vagueness Doctrine, Bradley E. Abruzzi Feb 2012

Copyright And The Vagueness Doctrine, Bradley E. Abruzzi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Constitution's void-for-vagueness doctrine is itself vaguely stated. The doctrine does little to describe at what point vague laws-other than those that are entirely standardless-become unconstitutionally vague. Rather than explore this territory, the Supreme Court has identified three collateral factors that affect its inclination to invalidate a law for vagueness: (1) whether the law burdens the exercise of constitutional rights, (2) whether the law is punitive in nature, and (3) whether the law overlays a defendant-protective scienter requirement. Measured against these factors, copyright law does not meet the vagueness doctrine's minimum requirement of fair notice to the public. Copyright, by …


Federal Discovery Stays, Gideon Mark Feb 2012

Federal Discovery Stays, Gideon Mark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In federal civil litigation, unless a discretionary stay is granted, discovery often proceeds while motions to dismiss are pending. Plaintiffs with non-meritorious cases can compel defendants to spend massively on electronic discovery before courts ever rule on such motions. Defendants who are unable or unwilling to incur the huge up-front expense of electronic discovery may be forced to settle non-meritorious claims. To address multiple electronic discovery issues, Congress amended the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2006 and the Federal Rules of Evidence in 2008. However, the amendments failed to significantly reduce costs and failed to address the critical issue …