Litigation Commons^™

Rural Renting: An Empirical Portrait Of Eviction, Cassie Chambers Armstrong, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

University of Cincinnati Law Review

In this Study, we examine eviction from the renter’s perspective. Specifically, we seek to understand what factors influence the eviction process—and the likelihood it will result in a judgment against a renter—once a property owner initiates legal proceedings. To this end, we used records from 202,572 eviction cases filed by landlords in Kentucky state courts. We employed statistical modeling to determine what impacted whether each case ultimately ended in a judgment of eviction against the renter.

Many of our findings were novel, and they were staggering. We found that, holding all else equal, those living in rural areas were at …

Leveling The Playing Field For Racial Justice In The Civil Litigation System, Suzette M. Malveaux

Scholarly Articles

Under the weight of the #MeToo movement and severe public pressure, Congress stopped this unseemly practice for a subset of Americans—those challenging sexual assault and harassment. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFASASHA), passed in 2022, gives these victims a choice of whether to challenge sexual misconduct in court or in arbitration. Such ubiquitous take-it-or-leave-it contracts are now unenforceable, giving this narrow swath of the population the power to decide for themselves how to challenge such outrageous wrongdoing. In Expanding the Ban on Forced Arbitration, Michael Z. Green argues that race discrimination claims should …

Construing "Consideration" In Maine's Recreational Use Statute: Robbins V. Great Northern Paper Co., Russell B. Pierce Jr.

Maine Law Review

Since 1961, when the Legislature enacted the original version of Maine's "recreational use statute," the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has had little opportunity to construe the statute's several components. The recent case of Robbins v. Great Northern Paper Co., however, allowed the court to interpret the "consideration" exception of the statute for the first time. In a 4-3 decision, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, ruled that a $95.00 annual rental fee for noncommercial, recreational use of a lot on the defendant's property did not constitute "consideration" so as to fall within the exception to landowner …

Constitutional Challenges To Caps On Tort Damages: Is Tort Reform The Dragon Slayer Or Is It The Dragon?, Kathryn L. Vezina

Maine Law Review

Liability insurance consumers are convinced the dragon is only sleeping. Because insurance has become a near necessity for businesses, professionals, and municipalities, it is no surprise that fears of the return of insurance unavailability and prohibitive cost cause the boldest policyholders to break out in a cold sweat. In many states, this fear has prompted legislative changes in the civil justice system—tort reform, as a sure-fire way to kill the insurance-crisis dragon. One such tort reform is a statutory limitation on tort damages. In Maine, a legislative proposal capping noneconomic tort damages in medical negligence cases at $250,000 has received …

Cameras In Maine's Courts: Has The Time Come? Will It Ever?, Joseph M. O'Connor

Maine Law Review

Should television cameras be allowed in Maine's courtrooms? The answer to this question implicates policies involving the rights of parties, witnesses, the media, and the public. Nearly ten years ago, the Supreme Court ruled conclusively that there is no constitutional impediment to allowing television coverage of trials in state courts. Since then, the majority of states have promulgated rules, with greater or lesser degrees of restriction, allowing television coverage of proceedings in their courts. This trend has not abated; with the adoption of audio-visual coverage rules by the Vermont Supreme Court in 1989, Maine is now the only New England …

In Pursuit Of The Appropriate Standard Of Liability For Defective Product Designs, Christina M. Moylan

Maine Law Review

Since the advent of strict products liability with the holding in Greenman v. Yuba Products Co. in 1963 and the promulgation of section 402A of the Restatement [Second] of Torts ("Restatement") in 1965, courts have struggled to strike an appropriate balance between competing social policies with respect to liability for defective products. On the one hand, those injured by defective products should not be burdened by the contractual intricacies of the law of sales or the onerous (virtually insurmountable in products cases) evidentiary obstacles of negligence. On the other hand, most courts agree that manufacturers and distributors should not be …

Majority Rules, Andrew Verstein

Northwestern University Law Review

The “disinterested and independent majority” is one of the most important concepts in corporate law. Corporate actions are almost immune to legal challenge if a suitable majority of directors stands ready to approve it.

