Third, class arbitration greatly increases risks to defendants. Informal procedures do of course have a cost: The absence of multilayered review makes it more likely that errors will go uncorrected. Defendants are willing to accept the costs of these errors in arbitration, since their impact is limited to the size of individual disputes, and presumably outweighed by savings from avoiding the courts. But when damages allegedly owed to tens of thousands of potential claimants are aggregated and decided at once, the risk of an error will often become unacceptable. Faced with even a small chance of a devastating loss, defendants will be pressured into settling questionable claims.
—
Justice Scalia delivers the opinion of the Court, and a knife in the back of class-action suits. [more inside]
posted by kipmanley
on Apr 27, 2011 -
107 comments
The Fourth Amendment provides, in part, that "...no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." The Supreme Court has issued its (yet another) 8-0
opinion, authored by Justice Scalia in the case of
United States v. Grubbs, overturning the Ninth Circuit
decision. Justice Souter filed a
concurring opinion.
Grubbs deals with the question of anticipatory warrants, and it is the first time that the Court has addressed the practice. It appears that under this ruling, preemptive warrants can issue without existing probable cause, but merely on the supposition that probable cause will exist in the future.
Some legal scholars had
anticipated that at least the
more conservative members of the Court would rule against anticipatory warrants. After all, under
Blackstone's analysis of the common law rule that contributed to the Fourth Amendment, as noted by Professor Orin Kerr in the
NYU Journal of Law and Liberty symposium on the subject, warrants "issue" when they are signed by the judge, and not when the precedent condition occurs. Professor Chris Slobogin
disagrees. Kerr has posted a preliminary
analysis of the decision on his new
blawg. The case has
previously been
discussed by the smart people over at the
Volokh Conspiracy.
posted by Pontius Pilate
on Mar 22, 2006 -
45 comments
Justice Scalia's recusal in the Pledge case has prompted a serious debate on the judicial role.
Robert Alt has suggested that the Justice's recusal carries an important warning for the Senate in confirming new judges; if the Senate requires the nominees to answer questions about their opinions on potential cases, those nominees would have to recuse themselves if those cases later indeed came before them.
Matthew Franck, on the other hand, suggests "this argument ... permits the requirements of judicial ethics — and even a terribly broad reading of them — to trump the constitutional obligation of senators to inform themselves adequately about the kinds of judges they are being asked to confirm." [more inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu
on Oct 22, 2003 -
11 comments
