During the latter half of 2011, I was privy to the following exchange between a well-known law professor and a well-known practitioner:
PROFESSOR: Yes, I wrote a piece which concluded that the class action is dead. You heard it here.
PRACTITIONER: And yet plaintiffs keep filing the things …
That exchange (which I promise actually…
I’ve made no secret about the fact that one of the purposes of this blog is to delve into how the other side thinks. And I’ve also emphasized the fact that it’s important to keep an open mind when considering one’s adversaries in litigation. So I was pleased to hear that plaintiffs’-lawyer-turned-academic Morris Ratner…
Cardozo law professor Lester Brickman has been a longtime critic of the contingency fee system. So it’s no surprise that his latest work, Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America (introduction here), has a lot to say about how contingency fees skew the incentives of plaintiffs’ lawyers. Among the most interesting observations…
Richard Nagareda’s object in Mass Torts in a World of Settlement, his only book-length theoretical work, was to show how settlements operate in a world in which aggregated litigation is common, and trial almost unheard of.
One of Nagareda’s primary observations is that settlements of mass torts are best handled by some administrative apparatus. …
"Hey man, I don’t practice law. I talk on the phone." — Richard Scruggs, on federal wiretap
This week, Class Action Countermeasures introduces another regular feature: book reviews. Once a month, I’ll be reviewing a book that has some relation to class action litigation. The primary purpose of the review will be to determine what…
As I’ve discussed before, there are few areas of law as polarized as class actions. The plaintiff and defense bars in class-action law rarely agree on anything, from the proper scope of Rule 23 to what a class action is in the first place. And I’m not the only one to have noticed this divide. …
Brian Fitzpatrick’s argument that courts should approve more fees for class action plaintiffs’ lawyers has generated its share of discussion. And a few months ago, the Seventh Circuit weighed in (sort of), during an argument about fees for objectors in In re Trans Union Corp. Privacy Litigation.
Judge Posner (who has decided a…
As I’ve written before, guessing at the motives and methods of plaintiffs’ lawyers in class actions can be much like old-style Kremlinology. But every once in a while, we get a little more information. The most recent comes from University of Minnesota Law School professor Stephen Meili, who just published his article Collective…
Florida State law professor Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is the latest to weigh in on the problem of how to make sure class actions are adequately governed. In an forthcoming article from the Vanderbilt Law Review, she asks what makes an optimal lead plaintiff in a securities class action.
Burch focuses on the…
Paul Karlsgodt of Classactionblawg.com got there first (in a post that should win "Title of the Month" hands-down), but Judge Posner’s opinion yesterday denying rehearing (and announcing there will be no en banc rehearing) in Thorogood v. Sears Roebuck & Co. is still worth an extra post. Not just because Judge Posner discusses the…
