Individuals Within the Aggregate: Relationships, Representation, and Fees

Over the past decades, aggregate litigation has become more common; through various statutory, rule-based, and informal means, judges and lawyers consolidate large groups of individual litigants and claims. The paradigm of a class action, however, continues to dominate the literature, and with it, the assumption that a single set of lead lawyers represent all of the plaintiffs in the assembled group. This article addresses the problems raised when, in contrast to that paradigm, aggregation brings together mass tort plaintiffs, some of whom come with individually-retained plaintiffs\u27 attorneys (IRPAs), who perform tasks in addition to those done by a court-appointed plaintiffs\u27 steering committee (PSC). Our central questions are about the roles of the many lawyers within the aggregate and the potential for policymakers to use procedural tools and the law of attorneys\u27 fees to structure incentives to enhance the experience of individual litigants within the aggregate. Animating our interest is the view that, in addition to effectuating outcomes, litigation is also a means by which to express political and social relationships. What occurs within an aggregate formed for adjudicatory purposes is of moment for the polity

Contingency Fees in Mass Torts: Access, Risk, and the Provision of Legal Services When Layers of Lawyers Work for Individuals and Collectives of Clients

The term contingency fee brings to mind an image of an individual lawyer entering into an agreement with a single client to be paid a percentage of that client\u27s recovery from an allegedly tortious injury. In addition, contingency fee contracts call for reimbursement of attorneys by clients of certain kinds of costs (such as filing fees imposed by courts or consulting fees charged by experts) advanced by lawyers on litigants\u27 behalf. Much of the literature on contingent fees examines the justifications for this form of payment. Enthusiasts praise contingent fee contracts for their capacity to enable access to courts and the provision of legal services for clients otherwise not able to afford counsel. Proponents argue that when contingency fee attorneys reap substantial returns, such sums are appropriate rewards for the willingness to bear the risk of nonpayment and to absorb the expenses of litigation, pending payment. Commentators consider whether the return on risk is optimal or a windfall, whether incentives created by contingency fees enhance or diminish attorney loyalty and the quality of the services provided, and whether contingency fee lawyers function well or problematically as gatekeepers to courts. Because the attorney-client relationship and the resulting obligation to pay are creatures of private contract, whatever worries are occasioned by contingency fees are channeled primarily into proposals to regulate attorneys through ethical rules

Grieving Criminal Defense Lawyers

Deborah Rhode has challenged the legal profession to reform itself, and she has given us several blueprints for effecting systemic changes. Her book, In the Interests of Justice, ably addresses complaints voiced by clients, academics, the public at large, and by lawyers themselves about the legal profession and the system of justice. We focus here on one of the causes of disquiet about lawyers and justice—the bar\u27s complete abdication of its obligation to provide competent legal services to indigent criminal defendants. In this essay, our interest is the regulation of criminal defense lawyers. Our goal is also more general—to bring attention to the relationship between client markets and the regulation of attorneys. While many have addressed how the availability of lawyers varies with clients\u27 capacity to pay, few have looked at how remedies for incompetent or inadequate legal services also vary directly with the financial wherewithal to pay lawyers. The many sources of regulation of lawyers at the top of the legal hierarchy stands in sharp contrast to those mechanisms that exist for lawyers who serve indigent criminal defendants

PowerAqua: fishing the semantic web

The Semantic Web (SW) offers an opportunity to develop novel, sophisticated forms of question answering (QA). Specifically, the availability of distributed semantic markup on a large scale opens the way to QA systems which can make use of such semantic information to provide precise, formally derived answers to questions. At the same time the distributed, heterogeneous, large-scale nature of the semantic information introduces significant challenges. In this paper we describe the design of a QA system, PowerAqua, designed to exploit semantic markup on the web to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. PowerAqua does not assume that the user has any prior information about the semantic resources. The system takes as input a natural language query, translates it into a set of logical queries, which are then answered by consulting and aggregating information derived from multiple heterogeneous semantic sources

Visions of Justice

The analysis of a work of art differs from legal analysis to the sole extent that the former necessarily includes a visual component. Each requires an understanding of the subject’s history (stylistic predecessors/legal precedent) and formative intent (artistic/legislative) in order to interpret the work or law effectively. Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis’s monumental and profusely illustrated coffee-table textbook, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms, constitutes an outstanding synthesis of the two. And if knowledge is power, then I am very powerful for having read this remarkable work of comprehensive and finely-tuned art history

The ensemble of random Markov matrices

The ensemble of random Markov matrices is introduced as a set of Markov or stochastic matrices with the maximal Shannon entropy. The statistical properties of the stationary distribution pi, the average entropy growth rate $h$ and the second largest eigenvalue nu across the ensemble are studied. It is shown and heuristically proven that the entropy growth-rate and second largest eigenvalue of Markov matrices scale in average with dimension of matrices d as h ~ log(O(d)) and nu ~ d^(-1/2), respectively, yielding the asymptotic relation h tau_c ~ 1/2 between entropy h and correlation decay time tau_c = -1/log|nu| . Additionally, the correlation between h and and tau_c is analysed and is decreasing with increasing dimension d.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figur

A Resident Perspective on Adding Value as Radiologists

During the annual 46th annual American Alliance of Academic Chief Residents in Radiology (A3CR2) meeting in New Orleans, chief residents discussed the role of residents within American College of Radiology 3.0 campaign. Our discussion was directed toward the evolving role of fourth-year radiology residents and how we might improve their training to better prepare them to add value as both leaders and radiologists. The ideas resulting from our Problem Solving session were divided into three categories: clinical presence in the wards and subspecialty clinics; visibility to clinicians and patients; and the education of medical students, residents, and advanced practice clinicians to aid in realizing the long-term goals of Imaging 3.0

Can metaphysical structuralism solve the plurality problem?

Metaphysics has a problem with plurality: in many areas of discourse, there are too many good theories, rather than just one. This embarrassment of riches is a particular problem for metaphysical realists who want metaphysics to tell us the way the world is and for whom one theory is the correct one. A recent suggestion is that we can treat the different theories as being functionally or explanatorily equivalent to each other, even though they differ in content. The aim of this paper is to explore whether the notion of functionally equivalent theories can be extended and utilized in the defence of metaphysical realism, drawing upon themes from structuralism in the philosophies of mathematics and science in which the specifics of theories do not matter as long as the relations in which they stand to other theories are maintained. I argue that despite its initial attractiveness, there are significant difficulties with this proposal. Discovering these obstacles (most probably) thwarts the realist structuralist project, but reveals interesting features of metaphysical systems