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
Scholarship
5 Takeaways from the Emory/FJC Conference
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the FJC’s 2016 Complex Litigation Conference, held in conjunction with Emory Law School’s Institute for Complex Litigation and Mass Claims. [Disclosure: I serve on the Institute’s Next Generation Board.] The conference covered issues in both class action and MDL cases, and was taught by luminaries on…
Tyson Foods and Statistical Adjudication
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…
Due Process Arguments and State Court Class Actions
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…
Common overcharges may not be so common
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Should MDL Judges Act More Like Class Action Judges?
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The Problem with Prospective Injunctive Relief
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The Issues with Issue Certification
Rule 23(c)(4) has been been placed under a microscope in the past few years, largely because of the judicial response to the Supreme Court’s Comcast Corp. v. Behrend opinion, and the Rules Advisory Committee’s subsequent consideration of possible amendments to the Rule.
In the course of that attention, two articles have come out…
Practical Rhetoric – Pleading & Plausibility
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Classic Scholarship – A Theory of Legal Strategy
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…