Litigation Commons^™

Editor's Note, Kori Dean

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

America’S Extraordinary And Compelling Problem: An Assessment Of The Sentence Modification Process In The Federal District Courts And The Need To Remove The Bureau Of Prison’S Gatekeeper Role, Katherine Chenail

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

The Case For Race: An Exploration Of Whether The United States Olympic And Paralympic Committee Can Require Athletes To Sign Away Their Right To Protest, Leon Rotenstein

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—Dangers Of The Substantive Due Process State-Created Danger Exception— Irish V. Fowler, 979 F.3d 65 (1st Cir. 2020), Bianca Tomassini

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Employment Law—Intersecting Identities & Ideologies, Nondiscrimination, And The First Amendment Ministerial Exception Defense—Deweese-Boyd V. Gordon College, 163 N.E.3d 1000 (Mass. 2021), Margaret R. Austen

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Education Law—Idea Eligibility: Hindsight Is 20/20—Lisa M. Ex Rel. J.M. V. Leander Indep. Sch. Dist., 924 F.3d 205 (5th Cir. 2019), Sydney Doneen

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Masthead, Jtaa Editors

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Allison Eddy

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Drawing Lines: Reconciling Disparate Standards Of Ada Title Iii Protections In An Online World, Benjamin Holman

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—First Circuit Clearly Unconvinced By Lack Of Procedural Safeguards In Proving Noncitizens’ Flight Risk—Hernandez-Lara V. Lyons, 10 F.4th 19 (1st Cir. 2021), Shannah Colbert

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Debt Collection—A Benign Language Exception Should Be Read Into The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act’S “Unfair Practices” Section—Donovan V. Firstcredit, Inc., 983 F.3d 246 (6th Cir. 2020), Shiri Pagliuso

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—Constitutionality Of Police Caretaking Conduct Inside The Home—Calinga V. Strom, 141 S. Ct. 1596 (2021), Angela Bartucca

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, Allison Eddy

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

The Judicial War On Drugs: Deciding Whether To Apply The Federal Or State Definition Of Controlled Substance Offenses For Career Offender Sentencing Enhancements, Marisa Chamberland

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—An Alternative Analysis To Intangible Emotional Harm Standing In The Way Of Constitutional Standing—Vazzano V. Receivable Mgmt. Servs., Llc, No. 3:21-Cv-0825-D, 2022 U.S. Dist. Lexis 144258 (N.D. Tex. Aug. 12 2022), Emily Larovere

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

A Machete For The Patent Thicket: Using Noerr-Pennington Doctrine’S Sham Exception To Challenge Abusive Patent Tactics By Pharmaceutical Companies, Lisa Orucevic

Vanderbilt Law Review

Outrageous drug prices have dominated news coverage of the American healthcare system for years. Yet despite widespread condemnation of skyrocketing drug prices, nothing seems to change. Pharmaceutical companies can raise drug prices with impunity because they hold patents on their drugs, which give them monopolies. These monopolies are only supposed to last twenty years, and then competing lower-cost drugs like generics can enter the market, driving down the costs of pharmaceuticals for all. But pharmaceutical companies have created “patent thickets,” dense webs of overlapping patents surrounding one drug, which have artificially extended the companies’ monopolies for years or even decades …

Civil Rights Catch 22s, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

The Future Of Cryptocurrency And Real Estate Transactions, Rachel Silverstein

Touro Law Review

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are all the rage right now and are beginning to make their ways into everyday transactions— including real estate transactions. This article discusses whether using cryptocurrencies to complete real estate transactions will become the norm in the near future. Cryptocurrency laws in general are few and far between, but laws surrounding cryptocurrency and real property are even more sparse. Recent case law involving cryptocurrency is a major focus of this article, along with background knowledge about cryptocurrency and the meaning of “money” as we know it today. The article concludes with a discussion about the unlikelihood …

Balancing Clashing Scholars’ Academic Freedoms, Sharona Aharoni-Goldenberg, Gerry Leisman

Touro Law Review

The paper analyzes the scope of scholars’ academic freedom and maintains that it is composed of two pillars. First, inclusion, which is subject to capacity, equality, and the provision of a pro-educational academic environment. Second, academic expression, which refers to teaching and research, freedom of opinion, political participation outside academia and freedom to receive academic materials. Scholars’ academic freedom is limited by professional standards and is subject to the respect of the rights of fellow scholars.

