Litigation Commons^™

The Fine Line Between Identifiers Capable Of Identifying And Identifiable Information, Aleksandra Popova

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …

Prosecutors And Voters Are Becoming Smart On Crime, Barbara L. Mcquade

Articles

How to explain the recent trend of electing reform-minded local prosecutors? It may be that voters are seeing through tough talk to embrace smarter strategies to reduce crime.

Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is …

Symposium: This Case Is Moot, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Adam Samaha

Faculty Scholarship

Forget guns for a moment. Imagine that, once upon a time, Boca Raton had a rule that prohibited its residents from transporting their golf clubs to driving ranges outside the city. Boca’s finest golfers challenged the constitutionality of the rule in court. Now imagine that the city thought twice and repealed the rule and that Florida then passed a statute authorizing people to transport their clubs to the driving ranges of their choice. The golfers could live happily ever after.

Unintended Consequences, Loopholes, And Gibberish: Why There Are Still Securities Act Class Actions In State Courts, Brian Elzweig

Texas A&M Law Review

This Article examines Congress’s decades-long attempt to ensure that securities class action lawsuits of national importance are litigated in federal courts. The intent is limiting strike suits. Congress attempted to curtail strike suits through the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (“PSLRA”). The PSLRA required heightened pleading requirements to ensure the validity of federal securities class actions. Instead of solving the dilemma, plaintiffs circumvented the PSLRA by bringing fraud cases as state law claims. To combat the circumvention of the PSLRA, Congress enacted the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act (“SLUSA”). SLUSA federally preempted state law claims based on …

Reforming Institutions: The Judicial Function In Bankruptcy And Public Law Litigation, Kathleen G. Noonan, Jonathan C. Lipson, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Public law litigation (PLL) is among the most important and controversial types of dispute that courts face. These civil class actions seek to reform public agencies such as police departments, prison systems, and child welfare agencies that have failed to meet basic statutory or constitutional obligations. They are controversial because critics assume that judicial intervention is categorically undemocratic or beyond judicial expertise.

This Article reveals flaws in these criticisms by comparing the judicial function in PLL to that in corporate bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted. Our comparison shows that judicial …

Emoluments And President Trump, John Mikhail

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Curious Incident Of The Falling Win Rate: Individual Vs System-Level Justification And The Rule Of Law, Peter Siegelman, Alexandra Lahav

Faculty Articles and Papers

For forty quarters starting in 1985, the plaintiff win rate in adjudicated civil cases in federal courts fell almost continuously, from 70% to 30%, where it remained - albeit with increased volatility - for the next twenty years. This Essay explores the reasons for this decline and the need for systemic explanations for the phenomenon. Approximately 60% of the fall could be attributable to the changing makeup of the federal docket, but that leaves 40% of the fall (that is, a win rate decline of 14 percentage points over a ten year period) unaccounted for. We show that the most …

The Compliance Process, Veronica Root

Indiana Law Journal

Even as regulators and prosecutors proclaim the importance of effective compliance programs, failures persist. Organizations fail to ensure that they and their agents comply with legal and regulatory requirements, industry practices, and their own internal policies and norms. From the companies that provide our news, to the financial institutions that serve as our bankers, to the corporations that make our cars, compliance programs fail to prevent misconduct each and every day. The causes of these compliance failures are multifaceted and include general enforcement deficiencies, difficulties associated with overseeing compliance programs within complex organizations, and failures to establish a culture of …

Saliency, Anchors & Frames: A Multicomponent Damages Experiment, Bernard Chao

Michigan Technology Law Review

Modern technology products contain thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of different features. Nonetheless, when electronics manufacturers are sued for patent infringement, these suits typically accuse only one feature, or in more complex suits, a handful of features, of actual patent infringement. But damages verdicts often do not reflect the relatively small contribution an individual patent makes to an infringing product. One study observed that verdicts in these types of cases average 9.98% of the price of the entire product. While both courts and commentators have blamed the law of patent damages, the role cognitive biases play in these outsized damages …

Unfamiliar Justice: Indigent Criminal Defendants' Experiences With Civil Legal Needs, Lauren Sudeall, Ruth Richardson

Faculty Publications By Year

Our legal system - and much of the research conducted on that system - often separates people and issues into civil and criminal silos. However, those two worlds intersect and influence one another in important ways. The qualitative empirical study that forms the basis of this Article bridges the civil-criminal divide by exploring the life circumstances and events of public defender clients to determine how they experience and respond to civil legal problems.

