Litigation Commons^™

Federal Practice, Richard Mills

Mercer Law Review

The formula for success in trial practice is simple: Be prepared, be decent, and be on time.

There are ninety-four district courts in the United States. Twenty-four states have two or more districts; for example, Illinois and Georgia have three. Twenty-six states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, are single districts. And in all of those ninety-four districts over the last thirty years, the civil cases have tripled! In my district we have quadrupled our caseload in that same time frame. In the last five years alone, we have had …

An Essay On Uncertainty And Fact-Finding In Civil Litigation, With Special Reference To Contract Cases, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Financing Of Litigation By Third-Party Investors: A Share Of Justice?, Poonam Puri

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article addresses the issue of the funding of civil litigation within the framework of access to justice and the normative goal of increasing access to the civil justice system. The author critically analyzes and cautiously advances the case for the recent development of the financing of litigation by third-party investors. The argument is that investor financing has the potential to increase access to the civil justice system by ameliorating the economic barriers to litigation. The author evaluates investor financing against existing public and private models of financing litigation such as legal aid plans, litigation subsidy funds, and contingent fee …

Appellate Procedure, Robin Jean Davis, Louis J. Palmer Jr.

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Agenda: Outdoor Recreation: Promise And Peril In The New West, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center, Colorado. Bureau Of Land Management

Outdoor Recreation: Promise and Peril in the New West (Summer Conference, June 8-10)

Co-sponsored by the Natural Resources Law Center and the Colorado Bureau of Land Management.

The conference will explore several components of the “promise and peril” of the ongoing outdoor recreation explosion. The conference will begin on the morning of June 8 with a series of introductory presentations designed to place the outdoor recreation movement in a useful historical and socioeconomic context. This material will be followed in the afternoon session by a discussion of environmental impacts of outdoor recreation, recognizing that the diversity and magnitude of impacts is as broad as the industry itself. This discussion will be followed on …

Legal Issues In Outdoor Recreation: Trends In Litigation, Ted Zukoski

Outdoor Recreation: Promise and Peril in the New West (Summer Conference, June 8-10)

17 pages.

Probate From The Ground Up, Oregon Law Institute, Shirley A. Bass, Stephen E. Kantor, Ron D. Bailey, Dean T. Sandow, Mark M. Williams, James R. Cartwright, Carolyn W. Miller, Richard A. Pagnano

Oregon Law Institute, 1998

Course Materials from the May 15, 1998 Program in Portland

Amchem Products, Inc. V. Windsor: The Supreme Court Defines The Standard For Settlement Class Action Certification, Jimmy White

Mercer Law Review

In Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, a case stemming from the asbestos litigation crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States Supreme Court addressed the certification criteria for settlement-only class actions under rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ("Rule 23").

Handling Claims For Minor And Disabled Plaintiffs: Coordinating All Aspects Of The Case, Oregon Law Institute, Elizabeth Welch, Robert P. Jones, Doug M. Fellows, Elden M. Rosenthal, Donna R. Meyer, Jack Meligan, Jane Paulson, Cynthia L. Barrett, Beth Gafur, Jude Mollgaard, Richard H. Mills, David Rollins

Oregon Law Institute, 1998

Course Materials from the April 10, 1998 Program in Portland

Failing Faith In Litigation? A Survey Of Business Lawyers' And Executives' Opinions, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

To provide a more systematic assessment of contemporary faith in litigation, this article looks at a particular context-- business litigation--and analyzes the opinions of three groups of respondents: lawyers in private law firms who do commercial litigation (“outside counsel”), lawyers employed in business firms who do some litigation (“inside counsel”), and nonlawyer executives in business firms (“executives”). These groups have the greatest exposure to litigation in the corporate setting; furthermore, because they play powerful roles in our political, economic, and social life as well as the legal system, their opinions influence public opinion more generally.

Drainage Law And Liabilities, Oregon Law Institute, Timothy J. Sercombe, Richard M. Botteri, Christina M. Steensgaard, James R. Herald, Marnie Allen, Harvey W. Rogers

Oregon Law Institute, 1998

Course Materials from the March 13, 1998 Program in Portland

Do Case Outcomes Really Reveal Anything About The Legal System? Win Rates And Removal Jurisdiction, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

General Observations on Interpreting Win-Rate Data Properly. Many empirical legal studies use data on plaintiffs' rate of success, because of those data's ready availability and apparent import. Yet these "win rates" are probably the slipperiest of all judicial data. Win rates are inherently ambiguous because of the case-selection effect. The litigants' selection of the cases brought produces a biased sample from the mass of underlying disputes. The settlement process, usually conducted by rational and knowledgeable persons who take into account and thereby neutralize the very factor that one would like to study, produces a residue of litigated cases for which …

Failing To Score: Clinton V. Jones And Claims Of Presidential Immunity, Jennifer Motos

Mercer Law Review

In Clinton v. Jones, the United States Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not afford the President temporary immunity from civil damages litigation arising out of events that occurred prior to his taking office absent the most unusual circumstances.

