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A New Look At Dismissal Rates In Federal Civil Cases, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

In the wake of Twombly and Iqbal, a number of studies have been conducted to determine their effects on dismissal practice in federal civil cases. However, because of coding and collection difficulties, those studies have tended to code whole cases rather than claims--leading to the ambiguous coding category of “mixed” dismissals and to problems in characterizing the nature of the dispute--and have failed to distinguish between legal sufficiency and factual sufficiency, potentially masking important detail about the effects of the pleadings changes.

This paper begins to fill in that detail. I compiled an original dataset of district court opinions and …