Litigation Commons^™

Understanding The Establishment Clause: A Revisit, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Summary Judgment In Employment Discrimination Cases: A Judge’S Perspective, Hon. Denny Chin

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Consumer Financial Services Arbitration: What Does The Future Hold After Concepcion?, Alan S. Kaplinsky, Mark J. Levin

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Commentator’S Response To J. Goodwin 'Norms Of Advocacy', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Professor Goodwin makes a case for the normative complexity of advocacy. She makes this case in the contexts of courtroom advocacy and advocacy in the public relations industry. I am going to examine that conclusion by reference to one of her two chosen case studies – courtroom advocacy. I am also going to agree with her conclusion that courtroom advocacy is normatively complex, although I will part company with her on a few points.

Goodwin has argued that the activity of arguing in court is normatively structured, in the sense that it is more than just persuasion, it is certainly …

Jewish Law Courts In America: Lessons Offered To Sharia Courts By The Beth Din Of America Precedent, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

Although the BDA is now a fifty-year-old organization, its true metamorphosis as an arbitration panel began only in 1996 when it gained autonomy from the Rabbinical Council of America. In the fifteen years since, an independent board of directors has worked with the BDA’s rabbinic leaders to craft an arbitration process that secular courts would feel comfortable upholding. While the BDA’s transformation required some level of compromise within Jewish law itself, the adaptations necessary for judicial acceptance proved to be procedural. Broadly, this meant conforming to the tenets of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). More specifically, the BDA’s viability came …

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 …

Future Conduct And The Limits Of Class-Action Settlements, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new and previously unrecognized trend in class-action settlements: releases for the defendant’s future conduct. Such releases, which hold the defendant harmless for wrongs it will commit in the future, are unusually dangerous to class members and to the public. Even more than the “future claims” familiar to class-action scholars, future-conduct releases pose severe informational problems for class members and for courts. Worse, they create moral hazard for the defendant, give it concentrated power, and thrust courts into a prospective planning role they are ill-equipped to handle.

Courts should guard against the dangers of future-conduct releases with …

Litigation As A Measure Of Well-Being, Theodore Eisenberg, Sital Kalantry, Nick Robinson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Symmetry And Class Action Litigation, Alexandra Lahav

Faculty Articles and Papers

In ordinary litigation, parties often have different resources to devote to their lawsuit. This is a problem because the adversarial system is predicated on two (or more) parties, equal and opposite one another, making their best arguments to a neutral judge. The class action is a procedural device that aims to equalize resources between individual plaintiffs and organizational defendants by allowing plaintiffs to pool their claims. Current developments of class action doctrine, however, reinforce in the courtroom the asymmetry that exists between individual plaintiffs and organizational defendants outside the court. This Article explores these trends and the questions they raise. …

Underclaiming And Overclaiming, Peter Siegelman, Sachin Pandya

Faculty Articles and Papers

Arguments that we have too much litigation (overclaiming) or too little (underclaiming) cannot be valid without estimating how many of the undecided claims that are brought (actual claims) or not brought (potential claims) have or lack legal merit. We identify the basic conceptual structure of such underclaiming and overclaiming arguments, which entails inferences about the distribution of actual or potential claims by their probability of success on the merits within a claims-processing institution. We then survey the available methods for estimating claim merit.

Achieving Procedural Goals Through Indirection: The Use Of Ethics Doctrine To Justify Contingency Fee Caps In Mdl Aggregate Settlements, Morris A. Ratner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Mosaic Theory In Individual Rights Litigation: On The Genealogy And Expansion Of A Concept, Robert M. Pallitto

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

This article explores the use of the concept of "mosaics" in individual rights litigation, a topic that has received virtually no scholarly attention. Originally a construct used in analysis of intelligence data, the mosaic theory has been transposed to the litigation context and applied in a range of recent case law. Here, the article examines the theory's use in two settings that have important implications for individual liberties: to support the state secrets privilege as a form of information control, and to defeat habeas petitions filed by "war on terror" detainees. In these areas, the mosaic concept is used in …

The “Friend”Ly Lawyer: Professionalism And Ethical Considerations Of The Use Of Social Networking During Litigation, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Social media use has exploded around the world. The top social networking site (SNS), Facebook, reports that it has more than a billion members with approximately two million friend requests every twenty minutes. Coupled with the other top 15 social networking sites, including Linkedln, Google+, Twitter, and MySpace, the number of social networking users is estimated to exceed 2 billion. With billions of people producing and consuming media content through SNS, there has been a growing trend of law firms' use of SNS as a marketing tool and litigators' inclusion of discovery from SNS as a part of their discovery …

Say What: Confusion In The Courts Over What Is The Proper Standard Of Review For Hearsay Rulings, Todd J. Bruno

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

The Gun-Shy Commonwealth: Self-Defense And Concealed Carry In Post-Heller Massachusetts, Megan Ruebsamen

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Crumbling Patchwork: Massachusetts's Efforts To Fill The Gaps Left By Crawford Are Now Redundant, Christopher J. Fiorentino

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Thinking Outside Of The Box: Why Prisons Are Only Part Of The Solution, John C. Rapone

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law - Terry Searches Predicated On Nothing More Than Reasonable Suspicion That A Suspect Is Armed And Dangerous - United States V. House, 463 F. App'x 783 (10th Cir. 2012), David Cashman

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Family Law - Expanding Trail Courts' Authority To Create Contracts During The Equitable Division Of Property In A Divorce Action - Cesar V. Sundelin, 967 N.E.2d 171 (Mass. App. Ct. 2012), Lindsay Potter

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.