Litigation Commons^™

By Fair Means: The Inapplicability Of Bristol-Myers Squibb To Flsa Collective Action Lawsuits, Paige Maxa

Washington Law Review

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), passed by Congress in 1938, sets federal workplace standards and protects over 100 million workers in the United States. The FLSA also includes a collective action provision, which allows workers to privately sue their employers for FLSA violations in a unique way. A collective action lawsuit is a distinct form of aggregate litigation that allows an employee to sue their employer for FLSA violations on behalf of other similarly situated employees in one action. Similarly situated employees who wish to join a collective action must affirmatively opt in and consent to participate in the …

Still A Picture, Not A Life: Scrutinizing Media In Federal Court, Hope Forsyth

Washington Law Review

Before COVID-19, federal judges largely resisted cameras in their courtrooms; during it, they used webcams to hold court. The American legal system is designed for in-person interaction, yet cases during the pandemic were frequently adjudicated outside the courtroom’s shared physical space. Judges and policymakers must now harmonize pre-pandemic law and policy with pandemic-era experience. To do so, decisionmakers need an analytical framework to harmonize adjudication’s tangible foundation and media’s intangible effects. This Article provides it.

The Article first argues that pre-pandemic judicial intuition (as seen in three judicial philosophies) holds post-pandemic promise. The strictest philosophy requires physical presence for crucial …

All The King’S Lawyers, Rebecca Aviel

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

7th Annual Women In Law Leadership Lecture March 4, 2026, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Cle Program: Putting People At The Center Of Representation 2-24-2026, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Outbound Investment Restrictions And International Law’S Challenge, Harlan Grant Cohen

Seattle University Law Review

The Outbound Investment Rule, restricting U.S. investment in certain Chinese advanced technology sectors, has largely been portrayed as an incremental measure, a modest extension to fill loopholes in the existing investment screening regime. But while perhaps the logical next step in the securitization of the economy, the Outbound Investment Rule actually reflects a momentous shift in the relationship between governments and business, one playing out in the United States and around the world and worth attention. Unlike traditional investment screening, the Outbound Investment Rule operates like a sanctions regime, designed not to protect the U.S. economy, but to hamper the …

Resilient Dispute Resolution Systems For International Energy Conflicts, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Seattle University Law Review

Energy-related conflicts are on the rise, spanning diverse issues such as the impacts of rare mineral mining on local communities, the impacts of sanctions on energy investments due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impacts of expanded subsidies on the electric vehicle and solar panel industries. Increasingly, companies, communities, and governments are clashing over the challenges of pursuing disparate and sometimes competing energy policies. This Article argues that dispute resolution mechanisms in the energy investment sector must be fundamentally rethought. Traditional semi-adjudicatory models, which focus on winners and losers, fail to accommodate the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary energy …

Restricting Data Flows Is A Sign Of Weakness, Nikolas Guggenberger

Seattle University Law Review

There has been a seismic shift in American attitudes toward the free flow of data across borders.  In less than a decade, the United States has transitioned from condemning barriers to digital trade to constructing a digital fortress of its own. It passed legislation requiring TikTok’s parent company to divest its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban affecting 170 million U.S. users, citing national security concerns about its ties to China and the potential for data surveillance and content manipulation. Upon legal challenge by TikTok on First Amendment grounds, the Supreme Court affirmed the ban’s constitutionality. Recent federal legislation …

Product Nationality And Corporate Identity, Trang (Mae) Nguyen

Seattle University Law Review

Global supply chains have long depended on a deceptively technical device: the attribution of a “nationality” to goods. A trade law principle, rules of origin assign products an “economic passport” that governs how they are treated at the border, including what markets they may enter and which tariff rates apply. In recent years, however, product nationality has taken on a new and far more ambitious role. As U.S. trade policy increasingly intersects with national security and human rights policy, policymakers rely on nationality-based measures to police supply chain linkages, curb geopolitical issues, and discipline firms for their links to forced …

Global Supply Chain Resilience In Emerging Technologies: A Case Study Of Bitcoin Mining, Kishanthi Parella, Carla L. Reyes

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has put into motion bold plans in critical and emerging technologies to bolster its national and economic security.  For example, the federal government created a national bitcoin strategic reserve and a stockpile of other cryptocurrency; while several states have committed to or are considering similar goals.  However, the security of these reserves is dependent on two types of supply chains within the Bitcoin mining industry: analogue supply chains, relating to the physical components needed for Bitcoin mining, and data supply chains, relating to the complex and layered logistical network of actors that create input into the software …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Approaches To Shaping International Outer Space Law And Norms, Ariel G. Silverman

