Recent developments in multi-district litigations (MDLs) raise interesting and important questions about the responsibilities of lead attorneys and judges. Increasingly, lead attorneys use their control of settlement negotiations to enrich themselves. In a prior article co-authored with...

The paper analyzes the effects of different litigation cost allocation rules, detection skill of judges (judicial errors), and the mode of enforcement of foreign judgments on the home bias in trade and sheds a new light on the so-called border-effect puzzle. In our model the border effect or...

This paper discusses the recent brief filed in the famous case NML v The Republic of Argentina which takes place before the federal tribunals of the New York, and how such filing may affect the resolution of the litigation, probably forcing Argentina to default. This paper also discusses the...

American society does not require civil litigants to bear the actual cost of using the court; those costs are borne almost entirely by the taxpayer (i.e., the “civil judicial subsidy”). In this Article I ask: is that right? Or is there a more desirable way to apportion court usage costs...

Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

This article examines how the burden of proof is allocated in private antitrust suits in China, and tries to assess whether the criticism about the high burden of proof is merited. In that quest, the article lays out the general principle for the burden of proof in antitrust cases in China. It...

This paper advocates for a more active role for adjudicators, one in which they provide direction to parties and actively shape the hearing process. Indeed, active adjudication can be an important access to justice tool. Without some direction and assistance from the adjudicator, growing numbers...