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 their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

The economic models of bargaining and tort law have not been integrated into a coherent theory that reflects the empirical world. This Article models the interaction of settlement dynamics and the theory of negligence. It shows that tort claims are systematically devalued during settlement...

This article concerns the recent case of Georges v United Nations, which constitutes, to date, the most elaborate public law challenge to the principle of UN immunity from suit and private law attempt at procuring compensation from the UN for alleged malfeasance. Despite the fact that it relates...

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...

Courts assessing compensatory damages awards often lack adequate information to determine the value of a victim's loss. A central reason for this problem, which the literature has thus far overlooked, is that courts face a dilemma when applying their standard information-forcing tool to the...

Laws governing relations between spouses have undergone profound changes that continue to revolutionize the standards and procedures for dissolutions of marriage. The most dramatic changes in divorce law have come from the advent of no-fault divorce, the decline in spousal maintenance awards,...

This Article provides a financial economic analysis of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather, it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity...

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...