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Federal Civil Practice, Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum (Iclef)

Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum 2023

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held May 3, 2023.

Expert Witnesses In Civil Litigation April 23, 2021, Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum (Iclef)

Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum 2021

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held April 23, 2021.

The Parable Of The Forms, Samuel L. Bray

Journal Articles

This is a parable about the forms of action, code pleading, and the "civil action" of the Federal Rules.

Resurrecting Trial By Statistics, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

“Trial by statistics” was a means by which a court could resolve a large number of aggregated claims: a court could try a random sample of claim, and extrapolate the average result to the remainder. In Wal-Mart, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court seemingly ended the practice at the federal level, thus removing from judges a tool that made mass aggregation more feasible. After examining the benefits and drawbacks of trial by statistics, this Article suggests an alternative that harnesses many of the positive features of the technique while avoiding its major difficulties. The technique is the “presumptive judgment”: a …

Cy Pres And The Optimal Class Action, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article, prepared for a symposium on class actions, examines the problem of cy pres relief through the lens of ensuring that class actions have an optimal claim structure and class membership. It finds that the present cy pres doctrine does little to advance the creation of optimal class actions, and may do some harm to achieving that goal. The Article then proposes an alternative “nudge” to induce putative class counsel to structure class actions in an optimal way: set attorneys’ fees so that counsel is compensated through a combination of an hourly market rate and a percentage of the …

Superiority As Unity, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

One of Professor Redish’s many important contributions to legal scholarship is his recent work on class actions. Grounding his argument in the theory of democratic accountability that has been at the centerpiece of all his work, Professor Redish suggests that, in nearly all instances, class actions violate the individual autonomy of litigants and should not be used by courts. This Essay, prepared for a festschrift in honor of Professor Redish, begins from the opposite premise: that class actions should be grounded in the notion of social utility rather than autonomy so that class actions should be used whenever they achieve …

Procedure, Substance, And Erie, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

This Article examines the relationship between procedure and substance, and the way in which that relationship affects Erie questions. It first suggests that "procedure" should be understood in terms of process-in other words, in terms of the way that it changes the substance of the law and the value of legal claims. It then argues that the traditional view that the definitions of "procedure" and "substance" change with the context-a pillar on which present Erie analysis is based-is wrong. Finally, it suggests a single process based principle that reconciles all of the Supreme Court's "procedural Erie" cases: that federal courts …

Exiting Litigation, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The American judicial system will face significant challenges in the twenty-first century. One of its immediate challenges is adapting the rules of civil procedure to the stresses under which the civil-justice system operates. Some of the most notable pressures arise from transnational litigation, mass litigation, proliferation of claims against governmental and corporate institutions, and competition from methods of alternative dispute resolution that promise to dispense cheaper, faster, and more satisfying justice.

Resolving Cases On The Merits, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Prepared for a Symposium on Civil Justice Reform, this essay examines the role of the “on the merits” principle in modern American procedure. After surveying the possible meanings of the phrase, the essay critiques its most common understanding due to its economic inefficiency and its lack of strong philosophical support. Relying on the recent work of Amartya Sen, the essay proposes that the principle be replaced with a “fair outcome” principle that melds both “procedural” and “substantive” concerns.

Pound's Century, And Ours, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

On August 29, 1906, a little known Nebraska lawyer climbed to the podium at the twenty-ninth American Bar Association convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, and commenced the most thoroughly successful revolution in American law. The lawyer was Roscoe Pound, and the title of his address was The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice. The speech was hardly popular in its own time. The ABA nearly refused to publish the remarks. Thirty-two years would pass before Pound's seeds fully flowered. Even today, many of Pound's criticisms of our adversarial civil justice system ring as true as the day …

Civil Procedure: The Last Ten Years, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

In my view, the story of the last ten years in civil procedure is the slow but inexorable creep of ideas and solutions developed for complex cases into routine cases, and the continued effort of litigators and judges in complex cases to develop ideas and solutions that push the procedural envelope still farther out-thus setting the agenda for the next generation of procedural reform.

I do not want to overstate my claim. The procedures for a lawsuit are still basically the same: a short pleading stage followed by a lengthy discovery stage followed by a culminating event of trial. But …

Rule 11 In The Constitutional Case, Gary J. Saalman, Kenneth Ripple

Journal Articles

The 1983 amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure arose from concern over the flood of litigation in recent years and its high costs to both litigants and the court system. Although the causes of this litigation explosion and the remedies are both many and complex, the pretrial stage of litigation and the standards governing attorney responsibility were considered major contributors to the problem and prime areas for reform. The drafters of the 1983 amendments sought to streamline the litigation process by increasing judicial oversight and deterring abusive or dilatory tactics by the bar. Some of the most significant changes …