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The article presents a court case in which the federal district court for the Northern District of Alabama affirmed the granting of summary judgments for plaintiffs claiming that the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is unconstitutional. In National Small Business United, et. al. v. Yellen, the court supported the Department of the Treasury and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in their enforcement of the CTA.

The article discusses the evolution of the mandamus jurisprudence and summary judgment procedure in the U.S. in the past 30 years as of April 2024 by analyzing the denial of summary judgment in the case In re Prudential. Other topics include appellate remedies, appellate rights, and the evidence to warrant a trial.

Research Summary: We contend that entrepreneurial judgment governance (EJG) is a profound yet poorly understood process in which firms sense, seize, and transform opportunities related to digital transformation. Grounded in a rich, multi-case study of six large incumbent firms, we conceptualize and examine how firms change EJG through three phases: recognizing, distributing, and orchestrating. We find that EJG adaptation is at the heart of why some firms succeed in responding to the challenges associated with digital transformation while others fail. Implications and opportunities for future research are discussed. Managerial Summary: Entrepreneurial judgment governance (EJG) is central to explaining why some firms succeed in digital transformation (DT) whereas others do not. EJG determines who has the right to exercise entrepreneurial judgment (EJ) about allocating and using resources to address new opportunities. As distinct types of uncertainties require distinct EJ features, established firms face the challenge of EJG adaptation to the unique DT uncertainties. Based on a multiple-case study, we offer a three-stage framework that facilitates and expedites EJG adaptation to DT. Furthermore, our study highlights that strategic leaders who fail to comprehend the need for changes in EJG, neglect to establish an EJG architecture aligned with DT goals or overlook implementing necessary adjustments internally and externally, may hinder positive DT outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judicial summary oriented to judgment documents is the key technology to improve the analytical ability of judgment documents. As the carrier of the trial activities, the judgment documents accurately present the trial logic of the case. However, the current abstract methods only focus on the serialization information of the judgment documents, ignore the logical structure, and can not effectively solve the problems of too long texts and redundant information. A judgment document summary generation method based on the trial logic steps is proposed. The method of "extraction + generation" is adopted. The extraction part uses the multi-label classification method to extract four sentence sets of "type, claim, fact and result" according to the logic steps of the people 's court. The generation part gets the summary from the fine-tuned T5-PEGASUS model. And the input text of the "fact" part is denoised by using the maximum similarity matching algorithm based on internal knowledge, which further improves the summary effect. The experimental results show that, compared with the mainstream pointer-generated network summary model, the proposed method improves the F1 index of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L by 17.99 percentage points, 21.24 percentage points and 21.86 percentage points, respectively. This shows that introducing logical structure into the judicial summarization can improve the performance of the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The McDonnell Douglas framework is the most important analytical structure in employment discrimination law. Scholars and judges have regularly criticized the three-part burden-shifting test. Despite decades of criticism, a central feature of the framework remains unexamined—its second step is incompatible with the summary judgment standard. In employment discrimination cases courts often grant summary judgment in the employer’s favor. Scholars have offered various accounts of why this happens, including docket pressures and published case law that focuses on grants of summary judgment. The second step of the inquiry has largely escaped scrutiny because it appears to be a quirky, but somewhat harmless, part of the McDonnell Douglas framework. This Article demonstrates that the conventional view of the second step is wrong. When a defendant files a motion for summary judgment, a court must draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the plaintiff, the non-moving party. The second step of McDonnell Douglas requires courts to credit the employer’s reason for acting and give it a certain weight and legal effect in discrimination analysis. It also labels an employer’s reason for acting as legitimate and non-discriminatory even though the defendant is not required to establish either proposition. Even when a defendant’s reason does not respond to the plaintiff’s theory of the case, courts still credit the employer’s reason. The year 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of McDonnell Douglas. Yet, no one has recognized what has been hiding in plain sight for decades: the second step cannot be reconciled with the summary judgment standard. The second step alters discrimination analysis in ways that deny plaintiffs their right to have juries decide contested cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a trilogy of cases on summary judgment in 1986. Questions remain as to how much effect these cases