Law Commons^™

Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

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Over the last fifty years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found itself repeatedly defending its regulations before federal judges. The agency’s engagement with the federal judiciary has resulted in prominent Supreme Court decisions, such as Chevron v. NRDC and Massachusetts v. EPA, which have left a lasting imprint on federal administrative law. Such prominent litigation has also fostered, for many observers, a longstanding impression of an agency besieged by litigation. In particular, many lawyers and scholars have long believed that unhappy businesses or environmental groups challenge nearly every EPA rule in court. Although some empirical studies have …

The Federal Rules Of Inmate Appeals, Catherine T. Struve

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The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure turn fifty in 2018. During the Rules’ half-century of existence, the number of federal appeals by self-represented, incarcerated litigants has grown dramatically. This article surveys ways in which the procedure for inmate appeals has evolved over the past 50 years, and examines the challenges of designing procedures with confined litigants in mind. In the initial decades under the Appellate Rules, the most visible developments concerning the procedure for inmate appeals arose from the interplay between court decisions and the federal rulemaking process. But, as court dockets swelled, the circuits also developed local case management …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

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In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …

Just And Speedy: On Civil Discovery Sanctions For Luddite Lawyers, Michael Thomas Murphy

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This article presents a theoretical model by which a judge could impose civil sanctions on an attorney - relying in part on Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - for that attorney’s failure to utilize time- and expense-saving technology.

Rule 1 now charges all participants in the legal system to ensure the “just, speedy and inexpensive” resolution of disputes. In today’s litigation environment, a lawyer managing a case in discovery needs robust technological competence to meet that charge. However, the legal industry is slow to adopt technology, favoring “tried and true” methods over efficiency. This conflict is …

Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank

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In this essay, prepared as part of a festschrift for the Italian scholar, Michele Taruffo, I portray him as a pragmatic realist of the sort described by Richard Posner in his book, Reflections on Judging. Viewing him as such, I salute Taruffo for challenging the established order in domestic and comparative law thinking about civil law systems, the role of lawyers, courts and precedent in those systems, and also for casting the light of the comparative enterprise on common law systems, particularly that in the United States. Speaking as one iconoclast of another, however, I also raise questions about Taruffo’s …

Spelling Out Spokeo, Craig Konnoth, Seth F. Kreimer

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For almost five decades, the injury-in-fact requirement has been a mainstay of Article III standing doctrine. Critics have attacked the requirement as incoherent and unduly malleable. But the Supreme Court has continued to announce “injury in fact” as the bedrock of justiciability. In Spokeo v. Robins, the Supreme Court confronted a high profile and recurrent conflict regarding the standing of plaintiffs claiming statutory damages. It clarified some matters, but remanded the case for final resolution. This Essay derives from the cryptic language of Spokeo a six stage process (complete with flowchart) that represents the Court’s current equilibrium. We put …

The Subterranean Counterrevolution: The Supreme Court, The Media, And Litigation Retrenchment, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

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This article is part of a larger project to study the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we show how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for private enforcement. An institutional perspective helps to explain the outcome we document: the long-term erosion of the infrastructure of private enforcement as a result of …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

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Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Whose Regulatory Interests? Outsourcing The Treaty Function, Stephen B. Burbank

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In this article I describe the status quo in the area of foreign judgment recognition, with attention to the tension between domestic interests and international cooperation. Precisely because the future of the status quo is in doubt, I then consider current proposals for change, particularly the effort to implement the Hague Choice of Court Convention in the United States. Prominent among the normative questions raised by my account is whose interests, in addition to the litigants’ interests, are at stake – those of the United States, those of the several states, or those of interest groups waving a federal or …

A Tea Party At The Hague?, Stephen B. Burbank

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In this article, I consider the prospects for and impediments to judicial cooperation with the United States. I do so by describing a personal journey that began more than twenty years ago when I first taught and wrote about international civil litigation. An important part of my journey has involved studying the role that the United States has played, and can usefully play, in fostering judicial cooperation, including through judgment recognition and enforcement. The journey continues but, today, finds me a weary traveler, more worried than ever about the politics and practice of international procedural lawmaking in the United States. …

Linkline's Institutional Suspicions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Antitrust scholars are having fun again. Not so long ago, they were the poor, redheaded stepchildren of the legal academy, either pining for the older days of rigorous antitrust enforcement or trying to kill off what was left of the enterprise. Other law professors felt sorry for them, ignored them, or both. But now antitrust is making a comeback of sorts. In one heady week in May of 2009, a front-page story in the New York Times reported the dramatic decision of Christine Varney-the Obama Administration's new Antitrust Division head at the Department of Justice-to jettison the entire report on …

Obama's Antitrust Agenda, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Antitrust law is back in vogue. After years in the wilderness, antitrust enforcement has reemerged as a hot topic in Washington and in the legal academy. In one heady week inMay of 2009, a frontpage story in the New York Times reported the dramatic decision of Christine Varney —theObama administration’s new AntitrustDivision head—to jettison the entire report onmonopolization offenses released by the Bush JusticeDepartment just eightmonths earlier. In a speech before the Center for American Progress, Varney announced that the Justice Department is “committed to aggressively pursuing enforcement of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” As if to prove that …

Enforcement Of Foreign Money-Judgments In The United States: In Search Of Uniformity And International Acceptance, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

When international trade and investment increase, so does the need for satisfactory means of dispute resolution. Dispute resolution in national courts requires that litigants consider not only the likelihood of a favorable judgment but also the ability to collect on that judgment. In cases where the defendant’s assets lie in another jurisdiction, collection is possible only if the second jurisdiction will recognize the first jurisdiction’s judgment.

In the international arena, enforcement of United State judgments overseas is often possible only if the United States court rendering the judgment would enforce a similar decision of the foreign enforcing court. This reciprocity …