The Litigation Research Fund
The ABA Section of Litigation established The Litigation Research Fund in Fall 2007 to support original and practical scholarly work that significantly advances the understanding of civil litigation in the United States. This research fund supports research and writing projects in two broad areas: First, scholarship relevant to litigation policy (e.g., on issues important to rule makers, legislators, or courts, or helpful to the organized bar in developing guidelines and formulating positions); and second, scholarship bearing on litigation practice (such as writings addressing trial skills or other aspects of how litigators conduct their work). Funded scholarship may relate to judicial administration; judicial independence; rules and standards relating to litigation (e.g., ethics rules, rules of evidence, and rules of civil procedure); the assistance of counsel; trial and discovery practice; or the jury process, among others. Individual awards of between $5,000 and $20,000 are awarded. Legal academics as well as social scientists and scholars from other disciplines are invited to apply.
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS (Deadline: February 28, 2009)
Applications for the third round of funding are now being accepted.
Preference will be given to works with an empirical foundation, although they need not involve original data collection. Position papers, comparative and historical scholarship, and other original academic work of practical significance to litigation and litigators will also qualify for funding. Works already in progress are eligible. Authors will maintain the copyrights in their works; however, the Section of Litigation will receive the non-exclusive right to distribute, publicize and quote from the completed works in order to make them available, as appropriate, to members of the Section of Litigation, courts, lawmakers and policymakers, and others.
Applicants should submit a statement describing the project with a project title and how it will be conducted; the form the final product will take (e.g., article or book); when it will be completed; the importance of the project in light of the above criteria; and a project budget. Please include grantee institution’s name and contact person with e-mail and mailing address. The award is not intended to cover institutions’ indirect costs. Awardees will be asked to sign the ABA grant conditions before the award is made. A curriculum vita including a list of the applicant’s prior publications should also be submitted. Priority consideration for the next awards will be given to submissions received by February 28, 2009. For additional information, contact: Professor Bruce Green.
Applications should be submitted by e-mail with the subject line “Litigation Research Fund” to Monica Cortez, ABA Section of Litigation, with copies to Robert Nelson, Director, American Bar Foundation, and Professor Bruce Green.
In the second half of 2008, the Section of Litigation agreed to support the following six projects, selected from among approximately 40 applications.
- “Settlement Mills Under the Microscope” Nora Freeman Engstrom.” Georgetown University Law Center, will explore the normative, theoretical, and practical implications of the emergence of a relatively new form of law firm organization. The name she gives these firms is “settlement mills.” They are high volume personal injury law practices that aggressively advertise and mass produce the resolution of claims, typically with little client interaction and without initiating lawsuits, much less taking cases to trial. Her research will particularly focus on the following three questions: Just how prevalent is settlement mill representation; are settlement mills, on the whole, beneficial to society; and how can state courts curb settlement mills’ worst abuses without compromising their core efficiencies?
- “Effects of Economic Recovery on the Volume and Nature of Litigation.” Sean Farhang, U.C. Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy, will examine, in the context of job discrimination litigation, whether the statutory manipulation of the economic value of lawsuits influences the volume of enforcement litigation; which socio-economic classes of workers’ rights are actually vindicated through litigation; the ability of plaintiffs to secure counsel; and the extent to which plaintiffs counsel actually prosecute claims. The findings will have implications for statutory design as it pertains to the use of private lawsuits as a policy tool for implementation of social and economic regulation.
- “Representing the Indigent: Randomized Studies on the Effect of Legal Assistance, with an Eye To System Design.” Professor Jim Greiner of Harvard Law School will conduct a series of randomized studies to evaluate the effect of providing legal assistance to indigent clients in a variety of administrative and judicial contexts, including appeals in social security disability cases and unemployment assistance matters. The goal is to provide information about the importance of counsel in such settings as well as to make recommendations to policy makers regarding the design of systems in which litigants are supposed to be able to proceed pro se.
- “Civil Litigation in the News: A Local Perspective.” Herbert Kritzer, William Mitchell College of Law, will study the nature of the coverage of civil litigation on local news and how that coverage differs between local television news and local newspapers. The question is important because one source of public perceptions of the civil justice system is local news (which is more heavily used than national news sources). This project will compare how civil litigation has been portrayed in local television news casts and in print coverage over the same time periods in the same media market. The portraits, and comparisons, that emerge should provide a better understanding of the kinds of information available to the public about the civil justice system.
