Court records are unstructured and costly to access—here's how to fix it

TRANSNATIONAL CLASS ACTIONS 1389 judgment versus some passive plaintiffs with the option to bring a new suit in a foreign forum if they are unsatisfied with the first result. Some passive plaintiffs in transnational class actions thus possess "litigation options." 7 Uncomfortable with the asymmetry of litigation options, the Anwar court received testimony about which foreign courts were likely to give preclusive effect to a U.S. class judgment and then sorted plaintiffs on this basis. The court certified a class of plaintiffs from the United States,

83 University of Chicago Law Review 45 (2016)Across various contexts, parties and courts have pressed for territorial rules in cases implicating technology and national security. This Essay suggests that presumptively territorial approaches to these questions are misguided. Territorial rules do not track the division of authority or capacity among the branches, nor are they effective proxies for the important interests of regulators or regulatees. On issues of technology and national security, territorial rules seem particularly ill suited: territorial rules aspire to certainty, but technology makes it harder to define “territoriality” in a consistent and predictable way; technology weakens territoriality as a proxy for policy goals because data often move in ways disconnected with the interests of users and lawmakers; and technology makes it easier for public or private actors to circumvent territorial rules (often without detection), thus interfering with the existing allocation of policymaking authority. This Essay explores these themes with respect to the Stored Communications Act, electronic surveillance law, and court-access doctrines in criminal and civil litigation. The conclusion is that territorial approaches in such cases may have been wrong when first adopted or may have succumbed to desuetude in the intervening years.

Abstract. Civics class teaches the traditional mode of law enforcement: The legislature adopts a regulatory statute, and the executive enforces it in the courts. But in an increasingly interconnected world, a nontraditional form of regulatory litigation is possible in which public enforcers from one government enforce laws adopted by a second government in the second government's courts. That is, one government provides the executive while the second provides the legislature and the judiciary.