Eric Fink's Public Library

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- The state Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated an $8 million default judgment against Hyundai Motor Co. in a lawsuit over the backward collapse of a front seat in a 1997 crash that left a man paralyzed.

In a 7-2 ruling, the high court reversed the Court of Appeals, which had overturned a trial court's finding for Jesse Magana of Vancouver.

The justices said the South Korean automaker deliberately withheld documentation from Magana's lawyers for too long concerning other crashes in which front seats collapsed backward.

"Trial courts need not tolerate deliberate and willful discovery abuse," wrote the majority, led by Justice Richard Sanders. "This result appropriately compensates the other party, punishes Hyundai, and hopefully educates and deters others so inclined."

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law litigation CivilProcedure discovery courts

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humor

Summary --

Despite all the ominous warnings of wily terrorists and imminent attacks, there has been neither a successful strike nor a close call in the United States since 9/11. The reasonable -- but rarely heard -- explanation is that there are no terrorists within the United States, and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad.

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terrorism 9-11 international

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law LawPractice courts humor LegalWriting

Legal scholars almost universally believe that federal judges defer to agency interpretations of statutes. The debate has therefore focused on when judges should defer and how judges should operationalize a deference regime doctrinally. Such normative debates about deference rest upon factual assumptions that have not been rigorously tested; drawing from the entire population of Supreme Court cases (1984-2006) our empirical finds that Supreme Court Justices do not generally afford deference precedents stare decisis effect, but that the policies underlying the major deference regimes do have bite at the Supreme Court level. We also find that judicial ideology affects the Justices’ applications of deference regimes but does not explain why different Justices prefer different doctrinal formulations; we advance the hypothesis that the Justices’ expressed preferences are genuine, but do not dominate ideology and other context based factors in actual cases. Deference regimes are more like canons of statutory construction, applied episodically but reflecting deeper judicial commitments, than binding precedents, pretty faithfully applied or distinguished. Our study suggests that most academic proposals to “reform” deference doctrines would have little or no bite at the Supreme Court level; more modest proposals to clarify such doctrines would probably be (modestly) helpful, however.

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law AdministrativeLaw courts politics

"When civil cases involving one or more common questions of fact are pending in multiple district courts, 28 U.S.C. § 1407 empowers the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) to centralize the cases in a single district court for pretrial proceedings. If the JPML chooses to centralize a multidistrict action, it possesses broad discretion to select a transferee district and judge. While many litigants believe that the selection of one transferee district or judge over another can significantly impact the outcome of the litigation, they often describe the JPML’s rationale supporting selection as opaque and the resulting selection decision as difficult to predict. In order to clarify the criteria on which the JPML relies when choosing a transferee district and judge, this Note presents an empirical study of several years of JPML transfer orders. This Note argues that, while predicting where the JPML will centralize a multidistrict action is difficult, an understanding of statistical trends in JPML selection of transferee district and judge leads to a better understanding of the factors that are most likely to influence the JPML in any given multidistrict action. "

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litigation law CivilProcedure courts venue

At issue was whether plaintiffs were decades too late in filing a lawsuit, or whether that registered trademark should have been denied years ago since as plaintiffs claim " 'redskins' is today and has been historically a disparaging racial epithet that brings them into contempt, ridicule, and disrepute."

The legal dispute is over what's called the doctrine of laches -- negligence or delay in asserting a claim.

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law litigation CivilProcedure

Computational network model of U.S. law professors

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law LawSchool academia networks socio-legal

During the past 51 years, federal courts have used a hodgepodge of tests to determine a corporation's principal place of business. The U.S. Supreme Court today, for the first time, will consider what is the correct test in Hertz Corp. v. Friend, a case involving Hertz employees who claim the company violated California's wage-and-hour laws.

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law CivilProcedure litigation jurisdiction corporations

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law VirtualWorlds

Many legal historians find themselves face to face with Pound at some point in their research. For legal historians of the American administrative state, he is an inescapable presence because of the harshly critical report he published as chairman of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Administrative Law in 1938.

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AdministrativeLaw law government bureaucracy history

Scholars have long questioned the political and constitutional legitimacy of the administrative state. By 1980, a majority of Justices seemed to be poised to hold that large portions of the administrative state are unconstitutional. In 1984, the Court stepped back from that abyss and took a major step toward legitimating and democratizing the administrative state. The Court instructed lower courts to defer to any reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous agency-administered statute. The Court based this doctrine of deference on the superior political accountability of agencies. Henceforth, politically-unaccountable judges were prohibited from substituting their policy preferences for those of politically-accountable agencies. The Court recognized that agencies are politically accountable to the people because they are subject to the control of the elected President. The Court's 1984 effort to democratize the administrative state has fallen far short of its potential because of temporal problems with the manner in which the Supreme Court defines and implements the deference doctrine the Court announced in 1984 and the other two doctrines that require courts to defer to agency interpretations of agency-administered texts. The most important of those deference doctrines is explicitly premised on the Court's understandable belief that policy decisions should be made by the politically accountable President rather than by politically unaccountable judges. Yet, the Court's present method of implementing the deference doctrines has two unfortunate effects. First, in a high proportion of cases, there is a lag of four to eight years between the time that a President takes office and the time when a court is willing to acquiesce in implementation of the policies preferred by the President. In other words, each President is required to implement the policies preferred by his predecessor for at least one term and perhaps even for two terms. Second, in some important situations, regulatees are required to incur large c

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AdministrativeLaw law bureaucracy courts politics government

A Delaware federal judge's transfer of part of a patent infringement case involving software giant Microsoft Corp. to the Eastern District of Texas is the latest example of the federal courts' shifting approach to patent litigation venue battles. The decision is also notable in that the Eastern District of Texas, known as a plaintiff-friendly venue, has itself recently started to transfer cases to other venues in compliance with recent federal appellate decisions.

