Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

• Juris Doctor
• University of Georgia

Cambridge Core - Tort Law - Mass Tort Deals - by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

102 Cornell L. Rev. 1445 (2017)As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal- agent conc...

On paper, class actions run like clockwork. But practice suggests the need for tune-ups: sometimes judges still approve settlements rife with red flags, and professional objectors may be more concerned with shaking down class counsel than with improving class member’s outcomes. The lack of data on the number of opt-outs, objectors, and claims rates...

When transferee judges receive a multidistrict proceeding, they select a few lead plaintiffs' lawyers to efficiently manage litigation and settlement negotiations. That decision gives those attorneys total control over all consolidated plaintiffs' claims and rewards them richly in common-benefit fees. It's no surprise then that these are coveted po...

As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal-agent concerns that plagued class-action a...

High-stakes multidistrict litigations saddle the transferee judges who manage them with an odd juxtaposition of power and impotence. On one hand, judges appoint and compensate lead lawyers (who effectively replace parties' chosen counsel) and promote settlement with scant appellate scrutiny or legislative oversight. But on the other, without the ar...

Adequate representation and preclusion depend on whether the courts treat a litigant as part of a group experiencing an aggregate harm or as a distinct person suffering individual injuries. And though a vast literature about adequate representation exists in the class-action context, it thins dramatically when contemplating other forms of group lit...

Commonality is a defining characteristic of mass-tort litigation. But mass-tort claimants typically do not share enough in common to warrant class certification. That is, commonality does not predominate. Yet, without class certification, judges cannot conclude these cases as a unit absent a private settlement. This paradox prompts two questions. F...

This Article identifies a market-based solution for monitoring large-scale litigation that proceeds outside of Rule 23’s safeguards. Although class actions dominate the scholarly discussion of mass litigation, the ever-increasing restrictions on certifying a class mean that plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely rely on aggregate litigation (through multidi...

This short essay, written for a symposium on The Principles and Politics of Aggregate Litigation: CAFA, PSLRA, and Beyond, decouples due process from a proceduralist’s intuition and explains why it matters in securities class actions. It begins by exploring several analytical models that shed light on the representative relationship in class action...

Adequate representation in securities class actions is, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, usurped and subsumed by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act’s lead-plaintiff appointment process. Once appointed, the lead plaintiff bears a crushing burden: Congress expects her to monitor the attorney, thwart strike suits, and deter fraud, whi...

Despite a rise in the number of personal-injury and product-liability cases consolidated through multi-district litigation, a decline in class-certification motions, and several newsworthy nonclass settlements such as the $4.85 billion Vioxx settlement and estimated $700 million Zyprexa settlements, little ink has been spilled on nonclass aggregati...

In a post-Class Action Fairness Act world, the modern mass-tort class action is disappearing. Indeed, multi-district litigation and private aggregation through contracts with plaintiffs' law firms are the new mass-tort frontier. But something's amiss with this "nonclass aggregation." These new procedures involve a fundamentally different dynamic th...

This short introduction to Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. aims to explain the case and to set the table for what promises to be thought-provoking roundtable discussion hosted by Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc. Accordingly, what follows is a concise overview of the legal background and current debate over the two procedural issues that the Ninth Circ...

The potential for attorneys to collude in reaching a settlement agreement arises in any large-scale aggregation of mass torts. In the 1990s, attorneys settled seventy-four percent of the mass tort cases consolidated for transfer by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Even though most mass tort litigation settles, the judicial system ens...

In recent years, the class action certification hearing has become the latest forum for disputes over the reliability of expert testimony. Since these hearings may involve complex technical matters, litigants frequently try to introduce expert testimony to either establish or challenge the basic requirements for class certification. Yet, most court...

This short piece responds to Jay Tidmarsh's article, Rethinking Adequacy of Representation, 87 Texas Law Review 1137 (2009). I explore Professor Tidmarsh's proposed "do no harm" approach to adequate representation in class actions from a procedural legitimacy perspective. I begin by considering the assumption underlying his alternative, namely that...

As class-action theorists, we sometimes focus so heavily on the class certification threshold that we neglect to reassess the line itself. The current line asks whether procedurally aggregated individuals form a sufficiently cohesive group before the decision to sue. Given this symposium’s topic - the state of aggregate litigation and the boundarie...

Large-scale litigation, such as the Vioxx, Zyprexa, and asbestos cases, breeds conflict. Conflicts arise between attorneys and their clients (agency problems), plaintiffs and other plaintiffs (group problems), and plaintiffs’ attorneys and other plaintiffs’ attorneys (competition problems). Although these cases cannot be certified as class actions,...

There's A Pennoyer in My Foyer: Civil Procedure According to Dr. Seuss is what it purports to be: a Seussian take on civil procedure. It's a short, fun essay that covers (1) the iron triangle of civil procedure--the role of lawyers, judges, and juries, and (2) prominent civil procedure doctrines, such as personal jurisdiction, Erie, pleading, disco...

This short essay responds to Judge Jack Weinstein's essay, Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigations, 2009 Cardozo De Novo 1. In so doing, it also provides a condensed version of my earlier article, Litigating Groups, which analyzes group dynamics within nonclass aggregation. By drawing on the literature of moral and politica...

Nonclass aggregate litigation is risky for plaintiffs: it falls into the gray area between individual litigation and certified class actions. Although scholars have formulated procedural protections for both extremes, the unique danger and allure posed by nonclass aggregation has been undertheorized, leaving mass tort claimants with inadequate safe...

Securities class actions are on the chopping block-again. Traditional commentators continue to view class actions with suspicion; they see class suits as nonmeritorious byproducts of self-interest and the attorneys who bring them as rent-seekers. Their conventional approach has popularized securities class actions' negative effects. High-profile co...

This short piece, written for the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, responds to Professor Scott Dodson's comment on Bowles v. Russell, titled Jurisdictionality and Bowles v. Russell. Dodson proposes to navigate a path between Justice Thomas's majority opinion and Justice Souter's dissent by embracing Thomas's use of mandatory and Souter'...

Class actions regulate when government fails. Perhaps this use as an ex post remedy when ex ante regulation founders explains the fervor and rhetoric surrounding Rule 23's political life. In truth, the class action does more than aggregate; it augments government policing and generates external societal benefits. These societal benefits - externali...

No coherent doctrinal statement exists for calculating open-market damages for securities fraud class actions. Instead, courts have tried in vain to fashion common-law deceit and misrepresentation remedies to fit open-market fraud. The result is a relatively ineffective system with a hallmark feature: unpredictable damage awards. This poses a signi...

On January 9, 2004, the United States officially declared Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war and indicated that it will turn him over to a special court established by the Iraqi Governing Council under the direction of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Yet, prosecution in this forum fails to ensure proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt as requi...

Women account for almost two-thirds of the world's illiterates. In the year 2000, the World Education Forum met in Dakar, Senegal and set goals to (1) eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and (2) achieve gender equality in education by 2015. Two months before 2004, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and...

Litigating Together: Social, Moral, and Legal ObligationsI have posted a draft of the last in a trilogy of articles on nonclass aggregation (on SSRN) and thought I would provide a brief retrospective for the interested reader. The first article in the trilogy is Procedural Justice in Nonclass Aggregation, which explains in-depth the problems and ri...