Civil Procedure Commons^™

Summary Of Saavedra-Sandoval V. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 55, Kammi Rencher

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

A plaintiff in a tort action appealed from a district court order denying her motion to enlarge time for service of process.

Summary Of Yonker Construction, Inc. V. Hulme, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. 54, Justin Shiroff

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court considered an appeal from a district court order expunging a mechanic’s lien under NRS 108.2275.

Summary Of Bahena V. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 57, Michael Gianelloni

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Nevada Supreme Court denied Goodyear’s request for a rehearing regarding the Court’s ruling in Bahena I.2 Additionally, the Court clarified that evidentiary hearings are not mandatory for non-case concluding sanctions.

Summary Of Awada V. Shuffle Master, Inc., 123 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 57, Magali Calderon

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Moon V. Mcdonald, Carano & Wilson, Llp, 129 Nev. Adv. Op. 56, David Rothenburg

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Justice Souter And The Civil Rules, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

Justice Souter’s recent retirement from the Court after nearly twenty years presents a unique opportunity to comment on his legacy. No doubt others will eulogize or castigate him for his membership in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey troika, but there is much more to the man and his jurisprudence. Indeed, the danger is that Justice Souter will be pigeonholed into one opinion, an opinion that he wrote early in his Supreme Court career, to the detriment of understanding the complex justice that he was. And what it finds is a justice deeply committed to the fair treatment of the litigants …

Summary Of Wyeth V. Rowatt, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 44, Yam Xiong Li

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Elyousef V. O’Reilly & Ferrario, Llc, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 43, Ashley C. Nikkel

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal from a summary judgment in a legal malpractice action.

Summary Of Schuck V. Signature Flight Support, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 42, Robert E. Opdyke

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal from a district court’s decisions: (1) granting summary judgment against the plaintiff; (2) awarding unpaid fees and costs to plaintiff’s attorneys; and (3) denying plaintiff’s 60(b) motion for relief from judgment.

Manifest Disregard And The Imperfect Procedural Justice Of Arbitration, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

Arbitration is an efficient dispute-resolution system that respects parties’ right to an accurate award. But because arbitration is designed to be efficient, accuracy is not guaranteed. This presents a challenge when courts are asked to confirm or vacate arbitrators’ decisions. Judges dislike approving inaccurate awards, especially in cases where parties have unequal bargaining power. Yet, judges also recognize arbitration’s limited-review principle. So they are forced to balance their desire for accuracy against arbitration’s efficiency policy. Efficiency typically wins at the expense of accurate outcomes.

This Article contends that courts place too much emphasis on the efficiency policy in mandatory arbitration. …

Introduction: Dukes V. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

This short introduction to Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. aims to explain the case and to set the table for what promises to be thought-provoking roundtable discussion hosted by Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc. Accordingly, what follows is a concise overview of the legal background and current debate over the two procedural issues that the Ninth Circuit explored in detail – how to evaluate Rule 23(a)(2)’s commonality when common questions heavily implicate the case’s merits, and when a Rule 23(b)(2) class can include relief apart from injunctive or declaratory relief without endangering due process.

Iqbal, Twombly, And The Lessons Of The Celotex Trilogy, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

This Essay compares the Twombly/Iqbal line of cases to the Celotex trilogy and suggests that developments since the latter offer lessons for the former. Some of the comparisons are obvious: decreased access and increased judicial discretion. However, one important similarity has not been well understood: that the driving force in both contexts has been the lower courts rather than the Supreme Court. Further, while we can expect additional access barriers to be erected in the future, our focus should be on lower courts, rather than other institutional players, as the likely source of those barriers.

A Sense Of Disentitlement: Frame-Shifting And Metaphor In Ashcroft V. Iqbal, Lisa A. Eichhorn

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Schiff V. Winchell, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 32, Amy Kominsky

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined whether the pre-judgment interest rate is calculated based the date of the original judgment or the date of affirmation on appeal.

Summary Of Quinlan V. Camden Usa Inc., 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 30, Zachary Lowe

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from district court’s award of attorney fees and costs in favor of Camden pursuant to a rejected offer of judgment on behalf of Quinlan. The Court decided whether Nevada would adopt an implied consent to service by facsimile for an offer of judgment under NRS 17.115 and NRCP 68.M

Cy Pres Relief And The Pathologies Of The Modern Class Action: A Normative And Empirical Analysis, Samantha Zyontz, Martin H. Redish, Peter Julian

Faculty Scholarship

Since the mid 1970s, federal courts have taken the doctrine of cy pres relief from the venerable law of trusts and adapted it for use in the modern class action proceeding. In its original context, cy pres was utilized as a means of judicially designating a charitable recipient when, for whatever reason, it was no longer possible to fulfill the original goal of the maker of the trust. The purpose of cy pres was to provide “the next best relief” by finding a recipient who would resemble the original donor’s recipient as much as possible. In the context of class …

Summary Of Polk V. Nevada, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 19, John L. Ward

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Summary Of In Re Sandoval, 126 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 15, Amy Kominsky

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This case is a certified question that originates from the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada to determine whether a default judgment entered for failure to respond to a valid complaint has issue preclusive effects.

