Litigation Commons^™

Building A Taxonomy Of Litigation: Clusters Of Causes Of Action In Federal Complaints, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic, Kosta Ristovski

Scholarship@WashULaw

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court dataset of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to …

Litigating Toward Settlement, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman

Scholarship@WashULaw

Civil litigation typically ends when the parties compromise. While existing theories of settlement primarily focus on information exchange, we instead examine how motion practice, especially non-discovery motions, can substantially shape parties’ knowledge about their cases and thereby influence the timing of settlement. Using docket-level federal district court data, we find a number of strong effects regarding how motions can influence this process, including that the filing of a motion significantly speeds case settlement, that granted motions are more immediately critical to settlement timing than motions denied, and that plaintiff victories have a stronger effect than defendant victories. These results provide …

Superiority As Unity, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

One of Professor Redish’s many important contributions to legal scholarship is his recent work on class actions. Grounding his argument in the theory of democratic accountability that has been at the centerpiece of all his work, Professor Redish suggests that, in nearly all instances, class actions violate the individual autonomy of litigants and should not be used by courts. This Essay, prepared for a festschrift in honor of Professor Redish, begins from the opposite premise: that class actions should be grounded in the notion of social utility rather than autonomy so that class actions should be used whenever they achieve …

The Pastor, The Burning House, And The Double Jeopardy Clause: The True Story Behind Evans V. Michigan, David A. Moran

Articles

The true story behind Evans v. Michigan is that a man who was probably innocent, and who would almost certainly have been acquitted by the jury, had his trial shortened after it became obvious to the judge that the police had picked up a man who had nothing to do with the fire. In other words, the facts set forth by the Michigan Supreme Court, and repeated by Alito, were grossly misleading. And because I, like Alito, believed the Michigan Supreme Court’s version of the facts, I made a silly mistake when I agreed to take the case. That silly …

Judges! Stop Deferring To Class-Action Lawyers, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The idea for this article came from the author's representation of a national non-profit consumer rights organization in a federal appeal challenging a district court’s approval of a class-action settlement. The organization's appellate briefs argued that the district court committed a reversible legal error when it deferred to the class-action lawyers’ recommendation to approve the settlement because, in those lawyers’ views, the settlement was "fair, reasonable, and adequate" (which is the standard for class-action settlement approval under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e)). The district court also deferred to the lawyers' reputations as talented and honest lawyers.

In this article, …

The Power And Promise Of Procedure: Examining The Class Action Landscape After Wal-Mart V. Dukes, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Jury (Or More Accurately The Judge) Is Still Out For Civil Rights And Employment Cases Post-Iqbal, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Check Please: Using Legal Liability To Inform Food Safety Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Food safety is a hotly debated issue. While food nourishes, sustains, and enriches our lives, it can also kill us. At any given meal, our menu comes from a dozen different sources. Without proper incentives to encourage food safety, microbial pathogens can, and do enter the food source--so much so that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans (or forty-eight million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. What is the optimal way to prevent unsafe foods from entering the marketplace?

Safety in the food …

Cobell Settlement Finalized After Years Of Litigation: Victory At Last?, Brooke Campbell

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Redistricting Litigation And The Delegation Of Democratic Design, Lisa Marshall Manheim

Articles

This Article seeks to reveal how the practice of litigating as redistricting, which has evolved into a form of litigation highly susceptible to procedural manipulation, has created a type of redistricting that grants profound power to those who choose to litigate. In so doing, this Article rejects any understanding of the redistricting process that understands the influence of litigants to be somehow negated or neutralized by the involvement of courts. It recognizes, moreover, that many of the defining features of redistricting litigation–which are, in certain respects, analogous to those characterizing other problematic forms of litigation–nevertheless reflect some of the most …

Does Criminal Diversion Contribute To The Vanishing Civil Trial?, John B. Meixner Jr., Shari Seidman Diamond

Scholarly Works

Through his seminal work on the vanishing trial, Professor Marc Galanter has had a profound impact on public and scholarly discourse about the role of the trial in litigation, documenting the sharp reductions in the rate of civil cases since the mid-twentieth century. While there is little remaining doubt that the American civil trial is an increasingly scarce commodity, there is still much debate as to what has caused the decline.

