Litigation and Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction in Industrial America, 1870-1958 / Edition 1

by Edward A. Purcell

Overview

Through the prism of litigation practice and tactics, Purcell explores the dynamic relationship between legal and social change. He studies changing litigation patterns in suits between individuals and national corporations over tort claims for personal injuries and contract claims for insurance benefits. Purcell refines the "progressive" claim that the federal courts favored business enterprise during this time, identifying specific manners and times in which the federal courts reached decisions both in favor of and against national corporations. He also identifies 1892-1908 as a critical period in the evolution of the twentieth century federal judicial system.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195073294
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/31/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.45(d)

About the Author

New York Law School

Table of Contents

	Introduction	3
1.	Origins of a Social Litigation System	13
2.	The Social Structure of Party Inequality and the Informal Legal Process	28
3.	The Federal Common Law	59
4.	The Battle for Forum Control, I: The Jurisdictional Amount and the Limits of Corporate Liability	87
5.	The Battle for Forum Control, II: Joinder and the Limits of the System	104
6.	Removal and the Problems of Local Prejudice: Three Perspectives on the System	127
7.	Contraction and Evolution: The System After 1910	148
8.	The Rise of Interstate Forum Shopping	177
9.	Tactical Escalation in Insurance Litigation	200
10.	Disintegration	217
11.	Retrospective: History, Procedure, and the Social Role of the Federal Courts	244
	Notes	293
	Index	419

Editorial Reviews

"A superb and important book. It is at once readable and closely reasoned. Perhaps most importantly, it combines a meticulously told but potentially abstruse story with a methodology that allows Purcell to draw general conclusions of large scale.—American Journal of Legal History

"[An} innovative and magisterial work...Litigation and Inequality is one of the most important works of American legal history to appear in our time."—New York University Law Review

"A compelling history...."—Social Science Quarterly

"Advances a new way of thinking about a portentous era in U.S. legal history."—Michigan Law Review

"A significant contribution to literature on the controversy over the role of law in allocating economic power, reinforcing more traditional Progressive assertions of the pro-business character of US law."—Choice

From the Publisher