Finding Justice for Greenwood

By Professor Eric Miller, Leo J. O'Brien Fellow

This week, Prof. Miller joined with other Justice for Greenwood advocates in discussing reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre. Below is an excerpt of his remarks. View the press conference.

Overwhelmingly, white business and political leaders have sought to appropriate the history of the massacre for their own interests. They have done this since the days following the massacre itself. In the immediate aftermath of the Massacre, member of the State National Guard, the County Sheriff’s Department, and the City of Tulsa Police herded the survivors of the massacre into internment camps where they held for three days. In a scheme concocted by the Chamber of Commerce, the National Guard, and the City of Tulsa, white Tulsans could sponsor an internee, and farm them out under threat of violence and without pay in conditions that amounted to slave labor. Under this scheme, Black residents of Tulsa marked with a literal badge of inferiority, a green card that the survivors had to wear to avoid further reprisals.

The City and its white business class saw an opportunity to grab the land they had burned from the survivors of the Massacre. They ensured that the victims received no compensation from the City and enacted illegal fire regulations and zoning ordinances to prevent rebuilding. For the rest of the summer and through the winter, the Massacre victims lived as refugees on their own land in red cross tents. The City and County destroyed the leadership of the community, murdering local leaders, professionals, and business owners who contributed to the community's prosperity, including nationally renowned surgeon Dr. A.C. Jackson. The County empaneled a grand jury to indict Black community leaders, such as J.B. Stradford, a hotelier and businessman, and A.J. Smitherman, a local attorney. These leaders fled the state, never to return.

White Tulsans have sought to tell the history of the Massacre in ways that most benefit themselves. When word of the Massacre spread across the country, money started to flow in to help the survivors. The Defendants, including the Chamber of Commerce, decided that they would be the ones to tell the story of the Tulsa Massacre; and that they would determine what to do with the money.

Immediately following the murders, lootings, and burning, the City of Tulsa and Chamber of Commerce colluded to minimize the impact of the massacre in the local and national press. Initially, they appropriated for themselves money sent from around the country to help the homeless, destitute victims. To minimize the financial harm to white businesses, the white community, falsely labeled the Massacre a Riot and blamed the destruction on the Black residents of Greenwood. When that was not enough to rehabilitate the reputation of white business leaders, the City, the County, and the Chamber of Commerce denied the massacre had ever happened, and affirmatively rejected aid from around the country intended to assist the Massacre victims. For the next 75 years, white political and business leaders silenced Black Tulsans and the Greenwood diaspora from recounting their experiences of the massacre and demanding restitution. 

LIABILITY UNDER FALSE CLAIMS ACT: Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar

Professor Paul T. Hayden's book, "The Law of Torts," is cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion turning on when liability arises under the False Claims Act.

[Excerpt from the opinion]

We need not resolve whether all claims for payment implicitly represent that the billing party is legally entitled to payment. The claims in this case do more than merely demand payment. They fall squarely within the rule that half-truths—representations that state the truth only so far as it goes, while omitting critical qualifying information—can be actionable misrepresentations. A classic example of an actionable half-truth in contract law is the seller who reveals that there may be two new roads near a property he is selling, but fails to disclose that a third potential road might bisect the property. See Junius Constr. Co. v. Cohen, 257 N. Y. 393, 400, 178 N. E. 672, 674 (1931) (Cardozo, J.). “The enumeration of two streets, described as unopened but projected, was a tacit representation that the land to be conveyed was subject to no others, and certainly subject to no others materially affecting the value of the purchase.” Ibid. Likewise, an applicant for an adjunct position at a local college makes an actionable misrepresentation when his resume lists prior jobs and then retirement, but fails to disclose that his “retirement” was a prison stint for perpetrating a $12 million bank fraud. See 3 D. Dobbs, P. Hayden, & H. Bublick, Law of Torts §682, pp. 702–703, and n. 14 (2d ed. 2011) (citing Sarvis v. Vermont State Colleges, 172 Vt. 76, 78, 80–82, 772 A. 2d 494, 496, 497–499 (2001)).

