NYU School of Law

Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) to reduce plaintiffs’ lawyers’ influence in securities fraud class actions. The PSLRA’s presumption that the class member with the largest financial interest would be named lead plaintiff was meant to place the class, instead of its lawyers, in charge of the litigation. Congress hoped that institutional investment funds, such as public pension funds, would serve as the new lead plaintiffs. At first, it seemed that the PSLRA was successful at installing institutional investors as lead plaintiffs and reducing the power imbalance between class counsel and their clients. Today there are new fears that plaintiffs’ lawyers have co-opted securities class actions by paying-to-play. “Paying-to-play” describes the practice of lawyers making campaign contributions to public pension funds’ political leadership in order to gain favorable consideration by the funds for appointment as class counsel. Many reforms have been proposed and enacted in response to paying-to-play fears. Aside from a few anecdotal reports, however, no examination of campaign contributions from plaintiffs’ lawyers to elected officials exists in the legal literature. This Note presents the first comprehensive report on campaign contributions that serve as the basis for paying-to-play concerns. My data suggest that law firms do indeed contribute to the investment funds that select them as class counsel, ruling out one possible response to paying-to-play fears, namely, that these contributions are not being made in the first place. This Note also provides guidance for future research, and in doing so, touches upon issues such as the reasons that firms donate and how funds make counsel-selection decisions.

Choice of law is a mess—or so it is said. According to conventional wisdom, choice-of-law doctrine does not significantly influence judges’ choice-of-law decisions. Instead, these decisions are primarily motivated by biases in favor of domestic over foreign law, domestic over foreign litigants, and plaintiffs over defendants. They are also highly unpredictable.

This Article argues that these “mess” claims do not accurately describe at least one domain of choice of law—international choice of law—and it demonstrates what is at stake in this debate for global governance. This Article uses statistical analysis of an original dataset of published international choice-of-law decisions by U.S. district courts in tort cases to present evidence that choice-of-law doctrine indeed influences these decisions; that these decisions are not biased in favor of domestic law, domestic litigants, or plaintiffs; and that they are actually quite predictable. The mess claims, it turns out, may be myths—at least in transnational tort cases.

Lastly, the Article explains why these findings are encouraging from a global-governance perspective, and why they might plausibly extend to unpublished international choice-of-law decisions and domestic choice-of-law decisions. The Article’s findings suggest that the conventional wisdom exaggerates what is wrong with choice of law and implicitly underestimates its contributions to global governance.