“The most important function of judges is to decide cases brought to them by litigants. By contrast, they are not commonly seen as participants in a market for litigation, competing to ‘sell’ their forum to litigants. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that some American judges actively try to extend their influence by making their courts attractive to plaintiffs. This phenomenon is known as ‘forum selling’. Before the US Supreme Court’s decision in TC Heartland, the most striking example of such behavior was the Eastern District of Texas, whose judges managed to attract a significant share of all patent infringement proceedings filed in the United States through a range of plaintiff-friendly tweaks to procedural rules. For arbitrators, in some situations, similar behavior can be observed …” (more)
Stefan Bechtold, Jens Frankenreiter and Daniel Klerman, Oxford Business Law Blog 26 November.
First posted 2018-11-26 13:39:33
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