Under what circumstances do third parties have standing to assert a decedent’s cause of action under various federal consumer protection statutes? Over time, federal courts opted to adopt a unique set of principles to guide this determination. This short article affords an overview of these tenets

According to many, discovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (“Rules” collectively, or “Rule” individually) imposes a multiplicity of financial and administrative burdens on parties and courts. True, much debate rages over the true extent of these costs; true, mindboggling...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 tackles many health care-related issues, but medical malpractice liability reform is not one of them. Despite being a perennial target of health care reform -- with accompanying assertions that a medical malpractice liability crisis is...

This article discusses the meaning of jury “predictability” and whether jury research supports claims of unpredictability. It then analyzes the factors that are associated with perceptions of civil jury unpredictability using data from (1) surveys of corporate and insurance attorneys’...

For professional "fact-gatherers" such as lawyers, insurance adjusters, claims handlers and private investigators, the vast wealth of information that people volunteer on Facebook can be a goldmine or a smoking gun, depending on your perspective. The personal information contained in a Facebook...

A festering ambiguity buried within the thirteenth chapter of the Bankruptcy Code threatens to shadow future rehabilitations of any mixed-use development owned by one or more individuals or proprietorships eligible to file for relief under that chapter. The reason for this pendant danger...

Amongst the group of related sections touching upon the creation and administration of a plan of debt adjustment pursuant to Chapter 13 of the Bankruptcy Code (“Code”), just one—§ 1329—concerns post-confirmation modification. This section’s first lettered paragraph enumerates the...

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 private value of lawsuits is based on plaintiffs' expected recovery at trial compared to their filing costs, whereas the social value consists of the incentives suits create for injurers to invest in accident avoidance. Generally, there is no relationship between these two values: there may...