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Full-Text Articles in Law
#Sowhitemale: Federal Civil Rulemaking, Brooke D. Coleman
#Sowhitemale: Federal Civil Rulemaking, Brooke D. Coleman
Northwestern University Law Review
116 out of 136. That is the number of white men who have served on the eighty-two-year-old committee responsible for creating and maintaining the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The tiny number of non-white, non-male committee members is disproportionate, even in the context of the white-male-dominated legal profession. If the rules were simply a technical set of instructions made by a neutral set of experts, then perhaps these numbers might not be as disturbing. But that is not the case. The Civil Rules embody normative judgments about the values that have primacy in our civil justice system, and the rule-makers—while …
Personal Jurisdiction And Aggregation, Scott Dodson
Personal Jurisdiction And Aggregation, Scott Dodson
Northwestern University Law Review
Aggregation—the ability to join parties or claims in a federal civil lawsuit—has usually been governed by subject matter jurisdiction, claim and issue preclusion, and the joinder rules. These doctrines have tended to favor aggregation for its efficiency, consistency, and predictability. Yet aggregation is suddenly under attack from a new threat, one that has little to do with aggregation directly: personal jurisdiction. In this Article, I chronicle how a recent restrictive turn in personal jurisdiction—seen in modern cases narrowing general jurisdiction and October Term 2016’s blockbuster case Bristol-Myers Squibb—threatens the salutary benefits of aggregation across a number of areas, including …
Judicial Mistakes In Discovery, Diego A. Zambrano
Judicial Mistakes In Discovery, Diego A. Zambrano
Northwestern University Law Review
A recent wave of scholarship argues that judges often fail to comply with binding rules or precedent and sometimes apply overturned laws. Scholars have hypothesized that the cause of this “judicial noncompliance” may be flawed litigant briefing that introduces mistakes into judicial decisions—an idea this Essay calls the “Litigant Hypothesis.” The Essay presents a preliminary study aimed at exploring ways of testing the validity of the Litigant Hypothesis. Employing an empirical analysis that exploits recent amendments to Federal Discovery Rule 26, this Essay finds that the strongest predictor of noncompliance in a dataset of discovery decisions is indeed faulty briefs. …
Mdl V. Trump: The Puzzle Of Public Law In Multidistrict Litigation, Andrew D. Bradt, Zachary D. Clopton
Mdl V. Trump: The Puzzle Of Public Law In Multidistrict Litigation, Andrew D. Bradt, Zachary D. Clopton
Northwestern University Law Review
Litigation against the Trump Administration has proliferated rapidly since the inauguration. As cases challenging executive actions, such as the “travel ban,” multiply in federal courts around the country, an important procedural question has so far not been considered—Should these sets of cases be consolidated in a single court under the Multidistrict Litigation Act? Multidistrict litigation, or MDL, has become one of the most prominent parts of federal litigation and offers substantial benefits by coordinating litigation pending in geographically dispersed federal courts. Arguably, those benefits would also accrue if “public law” cases were given MDL treatment. There also are some underappreciated …