Class Certification and the Substantive Merits

The United States Supreme Court, in its 1974 decision, Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, held that judges should not conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits of a suit as part of the decision whether to certify a class. The federal courts have struggled ever since to honor Eisen\u27s bar while still conducting a credible certification analysis-a task complicated by the fact that merits-related factors are often relevant to Rule 23 requirements. The result is a muddled body of case law in which courts tend to certify generously and avoid inquiring into the merits of substantive issues even when those issues are crucial to the certification analysis. This approach creates high social costs by inviting frivolous and weak class action suits. This Article argues that the Eisen rule should be abolished. Trial judges should assess competing evidence, not just allegations, and should evaluate case strength whenever the specific requirements of Rule 23 call for an inquiry into merits-related factors. For example, a party relying on a substantive issue to show commonality or predominance should have to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the issue. The Article also goes further and recommends that judges always conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits before certifying a class, regardless of whether merits-related factors are directly relevant to a specific requirement of Rule 23. The Article first reviews the history of the Eisen rule and surveys the current state of the law, before turning to a policy analysis of the rule\u27s effects. The policy discussion criticizes the traditional arguments and then offers a systematic evaluation of error and process costs. Error costs must be evaluated in light of the extremely high probability of postcertification settlement. Eisen\u27s liberal approach creates a substantial risk of erroneous certification grants that cannot be corrected later when a case settles. This risk coupled with the high likelihood of settlement invites frivolous and weak class action suits. The result is a serious error-cost problem with regard to certification. At the same time, requiring a merits review at the certification stage increases the risk of erroneous certification denials. But for several reasons this risk is not likely to increase dramatically, and the associated costs are not likely to be large. The net result therefore supports a merits inquiry, and this conclusion remains valid even after process costs are added to the policy mix

Journal publishing with Acrobat: the CAJUN project

The publication of material in electronic form should ideally preserve, in a unified document representation, all of the richness of the printed document while maintaining enough of its underlying structure to enable searching and other forms of semantic processing. Until recently it has been hard to find a document representation which combined these attributes and which also stood some chance of becoming a de facto multi-platform standard. This paper sets out experience gained within the Electronic Publishing Research Group at the University of Nottingham in using Adobe Acrobat software and its underlying PDF (Portable Document Format) notation. The CAJUN project1 (CD-ROM Acrobat Journals Using Networks) began in 1993 and has used Acrobat software to produce electronic versions of journal papers for network and CD-ROM dissemination. The paper describes the project's progress so far and also gives a brief assessment of PDF's suitability as a universal document interchange standard

Latent entrepreneurship across nations

The paper studies latent entrepreneurship across nations. There are three main findings. First, large numbers of people in the industrial countries say they would prefer to be self-employed. Top of the international ranking of entrepreneurial spirit come Poland (with 80% saying so), Portugal and the USA; bottom of the table come Norway (with 27% saying so), Denmark and Russia. Second, for individuals the probability of preferring to be self-employed is strongly decreasing with age, while the probability of being self-employed is strongly increasing with age. Third, we show that self-employed individuals have noticeably higher job satisfaction than the employed, so people's expressed wish to run their business cannot easily be written off as mistaken. We speculate on why so much entrepreneurial spirit lies dormant

Latent entrepreneurship across nations

The paper studies latent entrepreneurship across nations. There are three main findings. First, large numbers of people in the industrial countries say they would prefer to be self-employed. Top of the international ranking of entrepreneurial spirit come Poland (with 80% saying so), Portugal and the USA; bottom of the table come Norway (with 27% saying so), Denmark and Russia. Second, for individuals the probability of preferring to be self-employed is strongly decreasing with age, while the probability of being self-employed is strongly increasing with age. Third, we show that self-employed individuals have noticeably higher job satisfaction than the employed, so people's expressed wish to run their business cannot easily be written off as mistaken. We speculate on why so much entrepreneurial spirit lies dormant

Higgs Boson Exempt No-Scale Supersymmetry and its Collider and Cosmology Implications