In this Article, we seek to explore the extent to which the federal criminal docket may be contributing to the rapid disappearance of the civil trial by taking priority …

Logic, Not Evidence, Supports A Change In Expert Testimony Standards: Why Evidentiary Standards Promulgated By The Supreme Court For Scientific Expert Testimony Are Inappropriate And Inefficient When Applied In Patent Infringement Suits, Claire R. Rollor

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Drafting Arbitration Agreements: A Practioner's Guide For Consumer Credit Contracts, Nicole F. Munro, Peter L. Cockrell

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

The Extraordinary Deterrence Of Private Antitrust Enforcement: A Reply To Werden, Robert H. Lande, Joshua P. Davis

All Faculty Scholarship

Our article, "Comparative Deterrence from Private Enforcement and Criminal Enforcement of the U.S. Antitrust Laws," 2011 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 315, documented an extraordinary but usually overlooked fact: private antitrust enforcement deters a significant amount of anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, the article showed that private enforcement "probably" deters even more anticompetitive conduct than the almost universally admired anti-cartel enforcement program of the United States Department of Justice.

In a recent issue of Antitrust Bulletin, Gregory J. Werden, Scott D. Hammond, and Belinda A. Barnett challenged our analysis. They asserted that our comparison “is more misleading than informative.” It is unsurprising that they …

Innovation And Litigation: Tensions Between Universities And Patents And How To Fix Them, Jacob H. Rooksby

Law Faculty Publications

Universities that own patents have a problem. While nearly all are keen to enhance their revenue generated from patents, few are eager or prepared to enforce them in court, alone or with their exclusive licensees, should a third party deploy a product or process covered by a university-owned patent. Yet strict prudential standing requirements imposed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”) effectively require university participation as plaintiffs in enforcement lawsuits over their exclusively licensed patents, regardless of a university’s effective ability or enthusiasm to participate in a given action. Supported by forty years of …

Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Segmented Settlements Are Not The Answer: A Response To Professor Squire’S Article, How Collective Settlements Camouflage The Costs Of Shareholder Lawsuits, Christopher C. French

Faculty Scholarship

In his recent article, Professor Richard Squire offers a provocative theory in which he claims the underlying claimants in shareholder litigation against corporate policyholders are overcompensated due to what he describes as “cramdown” settlements, under which insurers are forced to settle due to the “duty to contribute” that arises under multi-layered directors and officers (“D&O”) insurance programs. He also offers a novel idea regarding how this problem could be fixed by what he refers to as “segmented” settlements in which each insurer and the policyholder would be allowed to settle separately and consider only its own interests in doing so. …

When Bad Guys Are Wearing White Hats, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

Allegations of ethical misconduct by lawyers have all but completely overshadowed the substantive claims in the Chevron case. While both sides have been accused of flagrant wrongdoing, the charges against plaintiffs’ counsel appear to have captured more headlines and garnered more attention. The primary reason why the focus seems lopsided is that plaintiffs’ counsel were presumed to be the ones wearing white hats in this epic drama. This essay postulates that this seeming irony is not simply an example of personal ethical lapse, but in part tied to larger reasons why ethical violations are an occupational hazard for plaintiffs’ counsel …

Educating For The Future: Teaching Evidence In The Technological Age, Denise H. Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The advent of the technological age has had significant effect on litigation practice, none more so than in the area of evidence gathering and presentation in court. A significant proportion of evidence that is gathered for both criminal and civil matters is now electronic in nature, and this necessitates a change in the way that lawyers think and advise on evidential issues. It is argued here that rather than simply focusing on principles relating to the admissibility of evidence in court, the traditional course on evidence law should be modified to equip students with an intellectual framework that conceives of …

Recent Developments In Third-Party Funding, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses recent developments in third-party funding that occurred during late 2012 and early 2013 in the three leading jurisdictions: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The most important developments are the following. On 22 April 2013, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) issued regulatory guidelines clarifying the status of funders with respect to ASIC’s regulations and detailing how funders should manage conflicts of interest and handle certain provisions of their funding arrangements. In the United Kingdom, the Jackson Reforms took effect on 1 April 2013, bringing sweeping changes to the allowable fee agreements, discovery rules …