Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Civil Justice (civil + justice)
Selected AbstractsForty Years of Civil Jury VerdictsJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2004Seth A. Seabury Debate over civil justice reform in the United States frequently centers on the extent to which damage awards granted by juries have been escalating over time. However, past studies on civil juries have been hampered by lack of data on verdicts spanning a sufficiently long time period. Average jury awards tend to be highly variable from year to year, making it difficult to distinguish trends over relatively short periods of time. We use the longest time series of data on jury verdicts ever assembled: 40 years of data on tort cases in San Francisco County, CA and Cook County, IL collected by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice. We find that while there has been a substantial increase in the average award amount in real dollars, much of this trend is explained by changes in the mix of cases, particularly a decreasing fraction of automobile cases and an increase in medical malpractice. Claimed economic losses, in particular claimed medical losses, also explain a great deal of the increase. Although there appears to be some unexplained growth in awards for certain types of cases, this growth is cancelled out on average by declines in awards in other types of cases. [source] Settlement as Civil JusticeTHE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 5 2000Simon Roberts First page of article [source] Forty Years of Civil Jury VerdictsJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2004Seth A. Seabury Debate over civil justice reform in the United States frequently centers on the extent to which damage awards granted by juries have been escalating over time. However, past studies on civil juries have been hampered by lack of data on verdicts spanning a sufficiently long time period. Average jury awards tend to be highly variable from year to year, making it difficult to distinguish trends over relatively short periods of time. We use the longest time series of data on jury verdicts ever assembled: 40 years of data on tort cases in San Francisco County, CA and Cook County, IL collected by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice. We find that while there has been a substantial increase in the average award amount in real dollars, much of this trend is explained by changes in the mix of cases, particularly a decreasing fraction of automobile cases and an increase in medical malpractice. Claimed economic losses, in particular claimed medical losses, also explain a great deal of the increase. Although there appears to be some unexplained growth in awards for certain types of cases, this growth is cancelled out on average by declines in awards in other types of cases. [source] The Contingency Legal Aid Fund: A Third Way to Finance Personal Injury LitigationJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2003David Capper Northern Ireland missed out on all the major reforms to civil justice which took place in England and Wales during the 1980s and 1990s. However the reform movement is now gathering pace and a Legal Services Commission is due to start work in the spring of 2003. This article considers how personal injury claims might be funded. The government wants to introduce conditional fee agreements (CFAs) but widespread hostility expressed by many interested parties led to the consideration of an alternative funding system, the Contingency Legal Aid Fund (CLAF). The relative merits of CFAs and CLAF are considered in the following pages. [source] | ||||||||||