Class action law enforcement is a resource-intensive undertaking, requiring investment of both intellectual capital and financial wherewithal. Building on insights developed in the economic theory of investment under uncertainty, the key theoretical proposition is that class action law...

Federal Rule of Evidence 407 prohibits the introduction of subsequent remedial measures for the purposes of demonstrating negligence, culpable conduct, or product defect. But the rule breaks down, in application and purpose, when a defendant undertakes the new safety measure after the...

This short paper focuses on the problem of reference class in evidentiary assessment as it relates to probability and weight of evidence. The reluctance to inject mathematical formalism into the factfinding function is justified. Objective probability requires a reference class from which a...

This paper assesses the widely held belief that damages for pain and suffering are random or arbitrary. We empirically analyze the differential impact of a plaintiff's personal characteristics, pain-specific circumstances and a lawsuit's procedural features on such payments. Relying on a dataset...

When several plaintiffs file individually a lawsuit against the same tortfeasor, the resolution of the various cases through repeated trials produces positive informational externalities, which benefit to the later plaintiffs (since there exist precedents, jurisprudence...). Thus, the first...

The paper addresses the issue of the impact of asymmetric information on risk aversion of litigant parties in a model à la Bebchuk. First we study the case where the plaintif is the informed party, and characterize the equilibrium with and without a pretrial negociation round. Then, we focuse...

The so-called English Rule in § 91 ZPO has a longstanding tradition in German civil litigation. Although this “loser pays”- fee shifting can raise severe problems like sharply reducing access to the courts for parties of moderate means, the adaption of alternative cost regimes like the...

This paper elaborates on a basic model of mass tort litigation, highlighting the existence of positive informational externalities afforded by the discovery process (as a general technology of production of evidences) in order to study when a class action is formed, or when a sequence of...

Regulatory reform efforts in a broad range of industries have resulted in increased importance of competitive forces as a means to allocate resources and improve economic efficiency. A number of indicators suggest that such forces have been stronger in the United States than in most other OECD...