One of the most straightforward ways to address the flavor problem of low-energy supersymmetry is to arrange for the scalar soft terms to vanish simultaneously at a scale $M_{c}$ much larger than the electroweak scale. This occurs naturally in a number of scenarios, such as no-scale models, gaugino mediation, and several models with strong conformal dynamics. Unfortunately, the most basic version of this approach that incorporates gaugino mass unification and zero scalar masses at the grand unification scale is not compatible with collider and dark matter constraints. However, experimental constraints can be satisfied if we exempt the Higgs bosons from flowing to zero mass value at the high scale. We survey the theoretical constructions that allow this, and investigate the collider and dark matter consequences. A generic feature is that the sleptons are relatively light. Because of this, these models frequently give a significant contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and neutralino-slepton coannihilation can play an important role in obtaining an acceptable dark matter relic density. Furthermore, the light sleptons give rise to a large multiplicity of lepton events at colliders, including a potentially suggestive clean trilepton signal at the Tevatron, and a substantial four lepton signature at the LHC.Comment: 36 pages, 16 figure

Quantifying Seasonal-Variation In Somatic Tissue - Surfclam Spisula-Solidissima (Dillwyn, 1817) - A Case-Study

Condition indexes are commonly derived from bivalve species. Usable meat yields (UMY, in l/bu) from 181 daily landings of Atlantic surfclams, Spisula solidissima (Dellwyn, 1817), at a Virginia processing plant in 1974 and 160 landings in 1975 were used as an index in our analysis. The data were fitted to a basic sinusoidal model and a two-compartment sinusoidal model to demonstrate the utility of these models for quantifying cyclic events. The basic model, x = x(0) + A cos2 pi t + B sin2 pi t, is linear in its independent variables and fitted by multiple regression, with x = UMY, 1 = time in years, where x(0), A, and B are constants determined by the regression procedure (x(0) = mean UMY). Its alternate form is x = x(0) + r cos2 pi(t - t(0)), with x, x(0), and t as before, r = amplitude of the sinusoidal variation, and t, = time when the maximal UMY occurs; r and t, are related to A and B as r = root A(2) + B-2, and t(0) = (1/2 pi)tan(-1) (B/A). The sinusoidal fit to the 1974 data was highly significant (p \u3c 0.0005); therefore, the null hypothesis that the data are not a function of time was rejected. The annual mean yield, x(0), was 5.93 l/bu, t(0) was 0.45 (i.e., the maximal UMY occurred about mid-June), and the amplitude r was 0.730; thus, the difference between the lowest and highest yields, 2r, was almost 1.5 l/bu. Similar estimates were determined from the 1975 data and the combined data. The fit was recalculated for both data sets after excluding apparent outliers. As expected, the root-mean-square residual (RMS,,,) decreased, whereas the coefficient of determination (R(2)) increased with the removal of the apparent outliers, but the fitted parameters were inconsequentially affected. A fit of the data to a two-component sinusoidal model, x = x(0) + A(1) cos2 pi t + B-1 sin2 pi t + A(2) cos4 pi t + B-2 sin4 pi t, modeled an annual variation with an asymmetric rise and fall. As a demonstration, the data were also fitted to a parabolic model, x = a, + a(1)t + a(2)t(2). Although this model produced fits comparably as close as the sinusoidal models, the coefficients are not interpretable in a simple manner, as is the case with the sinusoidal fits, and it does not allow asymmetric behavior

Spectral Measures and Generating Series for Nimrep Graphs in Subfactor Theory II: SU(3)

We complete the computation of spectral measures for SU(3) nimrep graphs arising in subfactor theory, namely the SU(3) ADE graphs associated with SU(3) modular invariants and the McKay graphs of finite subgroups of SU(3). For the SU(2) graphs the spectral measures distill onto very special subsets of the semicircle/circle, whilst for the SU(3) graphs the spectral measures distill onto very special subsets of the discoid/torus. The theory of nimreps allows us to compute these measures precisely. We have previously determined spectral measures for some nimrep graphs arising in subfactor theory, particularly those associated with all SU(2) modular invariants, all subgroups of SU(2), the torus, SU(3), and some SU(3) graphs.Comment: 38 pages, 21 figure