To date, studies addressing civil legal needs more generally have not focused on those individuals enmeshed with the criminal justice system, even though that group offers a …

Evidence Without Rules, Bennett Capers

Notre Dame Law Review

Much of what we tell ourselves about the Rules of Evidence—that they serve as an all-seeing gatekeeper, checking evidence for relevance and trustworthiness, screening it for unfair prejudice—is simply wrong. In courtrooms every day, fact finders rely on “evidence”—for example, a style of dress, the presence of family members in the gallery, and of course race—that rarely passes as evidence in the formal sense, and thus breezes past evidentiary gatekeepers unseen and unchecked. This Article calls much needed attention to this other evidence and demonstrates that such unregulated evidence matters. Jurors use this other evidence to decide whether to find …

Investing In Corporate Procedure, Jessica M. Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Corporate litigation is in crisis. At the state level, shareholder lawsuits challenging mergers and other corporate decisions are ubiquitous but rarely end with meaningful relief for shareholders. At the federal level, securities class actions are rife with ethical challenges and low-value settlements. Over the last several decades, multiple groups — including judges, legislatures, and corporate boards — have tried to solve this problem, but all have come up short. This Article argues that the solution lies in rewriting the procedural rules that govern corporate lawsuits. New standing requirements would lead to better screening of these claims. Discovery limits and heightened …

Winning The Right To Housing : Critical Reflections On A Holistic Approach To Public Interest Litigation, Fay Faraday, Tracy Heffernan, Helen Luu

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Class Actions, Indivisibility, And Rule 23(B)(2), Maureen Carroll

Articles

The federal class-action rule contains a provision, Rule 23(b)(2), that authorizes class-wide injunctive or declaratory relief for class-wide wrongs. The procedural needs of civil rights litigation motivated the adoption of the provision in 1966, and in the intervening years, it has played an important role in managing efforts to bring about systemic change. At the same time, courts have sometimes struggled to articulate what plaintiffs must show in order to invoke Rule 23(b)(2). A few years ago, the Supreme Court weighed in, stating that the key to this type of class action is the “indivisible” nature of the remedy the …

Artificial Intelligence And Role-Reversible Judgment, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen Henderson

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Intelligent machines increasingly outperform human experts, raising the question of when (and why) humans should remain ‘in the loop’ of decision-making. One common answer focuses on outcomes: relying on intuition and experience, humans are capable of identifying interpretive errors—sometimes disastrous errors—that elude machines. Though plausible today, this argument will wear thin as technology evolves.

In this Article, we seek out sturdier ground: a defense of human judgment that focuses on the normative integrity of decision-making. Specifically, we propose an account of democratic equality as ‘role-reversibility.’ In a democracy, those tasked with making decisions should be susceptible, reciprocally, to the impact …

Jason’S Long Night At Camp Blood: Surveying The Independent Copyrightability Of Jason Voorhees In The Wake Of Horror Inc. V. Miller, Tim Kelly

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Virtual Hearings And Blockchain Technology Solutions In Criminal Law, Chantell Bergquist

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Technology has evolved and raided our personal and professional lives. Although the courts are not immune to the advancement and integration of technology, the courts are not keeping up with relevant technological advancements. Historically, courts have been hesitant to embrace new technologies despite the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure creates the right to a “just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” Likewise, the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct have determined attorneys must “keep abreast of …

Judges Do It Better: Why Judges Can (And Should) Decide Life Or Death, Andrew R. Ford

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Following its decision in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court of the United States has attempted to standardize procedures that states use to subject offenders to the ultimate penalty. In practice, this attempt at standardization has divided capital sentencing into two distinct parts: the death eligibility decision and the death selection decision. The eligibility decision addresses whether the sentencer may impose the death penalty, while the selection decision determines who among that limited subset of eligible offenders is sentenced to death. In Ring v. Arizona, the Court held for the first time that the Sixth Amendment right to …

Calls For Speculation: An Experimental Examination Of Juror Perceptions Of Attorney Objections, Krystia Reed

Buffalo Law Review

Should attorneys object during trial? Does preserving the record outweigh the potential costs of objections, such as upsetting the jury or drawing attention to the evidence? Legal scholars have opined on the delicate balance attorneys must strike in their decisions to object, but researchers have offered little to guide attorneys making these in-the-moment decisions. I discuss results from two empirical studies that provide evidence that attorneys have less to fear from objections than legal scholars suggest. Based on these results, I provide suggestions for practicing attorneys.

Table Of Contents, Jtaa Editors

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Jtaa Editors

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Michelle A. Reid

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Masthead, Jtaa Editors

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Audible: Contractual Relations Between Schools And Their Student-Athletes Are Due For A Reroute, Tyler Jordan

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Land Of The Free Market: U.S. Companies Continue To Enjoy Greater Legal Protection Than Consumers, Christopher Leblanc

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

All For One And One For - Some: Challenging The Constitutionality Of Massachusetts Charter School Legislation After Doe No. 1 V. Secretary Of Education, Perry Gans

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Reexamining The Admissibility Of The Defendant's Non-Inculpatory Statements At Trial, Wes Reber Porter

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Truancy, Secure Detention, And The Right To Liberty, Amanda Mcnelly

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.