In a system dominated by settlement, scholars, lawyers, and judges who want to promote accuracy in litigation strive to promote accurate settlements. This effort typically relies on judicial intervention in pretrial practice, or on extrajudicial substitutes, to educate parties on the merits of...

Today, binding arbitration procedures are employed in a wider variety of contracts than at any time in our nation's history, and arbitration has become a wide-ranging surrogate for court trial of civil disputes. As a result, arbitration is subjected to unprecedented stresses and strains, and it...

Asserting that class actions are compatible with civil law systems, the author describes the Brazilian system of class actions, comparing it with its American counterpart, and placing it in the context of other systems' approaches to class action litigation. In this paper, the author presents...

This Article uncovers the history of a long-forgotten English court system, the “fire courts,” which Parliament established to resolve dispute between landlords and tenants in urban areas destroyed in catastrophic fires. One of the fire courts' remarkable features was the delegation of...

From 2010 through 2014, the Supreme Court issued thirteen class action decisions. With no new class action decisions on the immediate horizon, this article takes stock of what these decisions mean for federal class practice. These cases include some very good news for plaintiffs. Indeed, federal...

People litigate for various reasons. Some want to right wrongs, others – make precedents. But most, at least in the civil realm, sue to protect economic interests; and they are motivated by pragmatic considerations rather than abstract notions of justice. One fruit of the mercantile approach...

Class action litigation has generated a series of recent Supreme Court decisions imposing greater federal court supervision over the prosecution of collective injury claims. This group of cases raises the question whether class action waivers should be permitted on policy grounds. I examine the...

This Article synthesizes two decades of research on the progression of sexual harassment claims through the legal system and adds a new, original, empirical study on the resolution of sexual harassment lawsuits filed in federal district court. It examines the prevalence of sexual harassment in...

China's ever-expanding commercial influence has attracted global attention on how its civil and commercial disputes are resolved and how the changing landscape has developed.This compelling new book, Dispute Resolution in China, offers a detailed examination of the elements in the Chinese legal...