Deborah R. Hensler

COURT-ANNEXED ARBITRATION

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the court-annexed arbitration. Court-annexed arbitration programs can be established by statute or court rule. Established, all programs authorize trial courts to require arbitration of civil suits that fall within a specified jurisdiction as a precondition for placing those suits on the trial calendar. Arbitration generally results in an award that has the force of a court judgment, if the award is accepted by the parties. If any party is dissatisfied with the award, he or she may reject it and request that the case be calendared for a trial de novo . In many programs, appellants who request de novo trials are required to reimburse the court for the arbitrators fees and in some programs, court costs and attorney fees may also be levied on unsuccessful appellants. Such fees are intended to discourage frivolous appeals. In all court-annexed arbitration programs, cases assigned to arbitration are heard by one or more private attorneys or retired judges who agree to serve as arbitrator.

The Globalization of Class Actions: An Overview

In less than a decade, the number of countries that permit representative litigation by private actors has multiplied dramatically. A minority of these procedures share all the features of the American class action for money damages. But there is a trend toward permitting private individuals and organizations to come forward on behalf of absent parties to obtain injunctive or declaratory relief or monetary compensation in some or all circumstances. Whether these procedures will spread to other countries or within countries to a wide variety of substantive legal matters and whether in particular private actors will be allowed to claim money damages in many or all instances is uncertain. Currently, the key obstacles to effective implementation of class action procedures are traditional legal funding rules that do not easily accommodate the realities of representative litigation.

Financing Civil Litigation: The US Perspective

This unique and timely book analyses the problem of financing civil litigation. The expert contributors discuss the legal possibilities and difficulties associated with several instruments – including cost shifting, fee arrangements, legal expense insurance and group litigation.

Reconstructing Big Law: The Big Picture

This chapter, which is adapted from a talk presented at a workshop at the Law & Society Association meeting in Mexico City in 2017, offers an overview of the general concept of Big Law, and the implications that it has for the transformation and challenges facing the provision of high-end corporate legal services around the world. This chapter also discusses some of the most important changes affecting the rapidly changing market for corporate legal services, and explains the importance of studying those changes.

Class actions in context

In recent years collective litigation procedures have spread across the globe, accompanied by hot controversy and normative debate. Yet virtually nothing is known about how these procedures operate in practice. Based on extensive documentary and interview research, this volume presents the results of the rst comparative investigation of class actions and group litigation ‘in action’, in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Class Actions, Legal

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by G.C. Hazard, Jr., volume 3, pp. 1924–1927,