Despite my best intentions, I have not been posting here as often as I would like in the past few months.  But that does not mean that I have not been reading.  So, in lieu of a long-winded analysis of some new tactic, trend, or article, please accept the following capsule reviews of three of

This past Supreme Court Term included several closely-watched cases.  One of the most studied was Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, in which the Court identified at least one area of class action litigation where using statistical evidence instead of plaintiff-specific evidence might be allowed when determining class certification.

Since the Court issued its opinion, defendants

Many class-action commentators (including this blog) spend much of their time focusing on class action in federal courts: what caselaw controls, what arguments tend to work.  They spend far less time on what happens to those defendants who–for one reason or another–find themselves in state court.  There are sound reasons for this.  The fifty states

Often, when a plaintiffs’ counsel seek to certify a class asserting a hard-to-prove financial injury, they will rely on a statistics or economics expert to demonstrate that there has been some kind of “common overcharge” for the product at issue.  This method is extremely common in antitrust class actions, but also shows up increasingly in

Class actions are not the only form of aggregate litigation. Multi-district litigation (“MDL”), the process by which large numbers of smaller lawsuits are consolidated before a single judge for pretrial purposes, without requiring any kind of certification process, has been around since 1968.  And, as courts have demanded more rigor for Rule 23 certification, MDLs

There are several practices in class action litigation that really only work if you squint real hard and accept that, as a practical if not a doctrinal matter, class actions are just “different” than other litigation.  These practices tend to go unchallenged until someone without a vested interest in the current system points out that,

One of the things that makes legal academia so frustrating to practitioners (and possibly courts) is that much of it appears to focus on easily-researched questions, instead of the genuinely difficult questions that would yield some practical use.

Case in point: there is remarkably little scholarship that takes on the question of how litigators