Number Of Plaintiffs Research Articles

Climate risks are becoming legal liabilities for the energy sector

The number of plaintiffs taking energy firms to court for ignoring climate-related risks is growing. By revealing how the sector is not prepared — and not preparing — for what is coming, their cases are pressing the energy sector to treat those risks as a cost of doing business.

Close Enough for Jazz: Statistical Extrapolation in Complex Litigation

This paper discusses how statistical extrapolation methods can be used to calculate damages in large, complex litigation cases. The basics of elementary statistics are briefly explained and then applied to the litigation context, including when statistics are generally used, the manner of use, and several common challenges to statistical sampling.There is also a federal circuit split in allowing the use of statistics to calculate damages between the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the paper discusses the two seminal cases at the center of that split (Ratanasen v. State of California Department of Health Services; Cimino v. Raymark Industries, Inc.). There are several public policy concerns with the use of statistical sampling, namely judicial efficiency and accuracy of litigation outcomes. Other areas of law, such as antitrust, Title VII, and welfare rights law, that use statistical sampling can offer insight on its expanded use in general complex litigation cases. The paper concludes with a call for universal acceptance of the use of statistical extrapolation in large, complex litigation cases where it would be logistically impossible to determine the case by examining individual claims. This would apply in cases where there number of individual claims was so high that making a determination on a claim-by-claim basis would be impractical, or in class actions where the number of plaintiffs was exceedingly high that making individual determinations would be overly burdensome for the court. In sum, using statistical extrapolation to calculate damages is simply another tool for the judiciary to use in efficient case management, rather than a usurpation of the judiciary's discretion, and its used should be encouraged to litigate large, complex cases more effectively.

Exploiting Plaintiffs through Settlement: Divide and Conquer

Che and Spier [2008] describe how a defendant can exploit pecuniary externalities among victims (would-be plaintiffs) to reduce her total settlement costs. There are two types of externalities among victims/plaintiffs. First, there is a fixed amount of total harm, D, that has been suffered by Ν victims. At trial, a plaintiff's award will be his share of the total damages; that is, DIN. Thus, a larger number of victims reduces a single victim's incentive to join a class action and go to trial. Second, the η plaintiffs who go to trial share the cost of trial, Cp, equally. Thus, a larger number of plaintiffs increases a single victim's incentive to join the plaintiff class. Overall, a plaintiff expects a payoff of D/N Cp/n from trial; this payoff is higher if there are fewer victims and more plaintiffs. The trial-cost externality allows the defendant to settle selectively with different victims for different amounts, taking advantage of how settlement with some victims raises the cost of proceeding for those remaining. The reward externality has implications for how the defendant's ability to exploit them varies with the number of victims. The defendant's exploitation of these externalities results in a lower total payment and thus in reduced incentives for care. Several strategies that victims/plaintiffs might employ in order to defeat the defendant's exploitation are discussed. These include requiring a unanimous vote to accept any settlement offer; a commitment to consider only non-discriminatory offers; or making side payments within the class. Alternative game forms are also considered, under the assumption that no victim has a credible threat to go to trial alone. The use of sequential offers allows the defendant to reduce her total payment to zero. To see this, suppose there are Ν = 3 victims and that η 2 plaintiffs are required for a credible threat of trial. The defendant can offer the first victim zero, essentially by (credibly) threatening to settle with the remaining two victims. Having settled with the first victim (at zero), the defendant can offer the second victim zero, essentially by (credibly) threatening to settle with the third victim. Finally, having settled with the first two victims (for zero), the defendant can offer zero to the third victim, who does not have a credible threat to go to trial alone.

The consolidation of plaintiffs: The effects of number of plaintiffs on jurors' liability decisions, damage awards, and cognitive processing of evidence.

The consolidation of plaintiffs: The effects of number of plaintiffs on jurors' liability decisions, damage awards, and cognitive processing of evidence.

HIV+/AIDS related bioethical issues in Japan.

Annual and cumulative incidences of HIV+ and AIDS in patients reported by the AIDS Surveillance Committee of the Ministry of Health and Welfare are cited to illustrate some characteristics in Japan: nearly 59% of either HIV+ or AIDS patients were infected through injection of blood products or by blood transfusion. A number of plaintiffs have sued the Japanese government and pharmaceutical companies since 1989, but no judicial decisions have yet been made. The incidence of HIV decreases for each of the following routes of infection: the second highest route of transmission being heterosexual, followed by bisexual and unconfirmed or unknown cases, and less frequently homosexual, drug use and lastly via vertical transmission. The most serious bioethical problems with HIV+ and AIDS patients in Japan is the social segregation of these patients. There are many emotional fears among the general public and medical personnel about AIDS because of their inadequate scientific knowledge of this disease. The Japan Hospital Association is doing The Stop AIDS Campaign and made several surveys. Japan has become increasingly aware of the importance of AIDS education and a great deal of effort is being made to enhance bioethical consideration.

Sticks and Stones Can Break My Name: Nondefamatory Negligent Injury to Reputation

If a reputation is injured, does it matter whether defamation is the cause? Injury to reputation differs from other items of damage a plaintiff enumerates. Tradition links it to particular tortious conduct-defamation-on the part of a defendant.' This Comment examines ordinary negligent conduct as an alternative ground for recovery for injury to reputation. Recently, a number of plaintiffs have tried to recover for injury to their reputations from tortious conduct that is not defamatory. Typically, an accident injures a plaintiffs reputation when the plaintiff did not cause the accident but it looks like the plaintiff's fault. If a court finds that a defendant behaved negligently, the court must then decide whether to allow recovery for the resulting injury to a reputation given that the defendant's conduct was not defamatory. Taken as a whole, the claim of these plaintiffs is that injury to reputation is conceptually distinct from defamatory conduct and the highly-developed tort of defamation. This Comment describes the approaches courts have taken to negligence claims for injury to reputation. It then proposes a test for courts faced with an attempt to recover reputational damage claims brought on a negligence theory.2 Some courts have held that all claims for harm to reputation necessarily sound in defamation. Other courts have rejected the idea that defamation preempts all other grounds for recovery. These courts differ in their estimation of when reputation damages are recoverable outside of the tort of defamation. Section I provides an overview of the relevant defamation doctrine. Section II