have had on judicial decision-making in terms of wins and losses for plaintiffs. Shifts in wins, losses, and what cases get to decisions on the merits impact access to justice. We assemble novel datasets to examine this question empirically in three areas of law that are more likely to respond to shifts in the standard for summary judgment: antitrust, securities regulation, and civil rights. We find that the Supreme Court's decisions had a statistically significant effect in antitrust, an ambiguous effect in civil rights cases, and no effect in securities regulation. We also find that, in the trilogy's wake, antitrust appellate cases were far more likely to cite trilogy cases--particularly the one trilogy case that was an antitrust case--than appellate cases in the other areas. This suggests that the lone trilogy case that arose in antitrust had an effect on decision making in that field, but that the trilogy had a limited effect across other substantive areas of law. This finding differs from Twombly and Iqbal where an antitrust decision ultimately reshaped the entire body of law across doctrines around motions to dismiss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People commonly establish in advance the thresholds they use to pass social judgment (e.g., promising reward/punishment after a fixed number of good/bad behaviors). Ten preregistered experiments (N = 5,542) reveal when, why, and how people violate their social judgment thresholds, even after formally establishing them based on having full information about what might unfold. People can be swayed to be both "quicker to judge" (e.g., promising reward/punishment after 3 good/bad behaviors, yet then acting after 2 such behaviors) and "slower to judge" (e.g., promising reward/punishment after 3 good/bad behaviors, yet then withholding until 4 such behaviors)—despite all behaviors obeying their threshold. We document these discrepancies across many parameters. We also propose and test an integrative theoretical framework to explain them, rooted in psychologicalsupport: Being both "quicker" and "slower" to judge reflect a shared function of the distinct modes of evaluation involved in the act of setting social judgment thresholds (involving a packed summary judgment extending across myriad possible realities) versus following them in real time (involving an unpacked focus on whatever specific reality unfolds, which could provide higher or lower support than threshold setters had accounted for). Manipulating the degree of psychological support thus determines the direction of threshold violations: Higher support produces "quicker to judge" effects while lower support produces "slower to judge" effects. Finally, although violating one's preset threshold may sometimes be to one's benefit, we document initial evidence that it also risks damaging people's reputations and relationships. When it comes to treating others, making exceptions to the rule may often be the rule—for better or worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the unregulated approach to video evidence in U.S. courts. It provides an overview of three key factors that contribute to the inconsistent treatment of video as evidence: the shifting and uncertain categories under which video is admitted as evidence, the discrepancies in how video is perceived and interpreted, and the lack of widespread legal training in visual literacy. Together, these factors exacerbate the challenges that visual perception and interpretation pose in court, as illustrated by the analysis of the varied use of video by district and appellate courts at summary judgment in McDowell v. Sherrer, a case involving an Eight Amendment excessive force claim. By discussing these challenges, the paper argues for the necessity of archival legal standards, which could facilitate research into uniform guidance and applications for treating video as evidence. Otherwise, civil rights and human rights may be disparately recognized and upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal judgments are generally very long, and relevant information is often scattered throughout the text. To complete a legal judgment summarization, capturing important, relevant information comprehensively from a lengthy text is crucial. The existing abstractive-summarization models based on pre-trained language have restrictions on the length of an input text. Another concern is that the generated summaries have not been well integrated with the legal judgment's technical terms and specific topics. In this paper, we used raw legal judgments as information of different granularities and proposed a two-stage text-summarization model to handle different granularities of information. Specifically, we treated the legal judgments as a sequence of sentences and selected key sentence sets from the full texts as an input corpus for summary generation. In addition, we extracted keywords related to technical terms and specific topics in the legal texts and introduced them into the summary-generation model as an attention mechanism. The experimental results on the CAIL2020 and the LCRD datasets showed that our model achieved an overall 0.19–0.41 improvement in its ROUGE score, as compared to the baseline models. Further analysis also showed that our method could comprehensively capture essential and relevant information from lengthy legal texts and generate better legal judgment summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Minnesota Supreme Court case Staub as Trustee of Weeks v. Myrtle Lake Resort dealing with negligence and application to Minnesota tort law. The court held that in the absence of an alternate theory of causation, a negligence claim supported solely by circumstantial evidence may survive summary judgment.

