In Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the Ninth Circuit upheld the certification of the largest employment discrimination class in history, with more than 1.5 million women employees seeking over $1.5 billion in damages. A crucial piece of evidence supporting class certification came from a sociologist who...

The use of sampled evidence in mass tort cases is at the crossroads. In McLaughlin v. Phillip Morris, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York certified a nationwide class action on behalf of an estimated 50 million quot;lightquot; cigarette smokers. In the face of the...

An important debate is brewing over the proper scope of expert witness testimony that purports to summarize general social science evidence to provide context for the factfinder to decide case-specific questions. In a recent article, we argued that experts who provide this ‘social framework'...

The American Sociological Association (ASA) filed an amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the ASA defended the testimony of the plaintiffs’ sociological expert. Unfortunately, the ASA’s portrayal and defense of the method and opinions of this expert do not match the actual...

This experimental study manipulated presence or absence of temporal urgency, presence or absence of a judgmental standard, and the correspondence or noncorrespondence of outcomes among disputants in a factorial design to assess their effects on preferences for five dispute-resolution procedures...