In Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), the Supreme Court held that Article III requires plaintiffs to establish a “concrete and particularized” injury-in-fact, “even in the context of a statutory violation.” Although the Supreme Court noted that “intangible” injuries, including the “violation of a procedural right” can be sufficient in some
Lawyers
Five Takeaways from the Duke Conference on Class Action Settlements
A few weeks ago, the Duke Law Center for Judicial Studies held a conference on class action settlements in San Diego, to discuss best practices in the wake of the likely Rule 23 amendments. Like all of its conferences, this one was held under the Chatham House Rule, which dictate that you can…
The Supreme Court is Also Coming for Judge Baer
In what is rapidly becoming a trend, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in yet another class action (this time Martin v. Blessing, but one Justice wrote an accompanying opinion to signal where the Court may come out should the issue arise again.
Martin is one of several cases in which SDNY Judge Harold Baer…
A Review of Year-End Reviews
What King v. Hausfeld tells us about the business of plaintiffs’ lawyers.
So the small corner of the legal world that includes class action lawyers is up in arms this week because Jon King, formerly of Hausfeld LLP, has filed a wrongful termination complaint against his former employer, alleging that he was fired because he complained about ethical conflicts at the firm.
Hausfeld LLP is…
Adequacy of Counsel, Attorneys’ Fees, and Malpractice – Wyly v Weiss
In 1998, the class action plaintiffs’ firm Milberg Weiss filed sued Computer Associates for violating the federal securities laws by lying about its revenues in order to increase its stock price. In a perfectly unremarkable development, it was appointed co-lead counsel of the consolidated class. (Various firms had filed a total of eleven complaints.) …
Dewey Lebeouf, Grand Strategy, and Bad Strategy
For the last three months, much of the law-firm world has been watching the slow-motion train wreck that was the dissolution of Dewey & LeBeouf. The legal blogosphere has written a lot about what the collapse means, and offered numerous theories about why Dewey failed so spectacularly in only a few months. Most focus…
The Cause Lawyer and the Class Action
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years poking (as best I can) into the head of the entrepreneurial plaintiff’s lawyer. That is, the plaintiff’s lawyer that treats her lawsuits like business opportunities, keeping a diversified portfolio and working to maximize the profit from each opportunity. But there is another kind…
Classic Scholarship – Class Action Cops
For the last six or seven years, a growing academic literature has put forward the argument that the primary justification for class actions is not to compensate absent class members, but to deter corporate wrongdoing. That justification has formed the basis of a number of arguments, from Professor Fitzpatrick’s proposal that class action attorneys earn…
Classic Scholarship – Class Action Extraction
(I’m recovering from a cold, and on deadline for a book, so my apologies that this post is a little late and a little short.)
Today’s piece of "classic scholarship" was published in Public Choice in 2003. The authors, Jeffrey Haymond and James E. West, took a public-choice perspective on the class action, arguing that…