In In re South African Apartheid Litig., the district court for the Southern District of New York (Sprizzo, J.) recently considered whether multinational corporations that did business in apartheid South Africa violated international law, and therefore could be held subject to suit under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), and other jurisdictional provisions....

The idea of cy pres (pronounced “see pray” or “sigh pray,” from the French cy pres comme possible—“as near as possible”) originated in the trust context, where courts would reinterpret the terms of a charitable trust when literal application of those terms resulted in the dissolution of the trust because of impossibility or illegality. In a classic nineteenth century example, a court repurposed a trust that had been created to abolish slavery in the United States to instead provide charity to poor African-Americans. The California Supreme Court endorsed the use of cy pres or “fluid recovery” mechanism in class action settlements in 1986, to distribute proceeds to a “next best” class of consumers, and many other courts have gradually adopted the procedure. Cy pres settlements arise in one of three circumstances....

Defendants in West Virginia trial courts are increasingly being forced to confront a novel “reverse bifurcation” approach to decide punitive damages in mass tort cases. Th e approach calls for a determination of a defendant’s liability for punitive damages before basic issues of compensatory liability and damages have been decided. Defendants are challenging the procedure, arguing that putting the “cart before the horse” violates procedural due process guarantees found in the U.S. Constitution....

When a federal district court is called on to approve the settlement of a class action, it rarely, if ever, receives much input from any party that does not have a signifi cant interest in the outcome. The class representative and class counsel want the deal approved so that they can receive its benefits, and, assuming he has not agreed to remain silent, the defendant, too, wants the deal to go forward to bind as many potential claimants as possible. The court, likewise, has a strong institutional interest in disposing of such a case. Only a limited number of unnamed class members are likely to object, and only some of those objections, however strongly felt and expressed, are likely to be helpful to the court when it determines whether the settlement is fair, reasonable, and adequate....