Synonyms
Definition
Frivolous lawsuits refer to cases that are brought by plaintiffs with the only objective to extract settlement offers from defendants. Whereas a wide literature questions the credibility of frivolous litigation, this phenomenon had significant policy implications by inspiring several legal reform acts designed to deter meritless claims. Indeed, the issue of frivolous suits may be important from a welfare perspective since such claims may consume substantial resources (due to litigation costs, judicial congestion, etc.) and have negative distributive consequences (since a payment is made to a party who has no legal entitlement to recovery).
Introduction
Many scholars and policy makers have expressed concerns about frivolous suits. However, despite this broad concern, there is no consensus about how a frivolous case should be defined (Bone 1997; Spier 2007). A first approach defines frivolous suits as negative expected value suits, i.e., claims in...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Bebchuk LA (1988) Suing solely to extract a settlement offer. J Leg Stud 17(2):437–450
Bebchuk LA (1996) A new theory concerning the credibility and success of threats to sue. J Leg Stud 25(1):1–25
Bebchuk LA, Chang HF (1996) An analysis of fee shifting based on the margin of victory: on frivolous suits, meritorious suits, and the role of rule 11. J Leg Stud 25(2):371–403
Bone RG (1997) Modeling Frivolous Suits. Univ Pa Law Rev 145:519–605
Chen Z (2006) Nuisance suits and contingent attorney fees. Rev Law Econ 2(3):363–371
Dana JD Jr, Spier KE (1993) Expertise and contingent fees: the role of asymmetric information in attorney compensation. J Law Econ Org 9(2):349–367
Farmer A, Pecorino P (1998) A reputation for being a nuisance: frivolous lawsuits and fee shifting in a repeated play game. Int Rev Law Econ 18(2):147–157
Katz A (1990) The effect of frivolous lawsuits on the settlement of litigation. Int Rev Law Econ 10(1):3–27
P’ng IPL (1983) Strategic behavior in suit, settlement, and trial. Bell J Econ 14(2):539–550
Polinsky AM, Rubinfeld DL (1993) Sanctioning frivolous suits: an economic analysis. Georgetown Law J 82:397–436
Schwartz WF, Wickelgren AL (2009) Advantage defendant: why sinking litigation costs makes negative-expected-value defenses but not negative-expected-value suits credible. J Leg Stud 38(1):235–253
Spier KE (2007) Litigation. In: Polinksy AM, Shavell S (eds) Handbook of law and economics, vol 1, pp 259–342
William H. J. Hubbard (2014) “Nuisance Suits”, University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory, Working Paper No. 479
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media LLC
About this entry
Cite this entry
Gabuthy, Y., Lambert, EA. (2017). Frivolous Suits. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_732-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_732-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences