Download or read book The Litigation State written by Sean Farhang and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 1.65 million lawsuits enforcing federal laws over the past decade, 3 percent were prosecuted by the federal government, while 97 percent were litigated by private parties. When and why did private plaintiff-driven litigation become a dominant model for enforcing federal regulation? The Litigation State shows how government legislation created the nation's reliance upon private litigation, and investigates why Congress would choose to mobilize, through statutory design, private lawsuits to implement federal statutes. Sean Farhang argues that Congress deliberately cultivates such private lawsuits partly as a means of enforcing its will over the resistance of opposing presidents. Farhang reveals that private lawsuits, functioning as an enforcement resource, are a profoundly important component of American state capacity. He demonstrates how the distinctive institutional structure of the American state--particularly conflict between Congress and the president over control of the bureaucracy--encourages Congress to incentivize private lawsuits. Congress thereby achieves regulatory aims through a decentralized army of private lawyers, rather than by well-staffed bureaucracies under the president's influence. The historical development of ideological polarization between Congress and the president since the late 1960s has been a powerful cause of the explosion of private lawsuits enforcing federal law over the same period. Using data from many policy areas spanning the twentieth century, and historical analysis focused on civil rights, The Litigation State investigates how American political institutions shape the strategic design of legislation to mobilize private lawsuits for policy implementation.
Download or read book Rights and Retrenchment written by Stephen B. Burbank and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book contributes to an emerging literature that examines responses to the rights revolution that unfolded in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Using original archival evidence and data, Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang identify the origins of the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law in the first Reagan Administration. They then measure the counterrevolution's trajectory in the elected branches, court rulemaking, and the Supreme Court, evaluate its success in those different lawmaking sites, and test key elements of their argument. Finally, the authors leverage an institutional perspective to explain a striking variation in their results: although the counterrevolution largely failed in more democratic lawmaking sites, in a long series of cases little noticed by the public, an increasingly conservative and ideologically polarized Supreme Court has transformed federal law, making it less friendly, if not hostile, to the enforcement of rights through lawsuits.
Download or read book Public Regulation Through Private Litigation written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First, using a careful examination of agency and presidential archival materials, I specify the mechanisms by which agency actors promote private litigation and uncover the institutional and political conditions under which this legal enforcement strategy is employed over time. And then, from these archival observations, I construct original quantitative measures capturing the deployment of these legal enforcement strategies, and conduct statistical analyses to confirm the success of agency efforts to encourage private litigation over time. Ultimately, by reconsidering how to integrate informal mechanisms of enforcement, like agency-motivated private litigation, into theories of bureaucratic regulation, this research contributes to our practical understandings of day-to-day agency behavior and to our conceptions and assessments of state capacity, more broadly.
Download or read book Regulation Versus Litigation written by Daniel P. Kessler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The efficacy of various political institutions is the subject of intense debate between proponents of broad legislative standards enforced through litigation and those who prefer regulation by administrative agencies. This book explores the trade-offs between litigation and regulation, the circumstances in which one approach may outperform the other, and the principles that affect the choice between addressing particular economic activities with one system or the other. Combining theoretical analysis with empirical investigation in a range of industries, including public health, financial markets, medical care, and workplace safety, Regulation versus Litigation sheds light on the costs and benefits of two important instruments of economic policy.
Download or read book Model Rules of Professional Conduct written by American Bar Association. House of Delegates and published by American Bar Association. This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.
Download or read book In Praise of Litigation written by Alexandra Lahav and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the right to have one's day in court is a cherished feature of the American democratic system, alarms that the United States is hopelessly litigious and awash in frivolous claims have become so commonplace that they are now a fixture in the popular imagination. According to this view, litigation wastes precious resources, stifles innovation and productivity, and corrodes our social fabric and the national character. Calls for reform have sought, often successfully, to limit people's access to the court system, most often by imposing technical barriers to bringing suit. Alexandra Lahav's In Praise of Litigation provides a much needed corrective to this flawed perspective, reminding us of the irreplaceable role of litigation in a well-functioning democracy and debunking many of the myths that cloud our understanding of this role. For example, the vast majority of lawsuits in the United States are based on contract claims, the median value of lawsuits is on a downward trend, and, on a per capita basis, many fewer lawsuits are filed today than were filed in the 19th century. Exploring cases involving freedom of speech, foodborne illness, defective cars, business competition, and more, the book shows that despite its inevitable limitations, litigation empowers citizens to challenge the most powerful public and private interests and hold them accountable for their actions. Lawsuits change behavior, provide information to consumers and citizens, promote deliberation, and express society's views on equality and its most treasured values. In Praise of Litigation shows how our court system protects our liberties and enables civil society to flourish, and serves as a powerful reminder of why we need to protect people's ability to use it. The tort reform movement has had some real successes in limiting what can reach the courts, but there have been victims too. As Alexandra Lahav shows, it has become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to enforce their rights. In the grand scale of lawsuits, actually crazy or bogus lawsuits constitute a tiny minority; in fact, most anecdotes turn out to be misrepresentations of what actually happened. In In Praise of Litigation, Lahav argues that critics are blinded to the many benefits of lawsuits. The majority of lawsuits promote equality before the law, transparency, and accountability. Our ability to go to court is a sign of our strength as a society and enables us to both participate in and reinforce the rule of law. In addition, joining lawsuits gives citizens direct access to governmental officials-judges-who can hear their arguments about issues central to our democracy, including the proper extent of police power and the ability of all people to vote. It is at least arguable that lawsuits have helped spur major social changes in arenas like race relations and marriage rights, as well as made products safer and forced wrongdoers to answer for their conduct. In this defense, Lahav does not ignore the obvious drawbacks to litigiousness. It is expensive, stressful, and time consuming. Certainly, sensible reforms could make the system better. However, many of the proposals that have been adopted and are currently on the table seek only to solve problems that do not exist or to make it harder for citizens to defend their rights and to enforce the law. This is not the answer. In Praise of Litigation offers a level-headed and law-based assessment of the state of litigation in America as well as a number of practical steps that can be taken to ensure citizens have the right to defend themselves against wrongs while not odiously infringing on the rights of others.
