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The Quest for Funding Under the Dutch WAMCA: Third Party Funding and the Viability of a Procedural Fund
No full textA new chapter started for collective actions with the 2020 Dutch Mass Damage Settlement in Collective Actions Act (WAMCA) and the E.U. Directive on representative actions for consumer cases. The expansion of the class action mechanism has not only raised procedural and practical questions but has also triggered debates on the funding of inherently expensive collective claims for damages. Absent appropriate public legal aid schemes, third-party litigation funding has been on the rise and commercial funding has become one of the most discussed and controversial topics in European civil justice. Developments in collective actions and funding have prompted the Dutch Ministry of Justice to commission a study on the financing of collective actions and the desirability of establishing a litigation fund. This paper reviews Dutch collective actions and the quest for suitable funding mechanisms under the WAMCA at the background of E.U. developments
The Arrival of the Ultimate Disillusionment: The Right to a Jury Should be Recognized in the Juvenile Court System
No full textThe American juvenile court system does not recognize a right to a jury trial. It should. The juvenile court system was born out of the Progressive Era, a period of social and political change in the U.S. Its creators envisioned a system that cared for children and considered which individual treatment would suit each child in the system. However, the actual history of the juvenile court did not follow this idealistic vision. To combat the punitive system into which juvenile court had evolved, the Supreme Court decided in subsequent years that children deserve the due process rights recognized in adult criminal court: the right to counsel, notice, confrontation and crossexamination of witnesses, the privilege against self-incrimination, and the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of proof. The Court reasoned that because the juvenile court does not act all that differently from the adult criminal court, the same rights afforded to adults should be afforded to children. Despite upholding the above rights for juveniles, the Court has expressly rejected the jury trial right in the juvenile court. However, states should still elect to provide jury trials in their juvenile courts. Juries would give the juvenile court system more legitimacy, protect children from bias, and ensure that the juvenile court system has fair processes and appropriate punishments
What the Internet Archive Case in the U.S. Means for Digital Book-lending
No full textThe Internet Archive\u27s efforts have democratised access to more than 835 billion web pages and 44 million texts for anyone with an internet connection. Two of IA’s techno-legal experiments prompted a major copyright tussle with book publishers. The matter came to be titled Hachette Book Group, Inc. and others v. Internet Archive. This article examines the recent judgement of a US appellate court reaffirming the district court’s verdict in favour of the publishers. The author explains how US courts approach \u27fair use\u27 and reflects on the implications of the decision on digital book-lending
Banging the Gavel: Supreme Court Decisions That Shook the Nation This Summer: High Court, Hot Topics
No full textRedressing the Eurocentric Approach of the Court of Arbitration for Sports to Human Rights Law
No full textRoads Not Taken on Affirmative Action
No full textThe law of affirmative action is a mess. In the short term, legal doctrine is constrained by path dependence, but its long-term future is murkier due to the many unforeseen contingencies. To regain a sense of the possible, this Article looks forward to the future of equality jurisprudence by looking backward. It recovers three roads not taken. First, the Supreme Court could have kept expectations minimal by hewing closely to the methods and rhetoric of fairness rather than ratifying a consumerist model of entitlement by deploying an individualistic vision of equality. Second, the justices might have endorsed a robust right to higher education. Doing so would finally tell us about the nature of this social good as well as the scope of judicially enforced access to it. Third, they could have showed consistent respect for universities and colleges as distinctive communities by embracing their collective right to self-expression. Instead of taking any of these roads, the Supreme Court has used the Equal Protection Clause to protect something of uncertain social worth and deepened suspicion of educational institutions. Ultimately, how long this current quandary will remain-aggressive judicial supervision of university admissions and an impoverished conception of higher education as a social good-will depend on whether judges tire of the status quo and the rest of us perceive the real stakes and demand something better