Dean Paul Hayden Continues Legacy of Prosser & Keeton on Torts

Few law books are as universally recognized for their impact on a subject area as “Prosser & Keeton on Torts.” Loyola Law School Interim Dean Paul T. Hayden is carrying on the legacy of the 1941 tome that has become an essential study aid for generations of law students and lawyers. Along with two co-authors, he recently published “Hornbook on Torts,” a 1,200-page book that provides a single-volume overview of the entire field of tort law that is the successor volume to Prosser & Keeton’s work.

Originally written by William Lloyd Prosser, iconic professor and longtime dean of Berkeley Law, and later joined by Page Keeton, dean of the University of Texas Law School, the last edition of that hornbook book came out in 1984. Hayden’s collaborator Dan B. Dobbs (himself a co-author of the 1984 Prosser & Keeton edition) produced the first new edition of its replacement (titled “The Law of Torts”) in 2000. Hayden began writing the annual supplements to that book several years later. A few years ago, Hayden, Dobbs and co-author Ellie Bublick decided it was high time for second edition, which hit shelves in early January 2016.

The impact and importance of the new book are not lost on Hayden. “The ‘Prosser & Keeton Torts Hornbook’ was one of the books I relied on heavily as a first-year law student 35 years ago,” said Hayden, the Thomas V. Girardi Professor of Consumer Protection Law. “It’s gratifying to be part of such a legacy.”

Hayden’s other works include the widely adopted casebooks “Ethical Lawyering: Legal and Professional Responsibilities in the Practice of Law,” “Torts and Compensation,” “Global Issues in Tort Law” and “The Law of Torts,” a four-volume treatise with annual supplements. But “Hornbook on Torts” possesses a unique value to Hayden.

“We hope that it will aid law students, professors, lawyers and judges as they navigate an area of law that is superficially simple but often mystifyingly complex and obtuse in application.”

Aggregate Agency Adjudication

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

At Yale's Journal on Regulation, Chris Walker highlights our project on Aggregate Agency Adjudication with the Administrative Conference for the United States. Michael Sant’Ambrogio and I are studying agencies that experiment with class actions, trials by statistics, and other aggregate litigation techniques to resolves lots of cases in their own courts. As we discuss in The Agency Class Action, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 1992 (2012), agencies don't do this very often. And there are lots of reasons why. But, we want to see if agencies can use aggregate adjudication along with other tools -- rulemaking, informal guidance, stare decisis and ADR -- to resolve cases more effectively.

I've already described Medicare's new pilot plan to use "trials by statistics" to alleviate its 500,000+ case backlog. So, here's another example: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress created this program in the 1980s to provide people injured by vaccines with a no-fault alternative to lawsuits in federal court. In theory, an "Office of Special Master" must decide whether to compensate someone in 240 days based on a showing that the vaccine caused the injury. But see Nora Freeman Engstrom, A Dose of Reality for Specialized Courts: Lessons from the VICP, 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. _ (forthcoming 2015) (finding, among other things, that it takes longer than that). Many claims proceed one at a time, like most benefit programs. But when over 5,000 parents claimed that a vaccine additive, called Thimerosal, caused autism in children, the Vaccine Program used three “omnibus proceedings" to pool together all the individual claims that raised the same highly contested scientific questions in front of just three adjudicators. As it happens, the Vaccine Program has used coordinated proceedings like this for more than 20 years.

Even though the Act that created the vaccine program contains no provision for class action suits or anything like it, the program developed the concept of the omnibus proceeding on its own because the "same vaccine and injury often involve the same body of medical expertise." Counsel representing large groups of individual claimants often use an omnibus proceeding to answer questions of "general causation," like whether a particular vaccine is capable of causing a specific injury. The issue of whether it did so in a specific case can then be resolved more expeditiously. I'll provide a few more details about this process below, but can you think of other agencies that assign large groups of individual similar cases to the same adjudicator for similar reasons? What are strengths and weaknesses of this kind of approach? The Vaccine Program uses two types of omnibus proceedings. The first involves common vaccines and injuries--applying evidence developed in the context of one or more individual cases to other cases involving the same vaccine and the same or similar injury. See, e.g., Capizzano v. Sec’y, HHS, 440 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2006). The second involves hearing evidence on a general theory of causation--like does a rubella vaccine cause chronic arthritis or other categories of joint problems? The special master makes findings based on that evidence and orders the parties to file papers establishing the extent to which the facts of individual cases fit within the courts general findings. See, e.g., Ahern v. Sec’y, HHS, No. 90-1435V, 1993 U.S. Claims LEXIS 51 (Fed. Cl. Spec. Mstr. Jan. 11, 1993). For example, counsel representing a large number of petitioners and counsel for respondent may file expert reports and medical journal articles to support the theory that the rubella vaccine is associated with chronic arthritis. The special master then (1) conducts a hearing in which the medical experts testify, (2) publishes an order setting forth the conclusions, and (3) files it in each of the rubella cases. If he finds sufficient evidence that the rubella vaccination could cause chronic arthropathy under certain conditions, he may order individual petitioners seeking compensation to establish those conditions in a separate filing.