Download or read book Public Regulation of Private Enforcement written by David Freeman Engstrom and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a growing chorus of commentators has called on Congress to vest agencies with litigation “gatekeeper” authority across a range of regulatory areas, from civil rights and antitrust to financial and securities regulation. Agencies, it is said, can rationalize private enforcement regimes through the power to evaluate lawsuits on a case-by-case basis, blocking bad cases, aiding good ones, and otherwise husbanding private enforcement capacity in ways that conserve scarce public resources for other uses. Yet there exists strikingly little theory or evidence on how agency gatekeeper authority might work in practice. This Article begins to fill that gap by offering the first systematic study of an often invoked but little studied example: Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of qui tam litigation brought pursuant to the False Claims Act (FCA). Using an original dataset encompassing some 4000 qui tam lawsuits filed between 1986 and 2011, this Article offers evidence on numerous issues that have occupied recent judicial, scholarly, and popular debate, including the extent to which DOJ utilizes its various oversight tools, the mix of factors that drives DOJ intervention decisions, and whether DOJ's seemingly powerful impact on case outcomes can be ascribed to its merits-screening or merits-making role. The analysis mostly rejects heated claims that DOJ decisionmaking has a partisan political cast or is unconnected to case merit. At the same time, however, it uncovers substantial evidence that DOJ makes case decisions strategically, separate and apart from pure merits considerations, in response to simple resource constraints, judicial threats to its ability to police collusive relator-defendant settlements, and the identity (and corporate power) of the defendant. These findings have important implications for judicial evaluation of qui tam suits as well as leading FCA reform proposals. More broadly, the analysis opens up new theoretical and empirical avenues for thinking about optimal regulatory design at the border of litigation and administration, with applications well beyond the FCA.
Download or read book In Praise of Private Antitrust Litigation written by Spencer Weber Waller and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2017, Professor Alexandra Lahav of the University of Connecticut School of Law published an impressive book entitled In Praise of Litigation. She argues that private civil litigation in the United States is an important tool for democracy. In the preface and introduction, she explains how private civil litigation promotes American democracy:Lawsuits enforce the law by forcing wrongdoers to answer for their conduct; they increase transparency by eliciting information from their adversaries that often benefits the public, and in doing so, they help people participate in self-government. All of this is possible when courts treat litigants as social equals before the law.She is not blind to the costs of the civil litigation system, but contends that those costs are often exaggerated, and the societal benefits usually underappreciated. She emphasizes that disputes about the institutions and procedure of litigation are often merely a proxy for disagreements about the proper types of regulation of potentially harmful conduct. Antitrust is only a minor aspect of Lahav's arguments and discussions. She focuses on the more general mix of civil litigation in state and federal court and showcases a variety of examples involving civil rights, employment discrimination, and tort cases. Professor Lahav's arguments are an excellent jumping off point for how private antitrust litigation has been systematically undervalued and how private claims contribute to the proper functioning of competition policy. In this essay, I argue that private treble damage litigation promotes the four values identified by Lahav: enforcement, transparency, participation, and equality before the law. I also argue that the preference for public over private antitrust enforcement cannot be justified in the text, history, or policy goals of antitrust objectives, with the rare exception of a case involving major structural relief or substantial harm to the foreign policy or the national interests of the United States. I end with a brief look at a likely future where private enforcement continues to be restricted and underserved in the United States, encouraged and nurtured abroad, and how we can do better.
