Jordan Elias of Girard Sharp recently authored a pair of articles addressing issues in complex civil litigation. He is a treatise author whose scholarship has focused on civil procedure, public records, and consumer protection topics.
“Antitrust Restoration from California Anchored by a New Monopolization Synthesis" appears in the California bar journal Competition and opines on how the state’s law should be changed to counteract unlawful monopolies. With federal legislation stalled, California’s Law Revision Commission is looking into ways of amending the state’s antitrust law. Elias argues for a return to mid-twentieth-century principles in structuring a new anti-monopoly law, turning his research eye to core antitrust concerns.
Also by Elias, “The Multistate Problem in Consumer Class Actions and Three Solutions” was published this fall in the Harvard Law and Policy Review. Choice of law expert Symeon C. Symeonides of Willamette University College of Law found it “not only well written, but also richly documented with cases. Mr. Elias’s default rule is easier, more predictable, and he defends it well. Excellent in all respects.”
In his Multistate article, Elias draws on his practice experience to address a problem arising from the expansion of diversity jurisdiction by the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA). If plaintiffs proceeding in federal court cannot maintain a class action simply because their claims involve the laws of different states, consumers may be deprived of relief they otherwise could have obtained, had their claims proceeded separately in state court. This concern prompted an unsuccessful amendment by two U.S. Senators when CAFA was being debated.
The multistate problem has imposed burdens on case participants and created misalignments in class litigation, Elias argues. He proposes that Congress amend CAFA with a presumption that the law of a defendant’s home state governs state-law claims against it, except if the plaintiff declines the presumption or a choice-of-law clause applies.