Scholars have extensively debated the proper meaning and effect of “disinterested and independent,” but no such literature analyzes “majority.” As a matter of arithmetic, how do we compute whether a given set of directors contains a suitable majority? While seemingly innocuous, the concept of a majority means different things to different courts. Indeed, there may be no majority rule for majority independence. The Article charts and …

A Feedback Loop Of Exclusion: The Treatment Of Bilingualism In The Courtroom, Simone Stover

Northwestern University Law Review

In the 1991 case Hernandez v. New York, the United States Supreme Court characterized bilingualism as a race-neutral trait that can be used to exclude individuals from jury service. This Note proceeds by demonstrating how the current state of the law undermines the interests of bilingual individuals and then proposes a solution. Focusing specifically on Hispanic bilingual Spanish speakers, this Note first employs Professor Jennifer Lackey’s multi-directional credibility model to show that bilingual Spanish speakers suffer injustice in the courtroom due to both credibility deficits and excesses. Following this analysis, it proposes a possible solution to this issue: an …

Cy Pres Silliness: Remedies That Do Not Remediate The Harm, Phil Pillari

Northwestern University Law Review

Class actions play an important role in civil litigation, but they suffer from a serious problem. No matter how many plaintiffs are in the class, the individual claims are often miniscule, which can make distributing the inevitable settlement futile. Very few people make a claim, and it often costs more to mail the check than the check is worth. To solve this problem, Steven Shepherd proposed importing the cy pres doctrine (a trusts and estates device that allows courts to rewrite an unenforceable trust) into the class actions context. Shepherd’s framework instructs courts to devise the next best alternative for …

There Is No Helpful General Rule About Appealing Dismissals Without Prejudice, Bryan Lammon

Michigan Law Review Online

With some frequency, courts wrestle with whether litigants can appeal after dismissal without prejudice. But there is no helpful general rule to answer this question. That’s because the without-prejudice designation is more or less irrelevant to whether the dismissal is a final, appealable decision. In this Essay, I show that the nature of the underlying dismissal— what the dismissal did, not its without-prejudice nature—is what matters for appealability. Courts would do well to ignore whether an action was dismissed without prejudice when it comes to determining appealability.

Curbing Private Enforcement Of The Voting Rights Act: Thoughts On Recent Developments, Ellen D. Katz

Michigan Law Review Online

For decades, private plaintiffs have brought claims to enforce key provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Recent decisions have tossed out these claims on the ground that enforcement authority lies solely with the Attorney General of the United States. These decisions are deeply flawed. The VRA’s text and structure, history, precedent, and longstanding practice all support private enforcement of the VRA—including private enforcement of Sections 2 and 11(b). This Essay explains why.

Contempt: The Original Judicial Cheat Code, Ryan L. Scott

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The judicial contempt power challenges the fundamental rights enshrined in America’s Constitution. Imagine spending eight years in federal prison with no right to a jury trial or a court appointed attorney. Your only reprieve is the discretion of the judge who is imprisoning you. Meaningful appeals and even habeas corpus actions are generally not available remedies. Instead, what was originally justified as an inherent power of the court, necessary to maintain order and decorum, is increasingly used for trivial offenses or to incarcerate individuals for far longer than their possible crimes would otherwise warrant.

Despite widespread instances of abuse of …

An Updated Practical Guide To Taking And Defending Depositions, Gary S. Gildin

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The deposition offers a singular opportunity to handcuff the deponent to an irreversible script. Consequently, both the attorney taking the deposition and defending counsel must prepare for and conduct the deposition with equal if not greater care than the trial.

