We’re in the middle of the holiday season, and that means that folks are making (or, for those who celebrate Hannukkah, checking off) their wish lists. This October, the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform compiled one of their own in their report A Roadmap for Reform: Lessons from Eight Years of the
John Beisner
A Review of Year-End Reviews
By The Editors on
Posted in Lawyers
Klonoff on Class Action Decline – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
By The Editors on
Posted in Certification, Scholarship
Robert Klonoff, Dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School, has produced a new article, The Decline of Class Actions (forthcoming from the Washington University Law Review), that provides a much-appreciated overview of recent developments in class action law from a plaintiff’s perspective. (Disclosure: Dean Klonoff provided a very nice blurb for…
Classic Scholarship – Class Action Cops
By The Editors on
Posted in Lawyers
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…
Highlights from the ALI Principles of Aggregated Litigation Panel
By The Editors on
Posted in Presentations
My apologies for posting late this week; I’m suffering from a little jet lag. I spent yesterday in Virginia at the annual conference for the American College of Court Business Judges, where John Beisner and I were presenting a number of developments in class action litigation. Today I’m England, and by tonight, I will be…
Does Cy Pres Relief Violate the Rules Enabling Act?
By The Editors on
Posted in Settlement
Skadden attorneys John Beisner, Jessica Miller, and Jordan M. Schwartz have drafted a white paper for the Institute for Legal Reform titled “Cy Pres: A Not So Charitable Contribution to Class Action Practice.” Relying heavily on Martin Redish’s critique of cy pres recovery, they trace cy pres relief from…
Grand Strategy and Class Actions
By The Editors on
Posted in Strategy
What is grand strategy? It’s a term that’s usually thrown around in military, security, and foreign policy circles. As the military historian Liddell Hart defined it in his classic book Strategy:
[T]he role of grand strategy – higher strategy – is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band
…
Securities Class Actions – Inherently Inferior?
By The Editors on
Posted in Certification
Securities class actions have often drawn criticisms from both defense counsel and their ideological allies. One of the more interesting criticisms has been that securities class actions may be nothing more than shell games moving money around in such a way that the only parties to benefit are the lawyers. The theory goes like this:…
Battling Third-Party Litigation Funding: Aim Interrogatories at Funding Sources?
By The Editors on
Posted in Discovery
Class-action defense guru John Beisner has published a new study on third-party litigation financing: “Selling Lawsuits, Buying Trouble: Third-Party Litigation Funding in the United States” (US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, October 2009). Since it’s published by the US Chamber of Commerce, this is an advocacy piece, and one aimed more at…