US Class Actions: Promise and Reality
The US class action is the best-known tool of civil procedure for enforcement of mass private rights. It is intended to achieve judicial and procedural economy in civil procedure, and to exert significant pressure on corporate defendants to observe the law. This piece summarises the major empirical evidence on how the mechanism works. It confirms extensive enforcement of law. It also identifies issues of selectivity of case types (especially securities cases brought by investors), high transactional costs and reductions in sums received by claimants, the risk that high economic factors distort the legal merits of settlements, the limited evidence on evaluating the legal merits of outcomes, forum shopping, and aspects of conflicts of interest that have been criticised by European politicians as abusive. The piece notes that these features are predictable consequences of the policy of encouraging widespread private enforcement of law by incentivising intermediaries and reducing risk to claimants. Various questions are noted in relation to the future of collective redress in the different context of the European legal order.
Different Regulatory Approaches to Risk Management of GMOs in the EU and the US
Trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is being discussed under the negotiated draft of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US due to different regulatory approaches to the risk management of GMOs on both sides of the Atlantic. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the EU's precautionary principle can be reconciled with the US science-based approach in such a way as to avoid future trade disputes between the EU and the US within the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the reluctant approach of the EU with respect to GMOs was challenged by the US in the past before the Dispute Settlement Body. Even though the EU has authorized some GMOs to be marketed, they have to be labelled properly unless they are contained in foodstuffs as trace elements only. In the US, on the contrary, the labelling of GMOs is not mandatory and proceeds on a voluntary basis. Since the EU aims at maintaining a high level of consumer protection, it believes that consumers are entitled to be informed about the origin of the foodstuffs they are buying, thus shifting the precautionary decision from supranational to individual level.
Within and Inter-Institutional Differences Between Death Certifiers on Autopsy Conclusions
This study seeks to establish whether medico-legal practitioners differ in their autopsy conclusions within and across medico-legal institutions. Data include 459 violent deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidents) autopsy reports written by more than 20 death certifiers from four medico-legal institutions in two countries (France and the United States). Multinomial models show that compared with accidental deaths, weapon use and decedents’ characteristics both influence a homicide verdict, but not a suicide one. In addition, French practitioners are more likely than Americans to reach a conclusion of homicide or suicide compared with accident, and homicides are more likely to be certified by male practitioners.