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In this essay to honor Deborah Hensler, we summarize an update to her classic study on claiming behavior and explore its policy implications. More specifically, we empirically document how those with significant medical conditions utilize the civil liability system, particularly in terms of making claims against others, seeking the advice of legal professionals, and initiating litigation. We find that few who are injured or fall ill believe that another party is responsible, and even among that group, relatively few seek compensation against that party. Still fewer contact attorneys or file a lawsuit. Our findings have implications for the social welfare system, the role of tort law, and the way the selection of cases shapes the common-law. In particular, the significant non-random winnowing of the universe of harms litigated we observe can result in normatively undesirable path-dependence in the evolution of the common law.

Class actions, which are civil cases in which parties initiate a lawsuit on behalf of other plaintiffs not specifically named in the complaint, often make headlines and arouse policy debates. However, policymakers and the public know little about most class actions. This book presents the results of surveys of insurers and of state departments of insurance to learn more about class litigation against insurance companies.

The growing volume of electronically stored information has led to concerns that requests for electronic discovery (e-discovery) can increase litigation costs, impose new risks on lawyers and their clients, and alter expectations about likely court outcomes. The authors provide an overview of the issues involved and outline five avenues for future research on the legal and economic implications of e-discovery.

While a class action such as one brought under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 23 is certainly the most well-known mechanism for aggregating large numbers of similar claims, other approaches include mass joinder of parties, mass consolidation of separate cases, or \"multidistrict litigation\" transfer of federal cases from across the country into a single action for pretrial processing; corporate reorganizations under the U. S. Bankruptcy Code; large-scale inventories of clients controlled by a single attorney; government-initiated enforcement actions; and \"private attorneys general\" litigation brought on behalf of the general public.

Class action lawsuits--allowing one or a few plaintiffs to represent many who seek redress--have long been controversial. The current controversy, centered on lawsuits for money damages, is characterized by sharp disagreement among stakeholders about the kinds of suits being filed, whether plaintiffs' claims are meritorious, and whether resolutions to class actions are fair or socially desirable. Ultimately, these concerns lead many to wonder, Are class actions worth their costs to society and to business? Do they do more harm than good? To describe the landscape of current damage class action litigation, elucidate problems, and identify solutions, the RAND Institute for Civil Justice conducted a study using qualitative and quantitative research methods. The researchers concluded that the controversy over damage class actions has proven intractable because it implicates deeply held but sharply contested ideological views among stakeholders. Nevertheless, many of the political antagonists agree that class action practices merit improvement. The authors argue that both practices and outcomes could be substantially improved if more judges would supervise class action litigation more actively and scrutinize proposed settlements and fee awards more carefully. Educating and empowering judges to take more responsibility for case outcomes--and ensuring that they have the resources to do so--can help the civil justice system achieve a better balance between the public goals of class actions and the private interests that drive them.

Studies of civil jury verdicts have been a prominent feature of the Institute for Civil Justice's research agenda since its inception. This work has included the creation of a database for the analysis of jury verdicts and descriptive and analytic studies of verdict trends. Our current research extends our jury verdict work in two significant directions: First, it provides additional detail about punitive damage awards in cases in our existing database in which the plaintiff complains of financial injuries—cases in which punitive damages are awarded relatively more frequently than in other types of cases. Second, the database has been extended to include verdicts reached in Alabama from 1992 to 1997.

Regulation and consumer class actions can complement, duplicate, or oppose each other, depending, among others, on the leanings of regulatory objective functions towards the industry or consumers. In particular, pro-consumer regulators would like to see consumers benefit from class actions while pro-industry regulators would like to prevent regulated firms from being harmed by them. However, because pro-consumer regulators are already doing their best for consumers and pro-industry regulators their best for firms, they are both usually constrained in their policies. The result is that class actions tend to be less efficient under pro-consumer regulators and more efficient under pro-industry regulators. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]