- “Employment Discrimination Class Action Injunctions: Terms and Trends.” Margo Schlanger, Pauline Kim and Andrew Martin, Washington University School of Law, will study the contours of negotiated and litigated injunctive remedies in employment discrimination class actions. Examining the past 10 years of large-scale employment discrimination injunctions involving different types of parties, they will assess differences in terms across party type and over time, against hypotheses generated by theories about litigation, employment discrimination remedies, and anti-discrimination politics. The study aims, first, to shed light on the continuing relevance of institutional reform litigation as a practice, and second, to analyze remedial design in employment discrimination disputes, including any recent remedial shifts.
- Donna Shestowsky, University of California, Davis, School of Law, will conduct research exploring three questions about how civil parties perceive choices among the alternatives of litigation, arbitration and mediation: First, how do civil disputants evaluate procedural options at the beginning of the dispute resolution process? Second, do their initial preferences for various procedural models in fact predict which procedure they ultimately use? Finally, is their ultimate satisfaction with the procedure they use associated with how attractive they initially perceived that procedure? The comparative analysis will focus on real disputants, will examine their attitudes both before and after disputants experience a legal procedure for their dispute, and will be conducted in courts that offer both mediation and arbitration for the same types of cases. The findings should assist courts in offering procedures that best meet disputants’ needs as well as help lawyers to better educate their clients about the options available to them.
In 2007, the Section of Litigation agreed to support the following seven projects, selected from among approximately 40 applications.
- “What Do We Know About Jury Verdicts? Evaluating Data Sources That Influence Civil Litigation.” Nicole L. Waters, Cynthia G. Lee, and their colleagues at the National Center for State Courts will explore the uses of jury verdict reporter data, including by litigators and by legislators and advocates seeking tort reform and other litigation reform, and will test the accuracy of this commercial data by comparing it with empirical data directly from state courts, culminating in the publication of an article discussing the findings.
- “The Federal Side of Shareholder Litigation.” Jessica Erickson, Richmond School of Law, will review case records of shareholder derivative lawsuits filed in federal court in 2005 to gather information about, among other things, the nature of the plaintiffs, the allegations, the use of special litigation committees, the benefits to corporations flowing from the lawsuits, and the relationship to other litigation, and then publish an article describing the findings and offering policy recommendations on how legislation might improve the law governing derivative lawsuits.
- “Understanding the Impact of Social Science Research on School Finance Litigation.” Jeanne M. Powers, Arizona State University, will analyze the judicial use of social science research in school finance cases decided in state supreme courts from 1971 to 2006 in order to study how courts use social science research to resolve difficult public policy questions in the face of conflicting research findings. Her work will examine the relationship between school finance litigation, social science research and educational equity.
- “Settlement and Trial? An Empirical Study of High-Low Agreements.” J.J. Prescott, Univ. of Michigan Law School, and Albert Yoon, Northwestern Univ. School of Law, will explore, theoretically and empirically, the nature and effects of high-low settlement agreements in order to develop and publish findings useful to both policymakers and practitioners. Among the questions are: Under what conditions do litigants opt for a high-low agreement; how does the content of the high-low agreement vary with litigation costs; how effectively do litigants use high-low agreements; and who is the primary beneficiary of such agreements?
- “A Proposed Study of the Functioning of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.” Michael Saks, Roselle L. Wissler, Betsy Grey and Guy Cardineau, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, will study the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), established in 1986, as an example of a modern no-fault compensation system, by interviewing actors in the program, analyzing case processing and decision-making, and studying the program’s operation and evolution over time.
- “Debts, Defaults, and Details: Exploring the Impact of Consumer Debt Collection on American Courts.” Mary Spector, SMU Dedman School of Law, will collect empirical evidence regarding the current practice of debt collection litigation by reviewing court records in Dallas County and at least one other jurisdiction outside Texas. Prof. Spector will attempt to identify differences in cases where debtors make an appearance and those in which they do not and identify emerging trends to explore whether existing rules and procedures adequately protect the integrity of the judicial system.
- “The Litigation Bounty: A Study of the Comparative Effectiveness of Monetary Rewards as Compliance Systems.” Orly Lobel, University of San Diego School of Law, and Yuval Feldman, Bar-Ilan University, will conduct an empirical study of the federal False Claim Act’s qui tam bounty program to analyze the effect of the program’s incentives in motivating whistle-blowing and private enforcement litigation.
