Property-rights class actions are difficult to bring, because property tends to be unique, and class actions do not work well with unique claims. But that doesn’t stop plaintiffs from trying to certify classes asserting property based claims.
This week’s case–Onyx Props. LLC v. Bd. Cty. Comm’ners of Elbert Cty., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS…
Ten Cases to Educate You
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Last week, there were two appellate opinions, one from the Seventh Circuit and one from the Tenth, that are worth some attention. They’re worth discussing together as well, because while only one is really helpful for defendants, both discuss different conceptions of how to argue comity in class actions.
The first is Smentek v. Dart…
I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day weekend. This week, we take a brief look at a number of opinions that were decided last week, none of which are revolutionary, but all of which are useful to defendants at some stage of the class action. Think of it like a Memorial Day barbecue, a…
So, unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard that JP Morgan lost some money last week. And, as one might expect, with a $2 billion loss, lots of people have opinions. One of those is Yale Law Professor Jonathan Macey, who wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (behind a…
For years, class-action scholars have tried to import lessons from administrative law into Rule 23, on the theory that mass torts, like administrative actions, deal with large, generalized issues. Sometimes these imports provide new insights, but often they stress why it is that Rule 23 is not equipped to handle issues in the same…
Last month, I received a flurry of email from various people who wanted to point me towards Mark Herrrman’s column on Above the Law, "Torpedoing Class Actions." In that column, Herrmann reviewed Martin Redish’s 2009 book Wholesale Justice, which argues that class actions are an unconstitutional delegation of state power to private…
For those unfamiliar with Ronald Coase, he is the 101-year-old Nobel Laureate who laid a number of the foundations for law and economics when he published his Nature of the Firm (which explained why people would use corporate forms instead of just contracts) and Problem of Social Cost (which explained why law should seek…
This was a busy year for class-action jurisprudence. Clearly, most of the Supreme Court cases had some effect on class action practice. But the district and appellate courts also rendered a host of rulings this year that significantly affect class-action practice. Despite what a number of academics and plaintiffs’ lawyers have claimed, the class action…
This month’s piece of classic scholarship comes from the sociology of law. Thirty years ago, William L.F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat published a piece in the Law & Society Review titled "The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming …"
The authors wanted to trace how experiences…
