Abbe Colgan ’26 & Oliver Berger ’26

This summer we worked closely with Professor Andrew Lemon ’00 to develop a 300-level seminar on economic litigation. The work consisted of three phases, and my research will continue into the fall.

As a seminar, the class meets once a week for two hours; each week, students will focus on one court case that uses economic theory to settle the dispute of alleged harm. We wanted to introduce students to different types of economic analysis plaintiffs and defendants use to advance their interests in the courtroom in cases ranging from antitrust to discrimination. In addition, we wanted this course to provide an understanding of the inner workings of a lawsuit, specifically the role of expert witnesses. To further this understanding, we choose to include the initial complaint, the expert witness’ testimonies, and finally, the judge’s opinion as required reading for each case.

Once we decided on the course structure, we turned to finding the actual cases to include on the syllabus. The primary resource we used was Law360, a media site typically used by consulting firms and lawyers to stay updated with recent news in the legal field. It benefited our purposes because it is easy to navigate, and the site boasts summaries and documents related to many cases in the US court system. We were quickly able to scan complaints and read short articles to determine if the case would suit our goals for the course. We were looking at the category each case fell into, the presence of economic expert witnesses, and the fact that the case would use clear, accessible, and engaging economic analysis.

We combined ended up amassing just shy of 60 cases from Law360 that we thought would be interesting. Then, it was time to acquire the necessary documents. This proved to be the most challenging and most lengthy phase of our research. Complaints and Judge’s opinions are usually readily available, often on Law360 itself, but finding the expert reports was the most significant challenge. These reports are often filed under seal because they contain sensitive financial information concerning the parties involved. When filed under seal, the public cannot access the reports, making the case unusable for our purposes. Of the 57 cases we initially flagged as potential candidates, we only had all the documents for twelve.

The last phase of the research, which is still in progress and will continue this fall, is to start putting together the syllabus and discussion questions for the seminar. Each case has an average of 400 pages of reading between all the documents, so as we read these documents and ask ourselves what the most important part is, are there pages/paragraphs that can be cut from the required reading? What should the students taking this class focus on in their discussion? Are additional readings needed to supplement and explain the economic analysis used by the experts? As of August 5th we have gone through three of the cases, my tasks for the fall is to go through all the cases.

Working on this project was rewarding, and we learned a lot about how the economic theory we covered in our classes applies to the real world. We hope this seminar will become a favorite for economics students at Vassar.