In the civil justice system, judges engage in case management and settlement promotion more than they do in trial and judgment. Despite the importance of judges’ role in settlement, its empirical depiction and jurisprudential theorization are lacking. This gap likely results from a key...

This chapter deals with the enforceability of U.S. opt-out class actions in continental Europe, with special attention to Italy, France and Spain. The study sets out by a thorough analysis of U.S. precedents concerning the availability of extra-compensatory damages in complex litigation (among...

In this brief Article, I explore the growing empirical evidence in support of the public choice model of judicial decision making. Although legal scholars have traditionally been reluctant to engage in a critical inquiry into the role of judicial self-interest on judicial behavior, recent...

This Article uses public choice theory and the new institutionalism to discuss the incentives, proclivities, and shared backgrounds of lawyers and judges. In America every law-making judge has a single unifying characteristic, each is a former lawyer. This shared background has powerful and...

In this paper, we study judicial attitudes and decision-making in mass litigation in the light of social sciences, namely rational choice theory and behavioural economics. These insights offer complementary views that are relevant in times where judges have been assigned increased...

The burden of proof is a central feature of adjudication, and analogues exist in many other settings. It constitutes an important but largely unappreciated policy instrument that interacts with the level of enforcement effort and magnitude of sanctions in controlling harmful activity. Models are...

Typically, judges retain sentencing discretion in criminal cases, but in some states this discretion is given to juries. One criticism of jury sentencing is that jurors will be tempted to issue "compromise verdicts," where they return a guilty verdict but a light sentence when they are uncertain...

This Article addresses the normative issues raised by the use of statistical sampling to adjudicate large case aggregations. In its recent decision, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court referred to sampling pejoratively as “Trial by Formula.” This Article argues that the...

The distribution of blockbuster punitive damages awards has fat tails similar to the distributions of losses from natural disasters. Extremely large awards occur more often and are more difficult to predict than if blockbuster awards were distributed normally. The size and predictability of...

Policymakers and scholars repeatedly warn that frequent and persistent judicial vacancies pose one of the greatest threats to the federal judiciary by overburdening judges. Scholars, in turn, are divided as to whether pressure on judges results in more lenient punishment. Despite such concerns,...