Alternate Dispute Financing and Legal Ethics: Free the Lawyers!
As is the case for many of our entitlements, our rights of action are protected by a less-than-full property rule. As a result, financing of litigation has been limited. The recent rise of alternate dispute financing has raised serious ethical problems. In this Article, I discuss those problems, dismiss some (but not all) of them, and suggest that pushing the protection of our entitlement to sue closer to a property rule might alleviate those problems that remain.
On the Alienability of Legal Claims
Courts have become increasingly skeptical about rules restricting plaintiffs' ability to sell legal claims, and legal commentators have argued that markets for claims would be efficient, moving claims to those who can prosecute them most efficiently. Claim sales intuitively might appear to present a clash of economic and philosophical arguments, with perceived efficiency benefits coming at the expense of societal commitments to values other than efficiency. In this Article, Professor Abramowicz argues that economic and philosophical arguments do point in opposite directions, but in the reverse directions from what one might expect. A range of philosophical and other noneconomic considerations, such as concerns about commodification, corrective justice, legal ethics, and procedural justice, pose no significant problems for claim sales. There is, however, a significant economic problem. Markets for legal claims face a particularly strong adverse selection effect, because a prospective purchaser must consider not only why the plaintiff wishes to dispose of the claim, but also why the plaintiff cannot obtain a better deal from the defendant. Thus, even a regime permitting alienation might result in very few claim sales, and many of those may be motivated by prospective inefficiencies, such as attempts to manipulate the path of legal doctrine. If, however, in some legal context plaintiffs managed to overcome this adverse selection problem, so that claim sales became the norm, the economic concern would be eliminated. But philosophical concerns would reemerge, as this Article shows by using a hypothetical mandatory alienation regime as a heuristic device.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.