Seattle University Law Review

This article explores convergences and divergencies in the United States and PRC’s responses to the stalemate in the United Nations over the future of outer space resource governance. I do so by systematically analyzing these leading space-faring nations’ policy-positions and tactics deployed to shape norms around three substantive areas of outer space resource governance: rights of ownership and scope of utilization of space resources, mechanization of the “benefits sharing” principle, and the rights and responsibilities of the private sector. I theorize that these leading space-faring nations have adopted divergent approaches due to their differing historical relationships with international law and …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Third-Party Funding: Balancing Transparency, National Security, And Access To Justice, Victoria Shannon Sahani

Seattle University Law Review

Many lawmakers who have recently become aware of the multi-billion-dollar global third-party funding industry are raising new national security concerns that further complicate preexisting, longstanding debates about transparency, disclosure, access to justice, and the best way to regulate third-party funding. In response, this Article briefly asserts three main points relating to the question of how best to regulate third-party funding. First, this Article explains the third-party funding industry, including its global regulatory landscape and how it serves three distinct populations: consumers, businesses, and law firms. Second, this Article explains that third-party funding is one tool that can help expand access …

The Field Of International Business Transactions Law, Kathleen Claussen

Seattle University Law Review

This Article studies the evolution of the scholarly subfield referred to as the law of “international business transactions” (IBT). It reviews data on academic articles, courses, textbooks and other signifiers of the growth of this research area. Beginning around 1960, scholars began to use the term “international business transactions” and by the 1980s, several law schools were offering a course by that title. A handful of dedicated textbooks soon followed. These data reflect a gradual increase in research on the topic of IBT, particularly in the United States, but also considerable diversity of subject matters covered by those works. The …

Kim Gyeong-Seok And The Origins Of Northeast Asia’S Corporate Accountability Movement For War And Colonialism, Timothy Webster

Seattle University Law Review

For the past three decades, a transnational reparations movement has unfolded across Northeast Asia. Hundreds of victims—assisted by attorneys, academics, and activists—seek remedies from Japan for various atrocities committed during World War II, colonialism, and other historical injustices.  They press their claims in street protests, legislative hearings, dramatic performances, and other fora.  The “comfort women” are the best known of these claimants; their global redress campaign ex-tends from noisy protests outside of Japan’s embassy in Seoul, to mute statues in raucous boroughs of Berlin.  More obscure, though larger in number, were the roughly one million Koreans who performed forced labor …

Navigating Compliance In A Geopolitical Era: The Case Of Chinese Multinationals In The United States, Ji Li

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines how Chinese multinational companies (MNCs) approach compliance in the United States amid deepening geo-political rivalry and intensified regulatory scrutiny. Drawing on original survey data, this Article maps variations in compliance structures, staffing, and governance mechanisms across Chinese firms and identifies key determinants such as industry-specific regulatory intensity, listing status, and organizational imprinting from headquarters. The analysis employs a dual institutional framework to explain how compliance systems emerge from the interplay between host-state regulatory demands and home-state institutional legacies, producing hybrid structures that blend local adaptation with headquarters-driven replication. Findings reveal that while certain compliance features—such as committee …

Is Delaware Different? Stockholder Lawyering In The Court Of Chancery, Jessica Erickson, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi

Law & Economics Working Papers

Delaware corporate law relies on stockholder litigation to police corporate misconduct. Judges in turn use attorneys’ fees to shape the incentives of the lawyers who pursue this litigation. This system of corporate accountability has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, with a series of decisions causing several high-profile companies to leave Delaware and prompting lawmakers to call for reform. Yet little empirical evidence exists about how Delaware judges set the attorneys’ fee awards that sustain this enforcement system. Using a hand-collected dataset of stockholder suits filed in the Court of Chancery, this Article offers the most comprehensive empirical analysis …

Unlached: The Case Against Laches In Actions Brought In Replevin By Foreign Sovereigns For Objects Of Cultural Heritage, Peyton M. Kendall

William & Mary Law Review

The American judicial system sanctions the theft of objects of immense cultural value from source nations—countries whose modern borders encompass territory previously inhabited by culturally rich civilizations—by allowing the allegedly equitable doctrine of laches to serve as an affirmative defense to actions brought by foreign sovereigns in replevin.

Courts have treated laches as a valid affirmative defense in foreign-sovereign-plaintiff replevin actions, treating the foreign sovereigns no differently than they would a private citizen bringing suit for a piece of artwork. While the value of the artwork may be the same in the two instances—both in terms of cultural and monetary …

Medical Device Dangers: Choosing Ignorance In The Courts And At The Fda, George Horvath

William & Mary Law Review

Medical devices save lives and improve well-being but have caused as many as 83,000 deaths and 1.7 million injuries in a recent decade. Decisions of critical importance—patients’ decisions whether to have a device implanted, doctors’ decisions about which device to use, insurers’ decisions whether to reimburse for those devices—depend on information about risk that is provided by manufacturers. But producing this information is costly. Injured patients, through private lawsuits under state products liability theories, can incentivize device manufacturers to incur these costs and to produce and disclose information about device risk. Unfortunately, courts are making it increasingly unlikely that this …