Traditionally, lawyers have used the deposition to discover facts relating to the legal elements and the credibility, perception, and recollection of the witness. However, recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as to how the brain makes decisions have revealed a different genre of evidence that will drive how the trier of fact will decide the case. Today an attorney taking a deposition …

The Liv Golf V. Pga Tour Antitrust Case As A Case Study In Federal Civil Procedure, Michael J. Dube

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article uses LIV Golf Inc. v. PGA Tour, Inc., a sophisticated and headline-grabbing antitrust matter, as a means of instantiating federal civil procedure concepts. The first Part of this Article addresses the unsuccessful motion for a temporary restraining order that in many ways shaped how the litigation proceeded. The second Part examines the dance that is discovery through a focus on a drawn-out dispute regarding a single interrogatory. The final Part drills down on a more novel discovery dispute that began the path towards settlement, namely whether the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 and related common-law doctrine …

How Do You Like Your Books, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Do you ever wonder how it is that libraries can lend books repeatedly, while copyright owners (e.g., book authors) are granted the exclusive right to distribute their copyrighted works? Or how publishers make money selling books at retail prices when a person can resell books (or buy used books) for much less (hello Amazon Used Books for under a dollar!)? The reason is because of copyright’s “first sale” doctrine, 17 U.S.C. § 109, codifying the common law’s exhaustion principle, which says owners of lawfully made copies are allowed to dispose of those copies without regard to copyright law. In other …

Private Law And Mass Claims: Regulating In The Place Of The State, Suzanne Chiodo

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Judicial Preview Oleh Mahkamah Konstitusi Sebagai Upaya Preventif Perlindungan Hak Konstitusional (Studi Komperasi Dengan Mahkamah Konstitusi Chili), Elisabeth Sihaloho, Fifiana Wisnaeni

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

The existence of the Constitutional Court as stated in the provisions of Article 24C of the 1945 Constitution has established the dignity of the Constitutional Court's position as a Guardian of the Constitution which is understood as a judicial institution that protects the constitutional rights of Indonesia citizens. This research is aimed at solving the problem of the constitutional rights of Indonesia citizens who are often injured through legal products in the form of laws. Therefore, this study focuses on studying, analyzing and comparing how the context of judicial preview or can be understood as a test of a draft …

Settlement As Construct: Defining And Counting Party Resolution In Federal District Court, Charlotte S. Alexander, Nathan Dahlberg, Anne M. Tucker

Northwestern University Law Review

Most civil cases settle. Yet generating a definitive settlement rate presents complex definitional and empirical problems, both in what should count as a settlement and how to count it. This Essay makes three contributions to better understanding and defining settlement. First, we propose a flexible, empirically informed, operationalizable definition of settlement as party resolution. Second, we exploit a new federal litigation data source to count party resolutions using machine learning models trained on 11 million docket sheet entries. Third, we offer new findings on party resolution frequency and distribution in the federal courts. Settlement is more widely and differently deployed …

Prosecutorial Data Transparency And Data Justice, Caitlin Glass, Kat M. Albrecht, Perry Moriearty

Northwestern University Law Review

The U.S. criminal legal system is notoriously racialized. Though Black and Latinx people make up less than 30% of U.S. residents, they constitute more than 50% of the nearly two million people currently in U.S. prisons and jails. For decades, research has indicated that one group of decision-makers has had an outsized influence on these numbers: prosecutors. From whom to charge to what sentences to recommend, no actor plays a greater role in determining who goes to prison in this country. Highly subjective and lacking in formal guidance and accountability, prosecutorial decisions are especially vulnerable to racial bias. They are …

Lawyerless Litigants, Filing Fees, Transaction Costs, And The Federal Courts: Learning From Scales, Judith Resnik, Henry Wu, Jenn Dikler, David T. Wong, Romina Lilollari, Claire Stobb, Elizabeth Beling, Avital Fried, Anna Selbrede, Jack Sollows, Mikael Tessema, Julia Udell

