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Full-Text Articles in Law
Close Enough For Government Work: The Committee Rulemaking Game, Paul Stancil
Close Enough For Government Work: The Committee Rulemaking Game, Paul Stancil
Faculty Scholarship
Procedural rules in U.S. courts often have predictable and systemic substantive consequences. Yet the vast majority of procedural rules are drafted, debated, and ultimately enacted by a committee rulemaking process substantially removed from significant legislative or executive supervision. This Article explores the dynamics of the committee rulemaking process through a game-theoretical lens. The model reveals that inferior players in the committee rulemaking game - advisory committees, the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, the Judicial Conference and the Supreme Court - are sometimes able to arbitrage Congressional transaction costs to obtain results at odds with the results Congress …
Balancing The Pleading Equation, Paul Stancil
Balancing The Pleading Equation, Paul Stancil
Faculty Scholarship
Pleading standards present a tale of two asymmetries. The first is informational: Plaintiffs don't know as much as defendants about defendants' alleged wrongful behavior. Given that, a liberal pleading standard may be sensible; overly demanding pleading standards may ultimately deny justice to worthy plaintiffs who cannot know critical details of their claims before filing.
But informational asymmetry is sometimes counterbalanced by a competing cost asymmetry. In certain circumstances, the cost of litigation is radically different for plaintiffs and defendants. The primary driver of this disparity is liberal discovery; in certain kinds of cases - consumer antitrust cases, for example: defendants' …