Law Commons^™

New Federal Rules For Pending Cases, M. Anderson Berry, Caroline N. Mitchell

M. Anderson Berry

On Dec. 1, 2010, changes to Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) extended work-product protection to discovery of draft reports by testifying experts and, with three exceptions, to communications between those experts and retaining attorneys. The amendments also require attorneys relying on experts who will provide testimony - but who are not required to provide a full expert report - to disclose the subject matter of the planned testimony and summarize the facts and opinions that the expert expects to offer.

What is not clear is whether this "attorney-expert work-product doctrine" applies to draft reports and …

Pleading Their Case: How Ashcroft V. Iqbal Extinguishes Prisoners’ Rights, Maureen Brocco

Maureen Brocco

Ashcroft v. Iqbal, decided on May 18, 2009, increased the evidentiary burden required to survive a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) (“Rule 12(b)(6)”) motion to dismiss to a strict plausibility standard. While this decision affects almost all civil claims in the federal court system, its impact is particularly troublesome in the realm of prisoners’ rights litigation. For a prisoner, such onerous pre-litigation fact-finding requirements can turn the administration of justice into an unattainable goal. Since prisoners’ claims are often against their captors, government officials, this heightened pleading burden may leave victims of egregious unconstitutional actions by government officials without …

Jurisdictional Discovery In United States Federal Courts, S. I. Strong

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

I Could Have Been A Contender: Summary Jury Trial As A Means To Overcome Iqbal's Negative Effects Upon Pre-Litigation Communication, Negotiation And Early, Consensual Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

With its recent decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court may be intentionally or unintentionally “throwing the fight,” at least in the legal contests between many civil rights claimants and institutional defendants. The most obvious feared effect is reduction of civil rights claimants’ access to the expressive and coercive power of the courts. Less obviously, the Supreme Court may be effectively undermining institutions’ motivation to negotiate, mediate - or even communicate with and listen to - such claimants before they initiate legal action. Thus, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have the potential to deprive …

Subverting Rule 56? Mcdonnell Douglas, White V. Baxter Healthcare Corp., And The Mess Of Summary Judgement In Mixed-Motive Cases, Christopher J. Emden

William & Mary Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Restrictive Ethos In Civil Procedure, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Those of us who study civil procedure are familiar with the notion that federal civil procedure under the 1938 Rules was generally characterized by a "liberal ethos," meaning that it was originally designed to promote open access to the courts and to facilitate a resolution of disputes on the merits. Most of us are also aware of the fact that the reality of procedure is not always access-promoting or fixated on merits- based resolutions as a priority. Indeed, I would say that a "restrictive ethos" prevails in procedure today, with many rules being developed, interpreted, and applied in a manner …

Redeeming The Missed Opportunities Of Shady Grove, Stephen B. Burbank, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Shady Grove Orthopedic Associates v. Allstate Insurance Co., a closely watched case decided in the 2009–10 Term, presented the Court with an opportunity to speak to two related problems under the Rules Enabling Act that have languished for decades without proper resolution. The first involves a broad interpretive question: How can the limitations on rulemaking authority contained in the Act be applied in a manner that reflects the separation-of-powers concerns that animated them while also exhibiting respect for the state regulatory arrangements that govern much of our economic and social activity? The second problem involves the intersection of the …

The Tao Of Pleading: Do Twombly And Iqbal Matter Empirically?, Patricia W. Hatamyar

American University Law Review

This article is an empirical study of the effect of Bell Atlantic Corp. vs. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft vs. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009), two recent Supreme Court cases that portend the decline of “notice pleading” in federal civil practice. The article analyzes how Twombly and Iqbal have begun to dismantle the regime of notice pleading by not only discarding the “no set of facts” standard of Conley vs. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41 (1957), but by changing or ignoring other principles that federal courts have followed for decades on 12(b)(6) motions. The statistical study then examines …

The Irrepressible Influence Of Byrd, Richard D. Freer, Thomas Arthur

Faculty Articles

We set forth four interrelated theses in this article. First, Byrd is the only Supreme Court case since Erie itself to discuss all three of the core interests balanced, expressly or not, in every vertical choice of law case. Second, because Hanna's "twin aims" test ignores two of these three core interests, it cannot adequately serve as the standard for cases under the Rules of Decision Act ("RDA"). This fact is evidenced by the Court's eschewing the twin aims test in cases, like Gasperini, where state and federal interests must be accommodated. Third, as all three opinions in …

Proportionality In Discovery: A Cautionary Tale, John L. Carroll

Campbell Law Review

"There has been widespread criticism of the abuse of discovery."' That statement comes not from a recent edition of the Defense Research Institute newsletter but from the Advisory Committee notes to the 1980 amendment that gave us the Rule 26(f) conference. Discovery abuse and the increase in the cost of litigation that flows from such abuse has been a constant theme emerging from analysis of the civil justice system.