Download or read book How Policy Shapes Politics written by Jeb Barnes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing judicialized and bureaucratized injury compensation policies, Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke conclude that litigation divides interests between victims and villains and winners and losers, and so creates a comparatively fractious, chaotic politics.
Download or read book Studies in Law Politics and Society written by Austin Sarat and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics and Society contains two sections, focusing on the interaction between law and religion, together with the ways in which the law simultaneously enhances and inhibits projects of social change.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development written by Richard M. Valelly and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 898 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.
Download or read book Administrative Law from the Inside Out written by Nicholas R. Parrillo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-23 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a generation, Jerry L. Mashaw, the most boundary-pushing scholar in the field of administrative law, has argued that bureaucrats can and should self-generate the norms that give us a government of laws. Administrative Law from the Inside Out brings together a collection of twenty-one essays from leading scholars that interrogate, debate, and expand on themes in Mashaw's work as well as on the fundamental premises of their field. Mashaw has illuminated new ways of seeing administrative law, composed sweeping indictments of its basic principles, and built bridges to other disciplines. The contributors to this volume provide a collective account of administrative law's commitments, possibilities, limitations, and strains as an approach to governance and as an intellectual enterprise.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism written by Orfeo Fioretos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism offers an authoritative and accessible state-of-the-art analysis of the historical institutionalism research tradition in Political Science. Devoted to the study of how temporal processes and events influence the origin and transformation of institutions that govern political and economic relations, historical institutionalism has grown considerably in the last two decades. With its attention to past, present, and potential future contributions to the research tradition, the volume represents an essential reference point for those interested in historical institutionalism. Written in accessible style by leading scholars, thirty-eight chapters detail the contributions of historical institutionalism to an expanding array of topics in the study of comparative, American, European, and international politics.
Download or read book Privatizing Justice written by Sarah Staszak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the use of arbitration in the private sector has grown dramatically in recent decades, arbitration itself is not new. Yet the practice today looks very different than it did at its origins. How did arbitration shift from providing a low cost, less adversarial, and more efficient way of handling disputes between relative equals to a private, non-reviewable, and compulsory forum for resolving disputes between individuals and corporations that almost always favors the latter? Privatizing Justice examines the broader institutional, political, and legal dynamics that shaped this century-long transformation and explains why the system that emerged has shifted power to corporations, exacerbated inequality, and eroded democracy.
Download or read book Legal Strategies in Childhood Obesity Prevention written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1980, childhood obesity rates have more than tripled in the United States. Recent data show that almost one-third of children over 2 years of age are already overweight or obese. While the prevalence of childhood obesity appears to have plateaued in recent years, the magnitude of the problem remains unsustainably high and represents an enormous public health concern. All options for addressing the childhood obesity epidemic must therefore be explored. In the United States, legal approaches have successfully reduced other threats to public health, such as the lack of passive restraints in automobiles and the use of tobacco. The question then arises of whether laws, regulations, and litigation can likewise be used to change practices and policies that contribute to obesity. On October 21, 2010, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) held a workshop to bring together stakeholders to discuss the current and future legal strategies aimed at combating childhood obesity. Legal Strategies in Childhood Obesity Prevention summarizes the proceedings of that workshop. The report examines the challenges involved in implementing public health initiatives by using legal strategies to elicit change. It also discusses circumstances in which legal strategies are needed and effective. This workshop was created only to explore the boundaries of potential legal approaches to address childhood obesity, and therefore, does not contain recommendations for the use of such approaches.
Download or read book Oxford Principles of European Union Law written by Robert Schütze and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 1914 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1957 Rome Treaty, the European Union has changed dramatically - in terms of its composition, scope and depth. Originally established by six Western European States, the EU today has 28 Members and covers almost the entire European continent; and while initially confined to establishing a "common market", the EU has come to influence all areas of political, economic and social life. In parallel with this enormous geographic and thematic expansion, the constitutional and legislative principles underpinning the European Union have constantly evolved. This three-volume study aims to provide an authoritative academic treatment of European Union law. Written by leading scholars and practitioners, each chapter offers a comprehensive and critical assessment of the state of the law. Doctrinal in presentation, each volume nonetheless tries to present a broader historical and comparative perspective. Volume I provides an analysis of the constitutional principles governing the European Union. It covers the history of the EU, the constitutional foundations, the institutional framework, legislative and executive governance, judicial protection, and external relations. Volume II explores the structure of the internal market, while Volume III finally analyses the internal and external substantive policies of the EU.
Download or read book The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice written by Rosann Greenspan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work. They asses the legacy of Feeley's theoretical innovations, put his findings to the test of time, and provide provocative historical and international perspectives for his insights. This collection of original essays not only draws attention to Professor Feeley's seminal writings but also to the theories and ideas of others who, inspired by Feeley, have explored how courts and the legal process really work to provide a promise of justice.
