In the past two decades, business groups and their political allies have often criticized broad civil rights remedies—particularly the availability of money damages—as encouraging abusive and extortionate litigation practices. In its decision in...

Incentive awards to representative plaintiffs in class actions have been the focus of recent law reform efforts and have generated inconsistent case law. But little is known about such awards. This study of 374 opinions from 1993 to 2002 finds that...

Two primary arguments are advanced for the contemporary functional importance of federalist constraints on centralized political power. The first is captured in Justice Brandeis's famous invocation of the states as the laboratories of democracy in...

At the conclusion of every class action lawsuit, a judge must hold a fairness hearing to assess the reasonableness of the outcome. The fairness hearing contains the promise of providing real monitoring of class counsel. In practice, it has not...

Sometimes, no news is good news. In an important article, Theodore Eisenberg and Geoffrey Miller add to the emerging literature that uses empirical research to shed light on the real-world operation of class action lawsuits. The conclusions that...

In United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the mandatory nature of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment because they required a judge to enhance a defendant’s sentence based on facts that were neither...