Law Without Lawyers: Access to Civil Justice and the Cost of Legal Services

The high cost of legal services presents a significant access-to-justice problem. In this Article, I argue that this problem is actually two distinct problems—one affecting primarily low- and moderate income persons, and one affecting primarily deep-pocketed corporate defendants. Because the problems are different, they are probably not amenable to a single solution. Most significantly, the Article applies Baumol’s “cost disease” to the rising cost of legal services, thus placing the debate over rising legal costs in a wider economic contex

Law Without Lawyers: Access to Civil Justice and the Cost of Legal Services

The high cost of legal services presents a significant access-to-justice problem. In this Article, I argue that this problem is actually two distinct problems—one affecting primarily low- and moderate income persons, and one affecting primarily deep-pocketed corporate defendants. Because the problems are different, they are probably not amenable to a single solution. Most significantly, the Article applies Baumol’s “cost disease” to the rising cost of legal services, thus placing the debate over rising legal costs in a wider economic contex

From Class Actions to Multidistrict Consolidations: Aggregate Mass-Tort Litigation After Ortiz

This is the published version

Centripetal Forces: Multidistrict Litigation and Its Parts

The article focuses on various issues related to multidistrict litigation (MDL). Topics discussed include the regulation of MDL proceedings under the Multidistrict Litigation Act of 1968, the role of the U.S. lawyers in centralized proceedings of tag-along cases, and the role of panel of judges in adjudicating MDL

Evidence for the h_b(1P) meson in the decay Upsilon(3S) --> pi0 h_b(1P)

Using a sample of 122 million Upsilon(3S) events recorded with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy e+e- collider at SLAC, we search for the $h_b(1P)$ spin-singlet partner of the P-wave chi_{bJ}(1P) states in the sequential decay Upsilon(3S) --> pi0 h_b(1P), h_b(1P) --> gamma eta_b(1S). We observe an excess of events above background in the distribution of the recoil mass against the pi0 at mass 9902 +/- 4(stat.) +/- 2(syst.) MeV/c^2. The width of the observed signal is consistent with experimental resolution, and its significance is 3.1sigma, including systematic uncertainties. We obtain the value (4.3 +/- 1.1(stat.) +/- 0.9(syst.)) x 10^{-4} for the product branching fraction BF(Upsilon(3S)-->pi0 h_b) x BF(h_b-->gamma eta_b).Comment: 8 pages, 4 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. D (Rapid Communications