What Federal Rulemakers Can Learn From State Procedural Innovations, Seymour Moskowitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

I Could Have Been A Contender: Summary Jury Trial As A Means To Overcome Iqbal's Negative Effects Upon Pre-Litigation Communication, Negotiation And Early, Consensual Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh

Journal Articles

With its recent decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court may be intentionally or unintentionally “throwing the fight,” at least in the legal contests between many civil rights claimants and institutional defendants. The most obvious feared effect is reduction of civil rights claimants’ access to the expressive and coercive power of the courts. Less obviously, the Supreme Court may be effectively undermining institutions’ motivation to negotiate, mediate - or even communicate with and listen to - such claimants before they initiate legal action. Thus, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have the potential to deprive …

Enforcement Of U.S. Electronic Discovery Law Against Foreign Companies: Should U.S. Courts Give Effect To The Eu Data Protection Directive?, Kristen A. Knapp

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

Enforcing discovery against companies located in foreign nations is not a new phenomenon. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the conflict between U.S. discovery rules and foreign non-disclosure law in a 1958 case. Despite more than fifty years to reach a settled jurisprudence regarding how to enforce U.S. law against foreign domiciled companies, there has yet to be a clear articulation of a standard applicable in all cases. Currently, there are two main sets of rules under which U.S. courts may enforce discovery laws against foreign companies, and if necessary impose sanctions for non-compliance: the Hague Convention and the U.S. …

The Expanding Duties Of Esi And In-House Counsel: Providing Defensible Preservation And Production Efforts After Swofford V. Eslinger, David W. Degnan

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

As a general rule, companies and government agencies should plan for preservation and production before litigation is probable. This means having a document retention program. These programs ensure that documents are retained or deleted in an orderly fashion. If a company properly follows its policies and procedures, this retention program acts as a “shield” against the incomplete preservation of relevant (or “hot”) documents deleted before the proper initiation of a litigation hold. If parties do not follow, or inconsistently follow, such a program, they might have to explain what happened to a missing relevant document. Thus, a retention program might …

How States Can Protect Their Policies In Federal Class Actions, Lucas Watkins

Campbell Law Review

The role of the states in our constitutional system is to protect their citizens and supply tort liability. Where federal law does not preempt state systems of liability, state law supplies the tort- and contract-based rules that govern the vast majority of the relationships in our society and economy. Some think that national rules of liability, or new national choice-of-law rules, should supplant today's state-by-state regulation. But until Congress enacts a comprehensive regulatory scheme, state law will control the causes of action that plaintiffs can bring. And the state law that controls the cause should control the way that the …

Nationwide Personal Jurisdiction For Our Federal Courts, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure limits the territorial jurisdiction of federal district courts to that of the courts of their host states.T his limitation is a voluntary rather than obligatory restriction, given district courts' status as courts of the national sovereign. Although there are sound policy reasons for limiting the jurisdictional reach of our federal courts in this manner, the limitation delivers little benefit from a judicial administration or even a fairness perspective, and ultimately costs more to implement than is gained in return. The rule should be amended to provide that district courts have personal …

The Rule 10b-5 Suit: Loss Causation Pleading Standards In Private Securities Fraud Claims After Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. V. Broudo, Evan Hill

Fordham Law Review

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo. The Court held that a plaintiff alleging securities fraud must prove that a defendant’s misrepresentation caused actual economic loss. The Dura decision put to rest the loss causation standard applied by several U.S. courts of appeals, which allowed plaintiffs to merely plead that a misrepresentation caused an artificially inflated purchase price. However, in Dura’s wake, the circuit courts have fashioned divergent standards with respect to pleading loss causation. The courts currently apply pleading standards ranging from the lenient and generally applicable Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a) to …

Law, Facts, And Power, Elizabeth G. Thornburg

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Ashcroft v. Iqbal is wrong in many ways. This essay is about only one of them: the Court’s single-handed return to a pleading system that requires lawyers and judges to distinguish between pleading facts and pleading law. This move not only resuscitates a distinction purposely abandoned by the generation that drafted the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, but also serves as an example of the very difficulties created by the distinction. The chinks in the law-fact divide are evident in Iqbal itself - both in the already notorious pleading section of the opinion, and in …

Hydrogen Peroxide: The Third Circuit Comes Clean About The Rule 23 Class Action Certification Standard, Amy Dudash

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston

Michigan Law Review

In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court changed the rhetoric of the federal pleading system. Those decisions have been decried by members of the bar, scholars, and legislators as judicial activism and a rewriting of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Such criticism has led members of both houses of Congress to introduce legislation to overrule the decisions and return to some variation of the "notice pleading" regime that existed before Twombly. This Note argues that both of the current proposals to overrule Twombly and Iqbal should be rejected. Although the bills take different …