Research Summary: Entrepreneurial judgment remains a concept that resembles a black box. This article attempts to further open that black box by developing a dimensionalization of types of judgment. To achieve this, it joins recent efforts to explicitly link entrepreneurship to Simonian themes by integrating the notion of decision problem structures into the judgment‐based approach (JBA) to entrepreneurship. This article proposes a more comprehensive and nuanced approach to judgment in the face of decision problems we label "real‐structured." Extending the JBA comes with several important implications: It uncovers additional entrepreneurial knowledge problems, provides new insights for both economic organization and judgment communicability, and informs research on entrepreneurial success and failure. It also sheds new light on the controversy over the relationship between effectuation and judgment. Managerial Summary: When taking decisions, entrepreneurs cannot know how the future will pan out. Those decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty and only time will tell whether they prove astute or otherwise. The uncertainty of the future leads entrepreneurs to exercise judgment based on their individual beliefs and to act accordingly. The components of that entrepreneurial judgment remain rather underexplored. The purpose of this article is to dig deeper into, and thereby improve, the understanding of entrepreneurial judgment. The main result of this article is a four‐part dimensionalization of judgment, covering entrepreneurial (sub‐)judgments on the effects incurred by action, the appraisal of action alternatives, the goals underlying action, and resolving the decision problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews how Florida courts navigate the amended Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.510, which regulates summary judgment motion. Topics discussed include effects of the amended rule on non-moving parties, reduction of multi-count complaints to single-count complaints, jurors' use of practical judgment when deciding a verdict in civil disputes, and increase in settlements after a court rules on summary judgment motions.

This research article aims to shed light on the legal encounters of the tenor Fleta for breaches of contract, carefully analyzing his final legal dispute that had yet to be studied. The article refers specifically to the legal proceedings initiated by Fleta in January 1933 against the Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos, and which continued until October 1935, during the Spanish Second Republic. However, Miguel Fleta was not the only party judged to be in breach of contract, as was believed until now based on press articles published in 1933 and various monographs on the tenor's life. This article will be limited to extracting the necessary data to explain how Fleta's legal situation came about and presenting the facts collected in the summary judgment that made the lawsuit against the Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment discrimination plaintiffs tend to lose on summary judgment. In these cases, judges are acting like juries and undermining anti-discrimination legislation while paying lip service to the law and the judicial role. How and why are courts doing this? Legal scholars blame bad doctrine and biased judging. But neither one tells the full story. The tell is in the opinions' strategic use of language, which shows how the court, as an institution, "sized up" the case and the motives of key actors the parties, the lawmakers, other courts, and the court itself. Conducting the first-ever rhetorical analysis of this problem, this Article reveals how these rhetorical innerworkings of judicial opinions can drive summary judgment in discrimination cases, forging pro-defendant and non-discrimination assumptions into law. To illustrate, this Article conducts a rhetorical case study showing how a notorious en banc opinion maneuvered within doctrinal spaces, presented rhetorical choices as commands of law, and concocted a version of motives that closed out any possibility of discrimination. The opinion also laundered its own judicial action, using error-correctinga nd procedure-protectingr hetoric as a cover for an implicit assumption that employers do not discriminate. Viewing the rush to summary judgment through this new theoretical and interdisciplinary lens, the case study provides a deeper understanding of the problem and suggests defensive litigation strategies. By understanding how opinion language strategically constructs motives, advocates can devise counternarratives, making it harder for courts to fill in the blanks with pro-employer rhetorical choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on role of efficiency evidence in Matsushita's summary judgment standard and unreasonable for a jury to infer agreement from plaintiff's circumstantial evidence of agreement. It mentions plaintiffs produce direct or strong circumstantial evidence that the defendants privately communicated assurances about future pricing, then no defenses are going to justify summary judgment.

The article offers update on civil procedure jurisprudence in cases of claims under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Topics discussed are standing in healthcare class actions, pleading simultaneous claims, exhaustion doctrine, summary judgment standards in benefit claims litigation, arbitration and ERISA class actions.

