Lynn A. Baker

University of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Law

The individual plaintiff in an MDL is subject to the efforts and decisions of numerous different attorneys, including many whom the plaintiff did not choose but who stand to share in any fees resulting from the plaintiff's case. Which lawyers effectively represent the MDL plaintiff, at what point(s) in time, for what purpose(s), and with what oblig...

Every year, fee awards enable millions of people to obtain access to justice and strengthen the deterrent effect of the law by motivating lawyers to handle class actions. But little research exists on why judges award the amounts they do or whether they size fee awards correctly. The process remains a black box. Through a detailed study of 431 secu...

This article was prepared for the Institute for Law & Economic Policy 19th Annual Symposium on "The Economics of Aggregate Litigation," held on April 11-12, 2013, in Naples, Florida, and also benefited from presentation at a Faculty Colloquium at the University of Texas School of Law. The authors would like to thank Cornerstone Research and Stanfor...

This Article was prepared for the Ted Schneyer Ethics Symposium: Lawyer Regulation for the 21st Century held at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in January 2011. Despite its obvious importance to the content and legitimacy of a state’s rules of legal ethics, the process by which these rules are made has received little schol...

In this Article, which was prepared for the Fordham Law Review Symposium on “Civil Procedure and the Legal Profession,” we make a preliminary effort to identify a principled basis for distinguishing self-interested conduct by attorneys that violates the fiduciary duty from similar conduct that is a proper exercise or assertion of an attorney’s cont...

This Article was prepared in connection with the Symposium on “Home Rule,” co-sponsored by The Byron R. White Center for the Study of American. Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and the Denver University Law Review. The distribution of powers between levels of government in the state system presents a puzzle for constitut...

Proponents of originalism typically acknowledge that some constitutional provisions are ambiguous. No originalist consensus has yet emerged, however, for how a court should proceed in such cases. Some originalists are comfortable permitting courts to announce a determinate meaning for such constitutional provisions, but offer the courts no guidance...

This chapter in a forthcoming collection of essays to be published by Cambridge University Press (THE REHNQUIST LEGACY, C. Bradley, ed., forthcoming 2006) discusses Chief Justice Rehnquist's legacy for federalism with particular reference to the spending power. After describing the opinion in Dole and tracing the apparent origins of the five-prong...

This Essay discusses a recent "populist" critique of plebiscites: that they "cannot be trusted to reflect the voice of the people accurately or meaningfully." At the center of the critique are two concerns: that previous discussions of plebiscites have been based on a too narrow understanding of "what it means to hear the voice of the people," and...

The spending power remains the notable exception to the Rehnquist Court's federalism revival, its exercise still governed by the extremely generous 1987 decision in South Dakota v. Dole. Consequently, many commentators, writing in this Symposium and elsewhere, have proposed that Congress should respond to the Rehnquist Court's states' rights decisi...

From 1937 to 1995, federalism was part of a “Constitution in exile.” Except for the brief interlude of the National League of Cities doctrine2—which, like Napoleon’s ill-fated return from Elba, met with crushing defeat3—the post–New Deal Supreme Court has been almost completely unwilling to enforce constitutional limits on national power vis-à-vis...

With its 1995 decision in United States v. Lopez, the Rehnquist Court made clear that the commerce clause does not grant Congress a plenary police power. Prevailing spending clause doctrine, however, permits Congress to use conditional offers of federal funds in order to circumvent seemingly any restrictions the Constitution might be found to impos...

This article examines the role that attorneys for plaintiffs can properly play in structuring settlements of cases that involve numerous clients or absent class members. The practical points of departure are (1) the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, 117 S. Ct. 2231 (1997), which sets out due process standards...

A survey of 137 marriage license applicants and 92 law students showed that both groups had largely incorrect perceptions of the legal terms of the marriage contract as embodied in divorce statutes (DSs), but they had relatively accurate, if sometimes optimistic, perceptions of both the likelihood and the effects of divorce in the population at lar...

The doctrine of informed consent, introduced by the courts in 1957, is but one of many legally imposed duties to disclose to arise over the last several decades. In myriad areas of everyday life, including medical decision-making, the law has come to require that a person or entity with presumptively superior information as to risks, contents, or c...