The Market for Preclusion in Merger Litigation

The recent finding that corporate litigation involving Delaware companies very often takes place outside of Delaware has disturbed the long-settled understanding of how merger litigation works. With many, even most, cases being filed and ultimately resolved outside of Delaware, commentators warn that the trend is a threat to shareholders, to Delaware, and to the integrity of corporate law generally. Although the out-of-Delaware trend suggests that litigants are seeking to use the procedural rules of other jurisdictions to their advantage, we argue that the result need not threaten the interests of any of the stakeholders in deal litigation. We reframe the process of resolving merger litigation as a market for preclusion, in which plaintiffs seek to sell and defendants seek to buy an important element of transactional certainty. Moreover, this market has the potential to efficiently process and price shareholder complaints while also providing benefits to Delaware and to corporate law more generally. We are not blind to reality, however, and also address how a well-functioning market for preclusion can be distorted by the opportunistic conduct of plaintiffs’ and defense attorneys alike. Greater judicial oversight is necessary to preserve the benefits of this market while preventing the distortions brought on through opportunistic conduct. In order to make this a reality, however, judges in different courts must have a means of communicating and coordinating across state lines. We therefore offer a theory of horizontal comity in which judges build trust and cooperation through communication across jurisdictional boundaries. We use this theory to suggest a set of concrete policy proposals designed to provide for a more efficient market for preclusion

The Jury and Participatory Democracy

Citizens directly participate in the civil justice system in three ways. They can be sued, they can sue another, and they can serve on a jury. Beyond that involvement, the court system is peopled by professionals: judges, lawyers, clerks, and administrators. This Essay considers the reasons our society might want citizens to directly participate as adjudicators in the third branch

Are Class Actions Unconstitutional?

Are class actions unconstitutional? Many people-defendants and conservative legislators, not to mention scholars at the American Enterprise Institute-would like them to be. For opponents of the class action, Martin Redish\u27s book Wholesale Justice provides some of the most theoretically sophisticated arguments available. The book is a major contribution both to the scholarly literature on class actions and to the larger political debate about this powerful procedural device. The arguments it presents will surely be debated in courtrooms as well as classrooms

A Revisionist History of Products Liability

Increasingly courts, including the Supreme Court, rely on ossified versions of the common law to decide cases. This Article demonstrates the risks of this use of the common law. The main contribution of the Article is to demonstrate that the traditional narrative about early products law—that manufacturers were not liable for injuries caused by their products because the doctrine of privity granted producers immunity from suit by the ultimate consumers of their goods—is incorrect. Instead, the doctrinal rule was negligence liability for producers of injurious goods across the United States in the nineteenth century. Courts routinely ignored or rejected privity arguments, and contract was not their paradigm for understanding a producer’s relationship with users of its products. This analysis has implications for how we view the development of the common law today. And it serves as a warning not to rely on potted histories from casebooks in determining what the common law was in the past

Participation and Procedure

How much participation should a procedurally just court system offer litigants? This question has always been especially difficult to answer in complex litigation such as class actions and mass torts because these cases involve so many litigants that it would be impossible for each of them to be afforded the kind of individualized hearing that we associate with the day in court ideal. To address the problem, we need to go back to first principles and ask what purposes participation in litigation is meant to serve. Participation serves two purposes: as a predicate to litigant consent and to engage public reason. This Article, written for the Clifford Symposium honoring Judge Jack Weinstein, argues that the public reason rationale offers the best normative underpinning for participation in large-scale litigation and demonstrates how public reason can be realized through procedural innovations such as those Judge Weinstein has pioneered

An Order, Most Fixed

A Review of Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. By Lorraine Daston

Procedural Design

The procedural law dictates the sequence of steps that bring a lawsuit from filing to completion. The design of civil procedure in the federal courts is generally described as having the following sequential order: complaint, motion to dismiss, discovery, summary judgment, trial, and finally, appeal. While this is a passable description of the vision of the drafters of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, it no longer describes the reality of federal litigation. Jurisdiction can be determined at the end of the lawsuit rather than the beginning. Judges demand determination of factual disputes before discovery commences through a variety of motions and orders. Hearings that are trials in all but name are held at the commencement of litigation, even as trials are expected to end a suit. Appeals can be brought at any time, even multiple times in one case. This Article is the first to synthesize and explain these developments. For a variety of reasons explained in this Article, the federal courts take inconsistent and often poorly justified approaches to procedural design. But a procedural system ought to have an articulable design, one that fits with the goals of that system and can be contested based on its ability to achieve those goals. To begin the discussion of the future of procedure, this Article suggests three possibilities: the traditional sequential order described above, a bespoke order in which judges pick the most important issue in the case and adjudicate that issue using the order of motions they think appropriate, or a subject matter order in which procedures are standardized but tailored by case type. Each of these procedural designs has costs and benefits when measured against the competing values of accuracy, relative speed of resolution, and cost. Preferences among them are likely to depend on the reader’s assumptions about the capabilities of judges and party behavior