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law litigation CivilProcedure venue courts

"Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary.

Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists. Having collected available information for all federal judicial law clerks employed by an Article III judge during the "natural" Rehnquist Court (1995-2004), we use these roughly 19,000 clerk events to craft a series of network based visualizations.

Using network analysis, our visualizations and subsequent analytics provide insight into the path of peer effects in the federal judiciary. For example, we find the distribution of "degrees" is highly skewed implying the social structure is dictated by a small number of socially prominent actors. Using a variety of centrality measures, we identify these socially prominent jurists. Next, we draw from the extant complexity literature and offer a possible generative process responsible for producing such inequality in social authority. While the complete adjudication of a generative process is beyond the scope of this article, our results contribute to a growing literature documenting the highly-skewed distribution of authority across the common law and its constitutive institutions. "

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law sociology judges networks socio-legal organizations

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labor law AdministrativeLaw unions

This essay is the introductory chapter of a book about research methods in the field of law and society (Halliday, S. and Schmidt, P., Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Practices, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors of law and society, Conducting Law and Society Research takes readers behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of the research process. The challenges and the uncertainties, so often missing from research methods textbooks, are revealed in candid detail. The accessible and revealing conversations about the lived reality of classic projects will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to those embarking on empirical research, ranging across the full array of disciplines that contribute to law and society. In this introductory essay, we argue for greater candor in discussing the messiness of empirical research methods, particularly in the field of law and society which has for many years explored the gap between rules and reality. We also examine the role which luck (both good and bad) plays in empirical research. Ultimately, we suggest that narratives of the research process such as the conversations contained in the book are a necessary complement to research methods textbooks. They reveal, in powerful ways, that 'good research' displays not an absence of problems but the care taken in negotiating them.

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law sociology socio-legal research empirical

Courts in the United States today address the constitutional permissibility of personal jurisdiction by discussing two sub-types, “specific jurisdiction” and “general jurisdiction.” “Specific jurisdiction” may exist “in a suit arising out of or related to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.” “General jurisdiction” may exist “in a suit not arising out of or related to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.”Over the past few years, courts have begun to address whether maintenance of a business oriented web site that is accessible to and used by residents of a state can be a sufficient anchor for the constitutional assertion of general jurisdiction in that state. At the level of the United States Courts of Appeal, a split of authority is developing. The D.C. Circuit in Gorman v. Ameritrade Holding Corp and the Ninth Circuit in Gator.com Corp. v. L.L. Bean, Inc., have held that the answer is yes, with Gator.com labeling L.L. Bean’s web site a “virtual store.” The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Tenth, and Federal Circuits, all after relatively short discussions, have held that the answer is no, at least on the facts before them.
This article argues that the Gorman and Gator.com were improvident and wrongly decided, that general jurisdiction over virtual stores is inconsistent with any principled development of the law of general jurisdiction. 
The article will conclude with a call for the courts of appeals to abandon the concept of general jurisdiction over virtual stores or for the Supreme Court to take up the issue and provide some much-needed guidance on the constitutional limitations of general jurisdiction.

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law litigation CivilProcedure commerce computers

This article examines how blogging has developed and considers the ethics of blogging and its impact on the legal profession. It examines blog entries from lawyers, law professors and law students and suggests that the rules of the Bar may be colliding with the manner of online storytelling occurring by legal professionals. The article takes an in-depth look at how blogging has impacted legal education and the relationship between faculty and students. It proposes ways in which incorporating blogging assignments into law school courses can assist students in developing ethical story-telling on web logs.

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law lawyers LawStudents blogging ethics

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce uses its Survey of State Liability to criticize judiciaries and seek legal change but no detailed evaluation of the survey’s quality exists. This article presents evidence that the survey is substantively inaccurate and methodologically flawed. It incorrectly characterizes state law; respondents provide less than 10% correct answers for objectively verifiable responses. It is internally inconsistent; a state threatened with judicial hellhole status ranked first in the survey while venues not on the list ranked lower. The absence of correlation between survey rankings and observable activity suggests that other factors drive the rankings. Two factors may help explain them. First, persistent low ranking of Gulf Coast states indicates that corporate counsel cannot shed hostility to states that were prominent in asbestos and tobacco litigation, notwithstanding changes in state laws. Second, low rankings of populous states suggest respondents fail to distinguish between rates of events and the absolute number of events. Adverse events in large states may occur more often but not necessarily at higher rates than in small states. The Chamber’s uses of the survey fail to account for the sample design, fail to account for the same respondent rating multiple states, fail to account for industry effects, and fail to distinguish among respondents based on their knowledge of a state. The survey may discourage investment in the U.S. and corporate risk managers’ views suggest that the survey promotes corporate behavior that needlessly endangers the public.

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law litigation corporations courts

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Jewish socialism