SUMMARY: Judgment and decision-making research suggests that auditors' judgments are negatively affected by the use of heuristics. However, there is little research investigating whether such biases survive the quality control processes that regulators and audit firms implement to mitigate them. We investigate this by identifying a setting where one such bias—confirmation bias—is likely to manifest. Consistent with confirmation bias influencing observable audit outcomes, we find that auditors with previous experience auditing a client with a history of low risk followed by an increase in risk do not adequately respond to the higher level of risk. This effect is mitigated when the risk increase is likely large enough to violate auditors' reasonableness constraint and when the client is highly visible or has strong external monitors. Our study complements prior experimental research by providing archival evidence that auditors' use of heuristics has a significant effect on auditor judgments. JEL Classifications: M40; M42. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability for civil damages. Courts applying the doctrine, which is heavily dependent on the facts of the case, must determine whether the government officials' conduct violated a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable person would have known. This inquiry is discretionary as judges must determine if the alleged violation was "clearly established," a term that the Supreme Court has defined in conflicting ways. Moreover, when federal judges conduct the qualified immunity inquiry at the Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss stage, their decision is guided only by their discretionary interpretation of allegations in the complaint. Thus, plaintiffs face two layers of judicial discretion when defendants claim that they are entitled to qualified immunity in a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. This double discretion can lead to inconsistent results, as evidenced by the different approaches taken by circuit court judges in such situations. This Note addresses the implications of this double discretion by examining the role judicial discretion plays in both (i) Rule 12(b)(6) motions as a result of the modern pleading standard and (ii) during the qualified immunity inquiry when judges define "clearly established." These examinations show that judges are granted with considerable discretion while determining the sufficiency of a complaint and while conducting a qualified immunity inquiry. This Note then reveals the implications of these discretions overlapping when judges engage in a qualified immunity analysis in the motion to dismiss stage. For example, this Note inspects Hart v. Hillsdale County, 973 F.3d 627 (6th Cir. 2020), a 2-1 Sixth Circuit decision in which the dissenting judge disagreed with the majority's interpretation of the complaint and definition of "clearly established law." Finally, this Note proposes four solutions that would either eliminate this double discretion or help lead to more consistent judgments when qualified immunity is invoked in a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses linguistic analysis and machine learning techniques to predict summary judgment outcomes from the text of the parties' briefs. We test the predictive power of textual characteristics, stylistic features, and citation usage, and find that citations to precedent - their frequency, their patterns, and their popularity in other briefs - are the most predictive of a summary judgment win. This suggests that good lawyering may boil down to good legal research. However, good legal research is expensive, and the primacy of citations in our models raises concerns about access to justice. Here, our citation-based models also suggest promising solutions. We propose a freely available, computationally-enabled citation identification and brief bank tool, which would extend to all litigants the benefits of good lawyering and open up access to justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an overview of the concepts related to summary judgment for mixed-motive cases in the U.S. It mentions examines the employment-at-will doctrine and the evolution of the mixed-motive burden of proof through Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins court case the 1991 Civil Rights Act, and Bostock v. Clayton County court case.

Over four decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students were not entitled to robust due process protections when public institutions dismissed them on academic grounds. A subsequent Supreme Court decision reinforced the notion that courts should defer to academic decisions that were based on "genuine professional judgment." In the years since these decisions were announced, federal (and some state) courts have shown considerable deference to academic judgments in cases brought by faculty challenging denials of promotion or tenure, and by students challenging academic dismissal decisions, often dismissing the lawsuit or awarding summary judgment to the institution, seemingly without a thorough review of the institution's supporting evidence for its exercise of "genuine professional judgment." Although scholars have roundly criticized judicial deference, especially when discrimination claims are before the court, deference persists to this day in most, but not all such litigation. This article traces the development of judicial deference in decisions involving faculty and student plaintiffs, discusses why courts refuse to defer in a few cases, and suggests implications for college and university defendants facing litigation involving academic judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Case Law Review / Revista Română de Jurisprudenţă is the property of Universul Juridic Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Soziologische Revue is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article reports that the Louisiana State Legislature gave significant attention to motions for summary judgment in recent years. Topics include examines in 1996, the Legislature adopted the modern burden-shifting framework and legal standard for summary judgment motions in effort to bring Louisiana summary judgment procedures in Article 966 of the Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure.

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada sought to address the inaccessibility of public adjudication for "ordinary Canadians" by introducing a culture shift to civil litigation. This culture shift required participants in the civil justice system to stop viewing trial as the default adjudication method and expand use of summary judgment. In this article, I critically evaluate the Supreme Court's reasoning for the culture shift from a jurisprudential perspective and quantitatively evaluate the endeavour's success. I find that Alberta courts have misapplied the culture shift contrary to the Supreme Court's intentions, that the culture shift is being implemented only on a limited basis, that summary judgment is no more accessible for ordinary Canadians, and that fairness and justice are not being preserved. I provide recommendations for alternate methods to address the accessibility problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]