Plain Meaning, Practical Reason, And Cuplability: Toward A Theory Of Jury Interpretation Of Criminal Statutes, Darryl K. Brown

Michigan Law Review

In one of the few existing recordings of American juries deliberating in an actual criminal case, Wisconsin v. Reed, we observe jurors struggling with how they should apply a statute in a case in which the facts are not in real dispute. The defendant is charged with felon in possession of a gun, and all agree that he has a felony record and owned a pistol until he turned it over to the police upon their request. The statute contains three elements. The defendant must (a) have a felony conviction, (b) have possessed a gun, and (c) have known that …

Interjurisdictional Preclusion, Howard M. Erichson

Michigan Law Review

Res judicata is hard enough already. Consider it at the interjurisdictional level, and we are asking for headaches. But consider it at that level we must, because litigation trends make interjurisdictional preclusion more important than ever. Lawyers, judges, litigants, and other litigation participants increasingly must contemplate the possibility that a lawsuit will have claim-preclusive or issue-preclusive effect in a subsequent suit in another jurisdiction. With great frequency, multiple lawsuits arise out of single or related transactions or events. Mass tort litigation and complex commercial litigation provide the most emphatic examples, but the phenomenon of multiple related lawsuits extends to every …

The Protection Of International Investment At The Start Of The Twenty-First Century: Will Anachronistic Notions Of Business Render Irrelevant The Oecd's Multilateral Agreement On Investment, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1201 (1998), Michael P. Avramovich

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Execution Under Oath Of U.S. Litigation Documents: Must Signatures Be Authenticated, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 927 (1998), Thomas W. Tobin

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fidelity To Original Preferences: An Application Of Consumer Choice Theory To The Problems Of Legal Interpretation, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1111 (1998), Ahmed M. Saeed

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dollywood Is Not Just A Theme Park In Tennessee Anymore: Unwarranted Prohibitory Human Cloning Legislation And Policy Guidelines For A Regulatory Approach To Cloning, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1385 (1998), Paul Tully

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reverse-Cost-Shifting: A New Proposal For Allocating Legal Expenses, 32 J. Marshall L. Rev. 35 (1998), Ephraim Fischbach, William Mclauchlan

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Symposium, The Florida Tobacco Litigation -- Fact, Law, Policy, And Significance, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

This is the transcript of the Florida tobacco litigation symposium, discussing the s$11.3 billion settlement concerning tobacco in the state of Florida. Jeffrey W. Stempel served as co-chair and moderator of the symposium.

Unreason In Action: A Case Study In The Wrong Approach To Construing The Liability Insurance Pollution Exclusion, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

For more than twenty-five years, a significant component of the scholarly commentary on insurance law has focused on the so-called “reasonable expectations doctrine” enunciated by then-Professor (now Judge) Robert Keeton in his justly celebrated 1970 article. The reasonable expectations principle made a seemingly sudden emergence with the appearance of Keeton's article and has held particular attraction to academics while simultaneously prompting resistance from elements of the bench and bar, and particularly from the insurance industry. The doctrine's life to date can be described as one of early growth followed by subsequent retreat and dilution, with continuing controversy.

However, despite the …

A More Complete Look At Complexity, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The ability of courts to successfully resolve complex cases has been a matter of contentious debate, not only for the last quarter-century, but for most of the twentieth century. This debate has been part of the legal landscape at least since Judge Jerome Frank's polemic book from which this Symposium derives its title, and probably since Roscoe Pound's famous address to the American Bar Association. During the 1980s and 1990s in particular, the battlelines of the pro-and anti-court debate have been brightly drawn. Some commentators, most reliably successful plaintiffs' counsel and politically liberal academics, defend the judicial track record in …

Reason And Pollution: Construing The "Absolute" Pollution Exclusion In Context And In Light Of Its Purpose And Party Expectations, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Responding to the flurry of environmental coverage litigation over the application of the “sudden and accidental” pollution exclusion, the insurance industry during the mid-1980s largely adopted new standard pollution exclusion language for commercial general liability (CGL) policies. Since the mid-1980s, the standard form CGL has included the so-called absolute pollution exclusion, which provides that the insurance does not apply to bodily injury or property damage “arising out of the actual, alleged or threatened discharge, dispersal, seepage, migration, release, or escape of pollutants.” A “pollutant” is defined as “any solid, liquid, gaseous or thermal irritant or contaminant, including smoke, vapor, soot, …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance Law in years 1998 and 1999.

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance law in the year 1998.

Transcript Of The Florida Tobacco Litigation Symposium - Fact, Law, Policy And Significance, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

On November 17, 1997, Professors Jeffrey W. Stempel and Jean R. Sternlight joined a group of colleagues specializing in litigation at the Florida State University College of Law Review's Symposium on the tobacco litigation settlement reached between the State of Florida and five leading tobacco manufacturers that same year. The professors appeared on a panel to discuss the the relationship among the legal system, public health concerns, and tobacco. This is a transcript of those preceedings.

Liberalism Stumbles In Tennessee, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

The Scopes trial will never be the same. I mean the trial immortalized in Inherit the Wind,' with its Southerners clutching in vain to their cozy scientific illiteracy and mechanically literal faith in the Bible, its idiotic intolerant Southerners destined to fall to the gale winds of modernity, liberalism, secularism, and skepticism embodied by a heroic ACLU and the inimitable Clarence Darrow. So what if Scopes got convicted? Surely the trial made a laughingstock of everything Tennessee stood for in banning the teaching of evolution from the public schools. And in a touch worthy of a gruesome morality play, William …

Front Matter, 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.