Law Commons^™

Aligning Incentives And Cost Allocation In Discovery, Jonathan R. Nash, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Recent proposals to revise Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 to incorporate cost allocation of discovery have sparked considerable controversy. Advocates for reform argue that replacing the long-standing “producer-pays” presumption with something more akin to a “requester-pays” rule would better align economic incentives and reduce litigants’ ability to wield discovery as an instrument to force settlement. Opponents argue that such a reform would limit access to justice by saddling requesters with an ex ante burden of funding the opposition’s discovery.

In this Article, we explain that either a rule requiring both parties to share the costs of discovery (“cost-sharing rule”) …

The Irrepressible Influence Of Byrd, Richard D. Freer, Thomas Arthur

Faculty Articles

We set forth four interrelated theses in this article. First, Byrd is the only Supreme Court case since Erie itself to discuss all three of the core interests balanced, expressly or not, in every vertical choice of law case. Second, because Hanna's "twin aims" test ignores two of these three core interests, it cannot adequately serve as the standard for cases under the Rules of Decision Act ("RDA"). This fact is evidenced by the Court's eschewing the twin aims test in cases, like Gasperini, where state and federal interests must be accommodated. Third, as all three opinions in …