Civil Procedure Commons^™

Making State Civil Procedure, Zachary D. Clopton

Cornell Law Review

State courts matter. Not only do state courts handle more than sixty times the number of civil cases as federal courts, but they also represent an important bulwark against the effects of federal procedural retrenchment. Yet state courts and state procedure are notably absent from the scholarly discourse.

In order to evaluate state procedure—and in order to understand the states’ relationship to federal procedural retrenchment— this Article presents the first comprehensive study of who makes state civil procedure. This project begins with a systematic review of the formal processes by which states make their rules of procedure. Many of the …