Thursday, August 16, 2012
This article argues that there is an unrecognized “anticommons” problem in aggregate litigation. An anticommons occurs when too many owners’ consent is needed to use a resource at its most efficient scale. When many plaintiffs have similar claims against a common defendant, those claims are often worth more if they can be packaged up and sold to the defendant (i.e., settled) as a single unit — that is, the defendant may be willing to pay a premium for total peace. But because the rights to control those claims are dispersed among the individual plaintiffs, transaction costs and strategic holdouts can make aggregation difficult, particularly in cases where class actions are impractical. Recently the American Law Institute has proposed to modify long-standing legal ethics rules governing non-class aggregate settlements to allow plaintiffs to agree in advance to be bound by a supermajority vote on a group settlement offer. By shifting from individual control over settlement decisions to collective decision making, the ALI proposal may offer a way out of the anticommons and allow the group to capture the peace premium. Critics, however, say that allowing plaintiffs to surrender their autonomy will leave them vulnerable to exploitation by the majority and by their lawyers. Viewed through the lens of the anticommons, these concerns are manageable. Similar anticommons problems arise in many areas of law, ranging from eminent domain to oil and gas to sovereign debt. But instead of slavishly preserving the autonomy of individual rights-holders, these areas of law have developed strategies for aggregating rights when doing so will result in joint gains. Drawing from these other contexts, this article argues that the legitimacy of compelling individuals to participate in a value-generating aggregation depends on the presence of governance procedures capable of protecting the interests of the individuals within the collective and ensuring that the gains from cooperation are fairly allocated. Governance is thus the key to legitimizing attempts to defeat the anticommons in mass litigation through aggregation, whether by regulatory means, such as the class action, or contractual precommitment, as in the ALI proposal.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Below is an announcement for the Branstetter Civil Justice Workshop. This is a wonderful experience if you are lucky enough to be selected! ADL
2013 NEW VOICES IN CIVIL JUSTICE SCHOLARSHIP WORKSHOP
CALL FOR PAPERS
Vanderbilt Law School’s Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program invites submissions for its annual New Voices in Civil Justice Scholarship Workshop, to be held May 6-7, 2013 at Vanderbilt Law
This year, four junior scholars will be selected via a blind review process to present at the New Voices Workshop. The format maximizes collegial interaction and feedback: in lieu of author “presentations,” all participants read the selected papers prior to the session, and at each workshop, a senior faculty member provides a brief overview and
commentary on the paper. Open and interactive discussion immediately follows.
Submitted papers should address an aspect of civil justice, broadly defined. Subject areas may include, but are not limited to, civil procedure, complex litigation, evidence, federal courts, judicial decision-making, alternative dispute resolution, remedies, and conflict
of laws. In keeping with the intellectual breadth of the Branstetter Program faculty, the Workshop welcomes all scholarly methodologies, from traditional doctrinal analysis to quantitative or experimental approaches.
Submissions must be received at Branstetter.Program@vanderbilt.edu
no later than January 1, 2013. Selected participants will have reasonable travel and accommodations covered. Other requirements and more details about the workshop can be found at www.law.vanderbilt.edu/newvoices.
Sam Issacharoff (NYU) has posted "Assembling Class Actions" on SSRN. The article is forthcoming in Washington University Law Journal as part of a symposium on the future of class actions. Here's the abstract:
Five times in the past two years, the Supreme Court has engaged the propriety of class actions. Taken together, these cases revisit certain core issues in class action law, all turning on the need and justification for treating individuals as part of a collective entity for litigation purposes. When examined from the perspective of legal treatment of individuals as part of a collective – assembling the class action, in the terminology of the title – three distinct aspects of class organization stand out. First, the existence of the litigation entity requires that someone be in charge, and that in turn raises the problem of how to ensure the faithfulness of the appointed agent. Second, the decision to forge a litigation entity necessarily empowers one side of the dispute, and that requires some justification. And, finally, even when litigation entities exist, class action law must come to terms with the range of individual autonomy that should still be recognized, including the ability to contract out of collective representation. As developed in the difficult recent class action cases, the questions of leadership, underwriting, and autonomy help define how modern class action practice endeavors to provide equality of treatment and predictability in the interaction between the individual insults of aggrieved citizens and the undiscriminating consequences of mass society.
Rhonda Wasserman (Pittsburgh) has posted an article titled "Legal Process in a Box, or What Class Action Waivers Teach Us about Law-Making" on SSRN. Here's the abstract:
The Supreme Court’s decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion advanced an agenda found in neither the text nor the legislative history of the Federal Arbitration Act. Concepcion provoked a maelstrom of reactions not only from the press and the academy, but also from Congress, federal agencies and lower courts, as they struggled to interpret, apply, reverse, or cabin the Court’s blockbuster decision. These reactions raise a host of provocative questions about the relationships among the branches of government and between the Supreme Court and the lower courts. Among other questions, Concepcion and its aftermath force us to grapple with the relationship between law and politics, the role of legislative history in statutory interpretation, the meaning of legislative primacy, the influence of federal agencies on the development of the law, and competing conceptions of the relationship between the Supreme Court and the lower courts.