Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law. I am grateful to all those who participated in a Boston University School of Law Faculty Workshop on an early draft of this article.
See WALTER K. OLSON, THE LITIGATION EXPLOSION: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN AMERICA UNLEASHED THE LAWSUIT 247-70 (1991) (discussing examples of frivolous litigation); INSURANCE INFO. INST., ATTITUDES TOWARD THE LIABILITY AND LITIGATION SYSTEM 17 (1982) (Gallup survey reporting that 31% of the general public perceives lawsuits asjustified "less than half of the time" and 41% perceives lawsuits as justified .about half of the time"); Valerie P. Hans & William S. Lofquist, Jurors'Judgments of Business Liability in Tort Cases: Implications for the Litigation Explosion Debate, 26 L. & SoC'Y REV. 85, 96 (1992) (noting that research revealed "a widespread impression among jurors that the civil litigation system is overburdened by claimants seeking awards in meritless cases");
This chapter examines the law-and-economics approach to civil procedure. It argues that law and economics offers tools and insights that are relevant, indeed critical, to designing an optimal procedural system no matter what normative metric is applied. Section 8.2 begins the discussion by defining more precisely what is included in the category “civil procedure”. Section 8.3 then describes the law-and-economics approach in more detail and discusses some of its strengths and limitations. Section 8.4 illustrates the usefulness of this approach by applying it to three specific procedures: court-annexed mediation, pleading, and discovery. Section 8.5 concludes by summarizing the key contributions the law-and-economics approach has made to civil procedure analysis in general and outlining directions for future work.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.