Et Tu, Counselor: may an in-house attorney file a qui tam action against the attorney's employer?

Most corporations probably do not consider their in-house counsel to be potential qui tam threats. That may be a naive assumption. Case law provides an illustrative view of the legal ramifications involved when an attorney brings a qui tam suit. In general, there is no prohibition on attorneys who wish to bring these actions. Nevertheless, a corporation can take preventive steps to eliminate the likelihood of attorney qui tam actions. In addition, the corporation can take advantage of state professional ethics laws to mount a defensive action against the attorney who files any such action.     

Methodological challenges to government sampling techniques in civil fraud and abuse cases

This Article discusses the use of statistical sampling in Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse audits. The author reviews cases in which government sampling methodologies have been challenged. Finally, the author describes the various alternatives available for challenging the validity of the statistical sampling used by the government in its audits.     

The continuing search for proper perspective: whose reasonableness should be at issue in a prescription product design defect analysis?

This Article is based on a presentation given at Seton Hall University School of Law's Seventh Annual Health Law Symposium on February 12, 1999.     

Methods for Understanding and Analyzing NIBRS Data

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is an incident-basedcrime reporting program for local, state, and federal law enforcementagencies. Within each criminal incident, NIBRS captures information onoffenses, victims, offenders, property, and persons arrested, as well asinformation about the incident itself. The ability to link and analyze thisdetailed information is a significant improvement to the existing UniformCrime Reporting (UCR) summary reporting system. As one might expect,however, this increase in crime data significantly complicates the life ofthe data analyst, particularly when cross tabulating the NIBRS data. To dealwith the complexity of NIBRS data, one must understand its structure. Thisarticle provides an overview of the NIBRS structure and methods formaneuvering within it to present and interpret correctly cross tabulationsof the NIBRS data.     

Policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting

Existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence, yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies. What accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation? I introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence: 1) a model which incorporates candidate-specific variables, so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy-related electoral advantages (or disadvantages); 2) a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters' candidate utilities, thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds. I report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model, which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model. I then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results.

     

Market failure,government failure,and the private supply of public goods: The case of climate-controlled walkway networks

Two opposing models of public-goods undersupply are those of “market failure” and “government failure”. Empirical work on the relative explanatory power of these two frameworks has been limited by the scarcity of acceptable data. The case of climate-controlled walkways in major urban cores is a rare instance where such difficulties can be overcome. We investigate the supply of CCWs in 55 large city-cores in North America. We find that (1) CCW networks are well-supplied by market forces, when (2) such forces are not frustrated by government policy. We also find evidence that (3) rules-based regimes dominate discretion-based regimes. These results are consistent with the position that the “government-failure” paradigm is a viable alternative to the traditional “market failure” paradigm.