Aggregation, Community, And The Line Between, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

As class-action theorists, we sometimes focus so heavily on the class certification threshold that we neglect to reassess the line itself. The current line asks whether procedurally aggregated individuals form a sufficiently cohesive group before the decision to sue. Given this symposium’s topic - the state of aggregate litigation and the boundaries of class actions in the decade after Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp. - the time is ripe to challenge our assumptions about this line in non-class aggregation. Accordingly, this Article examines group cohesion and asks whether the current line is the only dividing …

The Plaintiff Neutrality Principle: Pleading Complex Litigation In The Era Of Twombly And Iqbal, Robin J. Effron

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Plaintiff Neutrality Principle: Pleading Complex Litigation In The Era Of Twombly And Iqbal, Robin Effron

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

In this essay, I take up the Court’s less heralded second holding in Boumediene v. Bush - that a federal habeas court must have the institutional capacity to find facts, which in Boumediene itself meant that a federal district court must be available to the petitioners. Although this has gone largely unnoticed, I contend that this holding is inconsistent with the Madisonian Compromise - the standard view that the Constitution does not require jurisdiction in any federal court, except the Supreme Court. In fact, it appears that the Court adopted Justice Story’s position that the Constitution requires vesting of jurisdiction …

Corporate Governance In The Courtroom: An Empirical Analysis, Jessica M. Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom is that shareholder derivative suits are dead. Yet this death knell is decidedly premature. The current conception of shareholder derivative suits is based on an empirical record limited to suits filed in Delaware or on behalf of Delaware corporations, leaving suits outside this sphere in the shadows of corporate law scholarship. This Article aims to fill this gap by presenting the first empirical examination of shareholder derivative suits in the federal courts. Using an original, hand-collected data set, my study reveals that shareholder derivative suits are far from dead. Shareholders file more shareholder derivative suits than securities class …

Iqbal And The Slide Toward Restrictive Procedure, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Last term, in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court affirmed its commitment to more stringent pleading standards in the ordinary federal civil case. Although the decision is not a watershed, since it merely underscores the substantial changes to pleading doctrine wrought in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, Iqbal is disconcerting for at least two reasons. First, the Court treated Iqbal 's factual allegations in a manner that further erodes the assumption-of-truth rule that has been the cornerstone of modern federal civil pleading practice. The result is an approach to pleading that is governed by a subjective, malleable standard that permits …

Pleading And Access To Civil Procedure: Historical And Comparative Reflections On Iqbal, A Day In Court And A Decision According To Law, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The Iqbal decision confirms the breakdown of contemporary American civil procedure. We know what civil procedure should do, and we know that our civil procedure is not doing it. Civil procedure should facilitate determining rights according to law. It should help courts and parties apply law to facts accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. This article reflects on three historic American system failures and reports a foreign success story.

Pleadings can help courts do what we know courts should do: decide case on the merits, accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. Pleadings facilitate a day in court when focused on deciding according …

Book Review. Joan Biskupic, An American Original: The Life And Constitution Of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Iqbal And Bad Apples, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In addition to its important implications for federal civil procedure, the Supreme Court’s decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal put the imprimatur of the Supreme Court on a troubling narrative of the excesses carried out by the Bush Administration in the name of fighting terrorism. In this “few bad-apples narrative,” harsh treatment of detainees—especially in the immediate wake of the attacks of September 11th, but also years later in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq, the Guantanamo Bay detention center, and elsewhere—was the work of a small number of relatively low-ranking military and civilian officials who went beyond the limits of the …

Why Heightened Pleading - Why Now?, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Federal Pleading And State Presuit Discovery, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

This Article explores the role that state presuit discovery could play in rectifying the information imbalance caused by Twombly and Iqbal - when a plaintiff in federal court requires information in the hands (or minds) of defendants or third parties in order to properly plead her claim, but such information is not discoverable unless the claim can survive a motion to dismiss. First, this Article provides an account of the development of federal pleading standards from before Twombly through their current post-Iqbal state. Second, this Article describes the effects of the post-Iqbal federal pleading standards and highlights the harsh results …

Inventing Tests, Destabilizing Systems, Kevin M. Clermont, Stephen C. Yeazell

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court revolutionized the law on pleading by its suggestive Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and definitive Ashcroft v. Iqbal. But these decisions did more than redefine the pleading rules: by inventing a foggy test for the threshold stage of every lawsuit, they have destabilized the entire system of civil litigation. This destabilization should rekindle a wide conversation about fundamental choices made in designing our legal system.

Those choices are debatable. Thus, the bone this Article picks with the Court is not that it took the wrong path for pleading, but that it blazed a new and unclear …