The number of pages within the document is: 66
The self-declared author(s) is/are:
Original authors did not specify.
The subject is as follows:
Original authors did not specify.
The original URL is: LINK
The access date was:
2019-02-16 15:45:28.677810
Please be aware that this may be under copyright restrictions. Please send an email to admin@pharmacoengineering.com for any AI-generated issues.
Loading...
Reload document 
Open in new tab The content is as follows:
Electronic copy available at: ssrn.com/abstract=2632612 !A Comprehensive Theory of Civil Settlement J.J. Prescott University of Michigan Law School jprescott@umich.edu Kath ryn E. Spier Harvard Law School kspier@law.harvard.edu Draft: June 2015 Forthcoming, NYU Law Review, April 2016 Abstract A s ettlement is an agreement between parties to a dispute. In everyday parlance and in academic scholarship, settlement is juxtaposed to trial or some other method of dispute resolution in which a third -party factfinder ultimately picks a winner and announces a score . The Òt rial versus settlement Ó tr ope, howev er, represents a false choice; viewing settlement solely as a dispute -ending alternative to a costly trial leads to an anemic understanding of how dispute resolution should and often does work . In this article , we describe and defend a much richer concept of settlement, amounting in effect to a continuum of possible agreements between litigants along many dimensions. Ò FullyÓ settling a case, of course, appears to completely resolve a dispute, and if parties to a dispute rely entirely on background default rules, a ÒnakedÓ trial occurs . But in reality virtually every dispute is Òpartially Ó settled . T he same forces th at often lead parties to fully settle Ñjoint value maximization, cost minimization , and risk reduction Ñwill under certain conditions lead them to enter into many other forms of Pareto -improving agreements while continuing to actively litigate against one another . We identify three primary categories of these partial settlements: award -modification agreements , issue -modification agreements, and procedure -modification agreements . We provide real -world examples of each and rigorously link them to the underlyin g incentives facing litigants. Along the way, we use our analysis to characteriz e unknown or rarely seen kinds of partial agreements that nevertheless seem to us theoretically attractive , and we allude to potential reasons for their scarcity within the context of our framework . Finally, we study partial settlements and how they interact with each other in real -world adjudication using new and unique data from New YorkÕs summary jury trial program . Patterns in the data are consistent with parties using partial settlement terms both as substitutes and as complements for other terms , depending on the context, and suggest that entering into a partial settlement can reduce the attractiveness of full settlement. We conclude by briefly discussing the distinctive welfare implications of partial settlements. * We are grateful to Ryan Bubb, Janet Freilich , Louis Kaplow, Kyle Logue , Sam Gross, Mitch Polinsky, Margo Schlanger, Eric Rasmusen, and Steve Shavell for comments. We would like to thank seminar participants at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan , and the National B ureau of Economic Research for useful questions and suggestions on this paper and closely related work. Ismail Ali , Suraj Balakrishnan , Greg in den Berken , Cory Carone, Zane Hatahet, Stephen Houck, Richard Jolly, Anna Heim , Linfeng Li, Brian Tengel , Jessica Wall, and Eleanor Wilking provided excellent research and data gathering assistance . We thank Judge Lucindo Suarez for generously sharing case -level data from New YorkÕs Summary Jury Trial Program with us. Prescott would like to acknowledge the sup port of the William W. Cook Endowment of the University of Michigan .
Please note all content on this page was automatically generated via our AI-based algorithm (xdFTn1By39UAfyW0OGYC). Please let us know if you find any errors.