According to one special master, however, most omnibus proceedings work like bellwether trials in federal district court--organizing individual cases that raise similar issues in front of the same adjudicator, in the hopes that a big outcome settles aspects of the remaining cases:

Most omnibus proceedings ... have involved hearing evidence and issuing an opinion in the context of a specific case or cases. Then, by the agreement of the parties, the evidence adduced in the omnibus proceeding is applied to other cases, along with any additional evidence adduced in those particular cases. The parties are thus not bound by the results in the test case, only agreeing that the expert opinions and evidence forming the basis for those opinions could be considered in additional cases presenting the same theory of causation.

The use of the omnibus proceeding is thus less binding than the "all-or-nothing" approach of the class action. But there are some drawbacks. First, some agencies, even if they wanted to, may not be able to adopt omnibus proceedings like the Vaccine Program. Many agencies use administrative law judges, who are assigned randomly to each individual case to minimize bias and to prevent gamesmanship. Second, omnibus proceedings raise interesting questions about the legitimacy of using an adjudication process to settle complex scientific questions. Not only were many plaintiffs in the autism proceedings anxious about commencing cases together, so were members of the public heath community, who "found it unsettling that the safety of vaccines must be put on trial before three "special masters"" in an obscure vaccine court. Said one: "the truth about scientific and medical facts is not, ultimately, something than can be decided either by the whims of judges or the will of the masses."

To be fair, however, those concerns aren't unique to mass litigation, or for that matter, agencies that rely on rulemaking procedures, scientific panels, or even, the Center for Disease Control to resolve tough scientific questions. And, in the case of vaccines and autism, a significant test for the limited resources of the vaccine program, at least some found that the ability to hear common cases together led to deliberations that represented a "comparatively neutral exhaustive examination of the available evidence." But such concerns still raise the question about the best way to efficiently and consistently pool information about many common claims without sacrificing legitimacy, compromising due process, or magnifying the risk of error.

The Bellwether Settlement

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

A curious thing is happening in a Bergen County court in New Jersey. A set of trials scheduled to go forward this summer were resolved through an unusual settlement process. In a case that involved more than 3,000 defective hip-implants, the parties reached a $1 billion global settlement in record time, using what the court described as an unprecedented series of "bellwether settlements."

By way of background, courts have used "bellwether trials" for a long time to resolve large numbers of similar lawsuits. In a bellwether trial (or trials), the parties select a small group of cases for jury trial out of a large group of similar claims. A steering committee of plaintiff and defense counsel then use information gleaned from trial outcomes to resolve the remaining cases. Bellwether trials have been used to resolve many high profile cases--perhaps most famously in the Vioxx litigation against Merck and, most recently, in GM's litigation over its defective ignition switches.

But instead of "bellwether trials," the court facilitated a system of "bellwether settlements." That is, rather than use juries to decide the merits and value of certain cases, the parties--supervised by the court, magistrates and special masters--relied on a structured sample of 21 mediations involving typical plaintiffs to forge a global settlement. It was hoped that the different settlement outcomes, much like a bellwether trial, would offer the parties crucial "building blocks"--providing critical information about how to globally resolve the remaining cases. And Judge Martinotti, the New Jersey judge designated to handle all of the cases, was incredibly successful. The process not only resolved more than 2,000 lawsuits in New Jersey state court, but another 1,000 pending lawsuits in federal multidistrict litigation, all in one fell swoop.

A few thoughts beneath the fold.