We see all these fascinating law review articles appear in print, and we plan to read the articles and react intelligently to them.

Then life gets in the way.

Instead of actually reading the things, we pile a bunch of ’em up on our desks and then give up. Instead of publishing an intelligent blog post, we simply alert the world that the new stuff is out there.

So that’s our confession, and that’s what we’re doing here, again:

We liked the abstract of “The Quasi-Class Action Method of Managing Multidistrict Litigations: Problems and a Proposal,” posted at SSRN by Charles Silver and Geoffrey Miller. Here’s a link to the abstract (and, in turn, the entire article), and here’s the entire text of the abstract:

“This article uses three recent multi-district litigations (MDLs) that produced massive settlements – Guidant ($240 million), Vioxx ($4.85 billion), and Zyprexa ($700 million) – to study the emerging quasi-class action approach to MDL management. The approach has four components: (1) judicial selection of lead attorneys; (2) judicial control of lead attorneys’ compensation; (3) forced fee transfers from non-lead lawyers to cover lead attorneys’ fees; and (4) judicial reduction of non-lead lawyers’ fees to save claimants money. These widely used procedures have serious downsides. They make lawyers financially dependent on judges and, therefore, loyal to judges rather than clients. They compromise judges’ independence by involving them heavily on the plaintiffs’ side and making them responsible for plaintiffs’ success. They allocate monies in ways that likely over-compensate some attorneys and under-pay others, with predictable impacts on service levels. They also lack needed grounding in substantive law because the common fund doctrine, which supports fee awards in class actions, does not apply in MDLs. Academics have not previously noted these shortcomings; this is the first scholarly assessment of the quasi-class action approach.

“This article also proposes an alternative method of MDL management. It recommends the creation a plaintiffs’ management committee (PMC) composed of the attorney or attorney-group with the most valuable client inventory, as determined objectively by the trial judge. The PMC, which would have a large interest in the success of an MDL, would then select and retain other lawyers to perform common benefit work (CBW) for all claimants and monitor the lawyers’ performance. The new approach would thus use micro-incentives to organize the production of CBW in MDLs rather than judicial control and oversight. The court would stand back from the process, exercising only a limited backup authority to prevent abuses. If enacted as a statute, the proposal would restore judges’ independence, preserve lawyers’ loyalties, provide the requisite legal foundation for fee awards, and encourage the fairer, more efficient, and more appropriate representation of claimants in MDLs.”

We also like the sound of Richard Nagareda’s recent piece, “Aggregate Litigation Across the Atlantic and the Future of American Exceptionalism.” Again, here’s a link to the abstract (which will take you to the full text of the article in the January 2009 issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review), and here’s what the abstract tells us:

“This article analyzes the emerging phenomenon of trans-Atlantic civil litigation on an aggregate basis – chiefly, though not exclusively, by way of class actions. European systems have shown a growing receptiveness for aggregate litigation, but treatments of this development have consisted largely of description. This article offers an analytical framework with which to anticipate the structural dynamics of transnational aggregate litigation in the twenty-first century.

“Simply put, these structural dynamics will tend to recreate the difficulties seen in the context of nationwide class action litigation within the United States. The nationalization of US commerce led to aggregate litigation of a commensurately national scope. The result, however, was regulatory mismatch – for the scope of aggregation to expand to match the scope of the disputed nationwide activity, rather than the jurisdictional sovereignty of the forum. The globalization of commerce, coupled with the very multiplicity of approaches to aggregate litigation seen today, has a considerable tendency to replicate these mismatches – now, with international proportions. The recent Vivendi securities class action in the United States and the pathbreaking Royal Dutch Shell settlement under the 2005 Dutch collective settlement act confirm this trend.

“The article then analyzes the vehicles by which to address regulatory mismatches. Here, too, the US experience is instructive, underscoring both the centrality and the limitations of the two vehicles by which to achieve a kind of de facto, informal governance: the principles for transnational claim preclusion and the latitude available for private contracts to shift disputes from litigation to arbitration.”

Finally, we’re mighty tempted by Thomas Colby’s forthcoming piece in the Yale Law Journal, “Clearing the Smoke From Philip Morris v. Williams: The Past, Present, and Future of Punitive Damages.” Here’s the link to SSRN, and here’s what the abstract tells us:

“In Philip Morris v. Williams, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not permit the imposition of punitive damages to punish a defendant for harm caused to third parties. This Article critiques the reasoning, but seeks ultimately to vindicate the result, of this landmark decision. It argues that, although the Court’s procedural due process analysis does not stand up to scrutiny, punitive damages as punishment for third-party harm do indeed violate procedural due process, but for reasons far more profound than those offered by the Court. To reach that conclusion, the Article confronts the most basic and fundamental questions about punitive damages – questions that the Supreme Court has studiously avoided for more than a century: what, exactly, is the purpose of punitive damages, and how is it constitutional to impose them as a form of punishment in a judicial proceeding without affording the defendant the protection of the Constitution’s criminal procedural safeguards?

“The Article argues that punitive damages are properly conceived of a form of punishment for private wrongs: judicially sanctioned private revenge. As such, the Article explains, it makes both theoretical and doctrinal sense to impose them without affording the defendant criminal procedural protections, which are necessitated only for the punishment of public wrongs on behalf of society. When, however, courts employ punitive damages as a form of punishment for public wrongs, they become a substitute for the criminal law and thus make an intolerable end run around the Bill of Rights. For that reason, Williams was ultimately correct that punitive damages must be limited to punishment for the harm done to the individual plaintiff, not the harm done to the general public.

“The Article concludes by considering the future of punitive damages in light of the Williams decision. It concludes that, contrary to the emerging conventional wisdom, Williams does not stand in the way of the imposition of substantial extra-compensatory damages of the type favored by law and economics scholars as a means of forcing the defendant to internalize the costs of its behavior in order to achieve optimal deterrence. It is the fact that punitive damages punish, and that they do so in order to vindicate the interests of the state, that precludes their use to address third-party harms. Once the
element of punishment is eliminated from the remedy, the constitutional infirmity at issue in Williams is ameliorated.”

As we said, this all sound like good stuff.

And we’ll read these puppies in their entirety any day now; perhaps starting on the days we retire.