The paper argues that scholars’ academic freedom is not confined to a scholar-state relation but is also relevant to scholar-scholar relations. Hence, scholars’ academic …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Political Ideology And Judicial Administration: Evidence From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kyle Rozema, Adam Chilton, Christopher Anthony Cotropia, David L. Schwartz

Scholarship@WashULaw

We study the effect of political ideology on the administration of the judiciary by investigating how the chief judges of federal district courts set courthouse policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we use novel data on the geographic boundaries of federal courts and on the contents of pandemic orders. We account for state and local conditions and policies by leveraging district courts in states that have multiple judicial districts and that have courthouses in multiple counties, and we isolate the effect of chief ideology by using simulations that difference out unobserved district-level effects. We find no …

Public Safety Concerns And Meeting The Dudenhoeffer Pleading Standard, Douglass G. Brown

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

This Comment analyzes the recent Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) stock drop cases against The Boeing Company (Boeing) and reviews the underlying pleading standard in these cases that the Supreme Court set forth in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer. With the tremendous amount of assets in retirement plans—and specifically in employee stock ownership plans—litigation under ERISA can be extremely costly to employers, especially those in the airline industry that offer these plans. The current pleading standard for stock drop cases has become a practically insurmountable barrier to plaintiffs, even when their employers know they are negligently creating products …

Pandemic Rules: Covid-19 And The Prison Litigation Reform Act’S Exhaustion Requirement, Betsy Ginsberg, Margo Schlanger

Articles

For over twenty-five years, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) has undermined the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. For people behind bars and their allies, the PLRA makes civil rights cases harder to bring and harder to win—regardless of merit. We have seen the result in the wave of litigation relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning March 2020, incarcerated people facing a high risk of infection because of their incarceration, and a high risk of harm because of their medical status, began to bring lawsuits seeking changes to the policies and practices augmenting the danger to them. Time and again, …

Ethical Duties Of Class Counsel Also Representing Class Representatives, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

In their excellent article entitled May Class Counsel Also Represent Lead Plaintiffs?,¹ Professors Bruce Green and Andrew Kent explore a particular aspect of two broader questions I have also addressed: (1) who should regulate class action lawyers;² and (2) who will regulate class action lawyers?³ I, too, focused on lawyers' conflicts of interest; however, Professors Green and Kent focus even more specifically on conflicts arising from class counsel's simultaneous representation of both the class and individual clients who are serving or will serve as class representatives. Their concern is with three particular scenarios in which the class …

Ford's Underlying Controversy, Christine P. Bartholomew, Anya Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

Personal jurisdiction—the doctrine that determines where a plaintiff can sue—is a mess. Everyone agrees that a court can exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant with sufficient in-state contacts related to a plaintiff’s claim. This Article reveals, however, that courts diverge radically in their understanding of what a claim is. Without stating so outright, some courts limit the claim to a cause of action or its elements, while others understand it to encompass the controversy underlying the litigation. What is worse, few have noticed that these discrepancies even exist, much less explained why. This Article does just that. We show that …

Reflections On Nomos: Paideic Communities And Same Sex Weddings, Marie A. Failinger

Touro Law Review

Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative is an instructive tale for the constitutional battle over whether religious wedding vendors must be required to serve same-sex couples. He helps us see how contending communities’ deep narratives of martyrdom and obedience to the values of their paideic communities can be silenced by the imperial community’s insistence on choosing one community’s story over another community’s in adjudication. The wedding vendor cases call for an alternative to jurispathic violence, for a constitutionally redemptive response that prizes a nomos of inclusion and respect for difference.

Collected Wisdom On Selecting Leaders And Managing Mdls, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Stephen Bough

Scholarly Works

Today, nearly one out of every two new suits filed in federal civil court is part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL). Initially designed to organize antitrust cases against electrical equipment manufacturers, MDL’s adaptability and minimal requirements made it the preferred approach for coordinating pretrial process for all manner of cases, from securities, employment, intellectual property, and antitrust to sales practices, common disasters, and products liability. Yet, the simplicity of MDL’s technical requirements—that cases are pending in different districts and share a common factual question—belie the complexity of the proceedings themselves. Governed principally by insiders’ unwritten but longstanding norms, both newly-appointed …

Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams

Scholarly Works

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup.

Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure …

Environmental Law, Eleventh Circuit Survey, Travis M. Trimble

Scholarly Works

In 2021, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, in an issue of first impression, concluded that the United States is not a "person" under the contribution provision of the Oil Pollution Act (OPA),2 and therefore the provision did not waive the sovereign immunity of the United States. For this and other reasons a plaintiff could not recover in contribution from the United States for the plaintiffs costs of cleaning up an oil spill, even where the plaintiff alleged the spill was the result of the sole negligence of the United States. The United States District …