Cornell Law Review

Ford’s Hidden Fairness Defect

Linda Sandstrom Simard, Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School.

Cassandra Burke Robertson, John Deaver Drinko—BakerHostetler Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Professional Ethics, Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes, Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston.

 

A consumer saves up to buy a used car. Unbeknownst to him, the vehicle has a design defect—and in a crash, the airbag fails to deploy, leaving his passenger severely injured. Under state law, the injured party has a right to sue the vehicle manufacturer: but where? The obvious forum is the plaintiff’s home forum—it’s where…

Oct 2020

Recent News & Events

Cornell Law Review, Issue 4

Cornell Law Review is proud to announce Vol. 105, Issue 4, with Articles and Essays exploring Tort as Private Administration; Justice Scalia’s Campaign Against Legislative History; Corporate Privacy; Product Liability Law; and Student Notes that explore the Racial Gap in Financial Services and a Crime-Fraud Exception to Executive Privilege. Thank you to our amazing authors for their outstanding collaboration and patience with us during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aug 2020

Article

Torts as Private Administration

Nathaniel Donahue, JD/Ph.D. candidate, Yale University, nathaniel.donahue@yale.edu

John Fabian Witt, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Head of Davenport College, Yale University, john.witt@yale.edu

What does tort law do? This Article develops an account of the law of torts for the age of settlement. A century ago, leading torts jurists proposed that tort doctrine’s main function was to allocate authority between judge and jury. In the era of the disappearing trial, we propose that tort law’s hidden function is…

May 2020

Article

An Empirical Investigation of Third Party Consumer Litigant Funding

Ronen Avraham & Anthony Sebok

This is the first large-scale empirical study of consumer third-party litigation funding in the United States. Despite being part of the American legal system for more than two decades there has been almost no real data-driven empirical study to date. We analyzed funding requests from American consumers in over 100,000 cases over a twelve year period. This proprietary data set was provided to us by one of the largest consumer litigation…

Jul 2019

Article

Making State Civil Procedure

Zachary D. Clopton

State courts matter. Not only do state courts handle more than sixty times the number of civil cases as federal courts, but they also represent an important bulwark against the effects of federal procedural retrenchment. Yet state courts and state procedure are notably absent from the scholarly discourse. In order to evaluate state procedure—and in…

Nov 2018