Campos on Brown on Specious Claims & Global Settlements

Now available on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is an essay by Prof. Sergio Campos (Miami) entitled Striking Out Specious Claims in Mass Tort Global Settlements. It reviews a forthcoming article by Prof. S. Todd Brown (SUNY Buffalo), Specious Claims and Global Settlements.

The review begins:

The late Richard Nagareda once noted that global settlements in mass tort litigation present a “Field of Dreams” problem – “if you build it, they will come.”  In the movie, people came to the Iowa baseball field in the corn fields because it was “money they had, but peace they lacked.”  The opposite is true in mass tort litigation.  In most cases, multinational corporations and plaintiffs’ firms with large inventories of claims typically achieve peace through a global settlement resolving all of the victims’ claims.  It is money that the individual victims lack, and it is why the victims consistently come in droves, many with claims that are specious at best.  In his excellent article Specious Claims and Global Settlements, Todd Brown examines three comprehensive settlements in mass tort litigation to identify the cause of the “Field of Dreams” problem.

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