When, if ever, should foreign citizens be included as members of American class actions? The question is not a new one. Judge Friendly first raised it thirty-five years ago in Bersch v. Drexel Firestone, Inc. Since Bersch, courts have tied the answer to res judicata and the recognition of judgments:… Read More »
When, if ever, should foreign citizens be included as members of American class actions? The question is not a new one. Judge Friendly first raised it thirty-five years ago in Bersch v. Drexel Firestone, Inc. Since Bersch, courts have tied the answer to res judicata and the recognition of judgments:… Read More »
Henry E. Smith
Samuel Bray’s recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review proposes an innovative category—preventive adjudication—to capture how courts minimize the harm from legal uncertainty. In preventive adjudication, the court issues no command to the parties, applies a prospective remedy only, and applies the law to a given… Read More »
Recently, the Supreme Court has become more concerned with finding the appropriate rationale for its decisions than with its decisions’ substantive effects. In few areas of law is this untimely divorce of rationale and effect more evident than in the Supreme Court’s contemporary Confrontation Clause jurisprudence. Because the Court has… Read More »
In his recent article in The University of Chicago Law Review, Reconsidering Murdock: State-Law Reversals as Constitutional Avoidance, Professor Jonathan Mitchell has challenged one of the bedrock principles of federal jurisdiction. His thesis is that, in limited cases, the United States Supreme Court should take it upon itself to review certain… Read More »
“As a moth is drawn to the light, so is a litigant drawn to the United States.” Notwithstanding Lord Denning’s widely cited aphorism, this editorial and the article on which it is based suggest that the draw may no longer be as strong as it once was. Using a combination… Read More »
An Introduction to the Problem
Imagine you are a judge on one of the federal courts of appeals. You have before you a case that requires you to apply a thirty-year-old Supreme Court precedent, A v. B. Given your role as a lower-court judge, ordinarily you would simply apply A… Read More »
On May 10 and 11, 2010, scholars, practitioners, and judges met at Duke University School of Law for the 2010 Civil Litigation Review Conference (Duke Conference). The Duke Conference was sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules at the request of the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and… Read More »
State supreme courts occasionally issue questionable interpretations of their states’ statutes, constitutional provisions, or other laws. Sometimes this reflects home-town favoritism or bias against out-of-state parties. On other occasions, state-court judges use their interpretive power over state law to combat political movements that they oppose. During the 1950s and 1960s, for… Read More »
E-discovery sanctions are at an all-time high. We identified 230 sanction awards in 401 cases involving motions for sanctions relating to the discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) in federal courts prior to January 1, 2010. We analyzed these cases for a variety of factors, including sanctioning court, sanctioning authority,… Read More »