Northwestern University Law Review

Two Latin phrases describing litigants—pro se (for oneself) and in forma pauperis (IFP, as a poor person)—prompt this inquiry into the relationship between self-representation and requests for filing fee waivers. We sketch the governing legal principles for people seeking relief in the federal courts, the sources of income of the federal judiciary, the differing regimes to which Congress has subjected incarcerated and nonincarcerated people filing civil lawsuits, and analyses enabled by SCALES, a newly available database that coded 2016 and 2017 federal court docket sheets. This Essay’s account of what can be learned and of the data gaps demonstrates the …

Paying For Performance? Attorneys’ Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica M. Erickson, A. C. Pritchard

Law & Economics Working Papers

This Article studies whether plaintiffs' lawyers matter in securities class actions. We use inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) to compare the results in cases led by top-tier firms against those brought by lower-tier firms. This technique addresses case selection effects by using all of the cases led by a top-tier firm and then weighting the cases led by lower-tier firms based on how similar these cases are to the cases led by top-tier firms. We do find that top-tier lawyers obtain better outcomes for shareholders in a subset of securities class actions, specifically the cases against the larger (although not …

Elastic Batch And Bellwether Proceedings In Mass Arbitration, Bennett Rogers

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note will first succinctly review the history of aggregative litigation, including the decline of traditional Rule 23 class actions, the proliferation of arbitration agreements, and both the legislative and judicial support for this change. Next, it will examine plaintiffs’ response to the rise of arbitration with the creation of mass arbitration networks and explain why some companies started to move away from arbitration. Then it will consider the defense bar’s response to mass arbitration with batch and bellwether proceedings, examine the current bellwether arbitration cases moving through the courts, and introduce the latest arbitral institution making headways with its …

University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review, University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Small Business Prepack: How Subchapter V Paves The Way For Bankruptcy’S Fastest Cases, Christopher D. Hampson, Jeffrey A. Katz

UF Law Faculty Publications

America has long styled itself as a place where entrepreneurs can dream big and—if things go well—make it big too. But when small businesses fail, does the American bankruptcy system provide a real opportunity to preserve value and try again? For decades, bankruptcy professionals, judges, and lawmakers have tried various approaches to small business bankruptcies, none of which seemed to work particularly well. But in 2019, Congress passed the Small Business Reorganization Act (the “SBRA”), one of the most significant amendments to the Bankruptcy Code in a generation. As practitioners, scholars, and judges work out the contours of the rules, …

Analisis Penyelesaian Sengketa Konstruksi Akibat Wanprestasi Dalam Perjanjian Jasa Konstruksi Ditinjau Dari Hukum Perdata, Mayangsari Nurul Imani, Prof. Dr. Rosa Agustina, S.H.,M.H

Lex Patrimonium

This research analyzes how dispute resolution efforts can be made in the event of a construction dispute due to default committed by a party in a construction service agreement. This research is prepared using a doctrinal research method. The author describes and analyses three problems in this research, namely the factors that cause construction disputes based on the provisions in the construction service agreement, efforts to resolve construction disputes due to default by the parties in the construction service agreement, and the court's opinion in resolving construction disputes in Case No. 692/Pdt.G/2019/PN.Jkt.Utr. The results show that construction disputes usually occur …

Rwu School Of Law Social Justice Camp, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

First Amendment And Media Law Diversity Moot Court Competition, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michelle Choate

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu Alumni Honored In Pbn's 2024 40 Under Forty Awards 7-16-2024, Triniti Brown, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Changemakers: Juris Doctorate: Peter Sabian L'17: Practice With A Purpose 7-15-24, Jane Lee, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

A Major Wrong On A Private Right Of Action Under The Voting Rights Act, Macin Graber, Joshua A. Douglas

Washington and Lee Law Review

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Justice Neil Gorsuch posited in a short concurrence that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) does not confer a private right of action. That idea seemingly came out of nowhere, as Supreme Court precedent was clear and no one had suggested that the VRA did not allow private parties to bring suit. Justice Gorsuch’s one-paragraph concurrence was both unsupported and wrong. Even the single case he cited did not support his proposition.

An Arkansas district court and then the Eighth Circuit, however, followed Justice Gorsuch’s lead, ruling that only the federal Department …