Courts Commons^™

The Shifting Sands Of Cost Shifting, Andrew M. Pardieck

Cleveland State Law Review

The cost-shifting analysis employed by the federal courts in ruling on discovery disputes is flawed. There is tremendous variability in how courts interpret the factors guiding the analysis. There is tremendous variability in the information courts rely on in deciding whether to preclude the discovery or shift its costs. The result is waste for the litigants, courts, and society as a whole. This Article argues that there is a better way: mandate cooperation before cost shifting. The courts should condition proportionality and cost-shifting rulings on cooperation. The cooperation should be substantive: require disclosure of objective information about the disputed discovery …

Politics, Identity, And Pleading Decisions On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

We report the results of an empirical study of appeals from rulings on motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) after the Supreme Court’s decisions in Twombly and Iqbal. We first describe the role that pleading was intended to play in the original (1938) Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, review the Court’s decisions in Twombly and Iqbal, and offer a brief discussion of common themes in normative scholarship that is critical of Twombly and Iqbal, including the claim that they threaten to amplify ideological and subjective decision-making, particularly …

Class Certification In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals: A Longitudinal Study, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

There is a vast literature on the modern class action, but little of it is informed by systematic empirical data. Mindful both that there have been few Supreme Court class certification decisions and that they may not provide an accurate picture of class action jurisprudence, let alone class action activity, over time, we created a comprehensive data set of class certification decisions in the United States Courts of Appeals consisting of all precedential panel decisions addressing whether a class should be certified from 1966 through 2017, and of nonprecedential panel decisions from 2002 through 2017.

In Section I, through a …