Civil Procedure Commons^™

Escape From The Battle Of The Forms: Keep It Simple, Stupid, Corneill A. Stephens

Faculty Publications By Year

This Article reviews the history of the "battle of the forms" issue arising when contracting parties submit conflicting terms to each other in attempting to form a contract and how courts have resolved issues arising from this, both under the original Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Article 2 and the Revised Article 2. The author reviews the economic circumstances that gave rise to the current use of standard form contracts, such as lower transaction costs and the ability of a company to control the terms and the discretion of its personnel. He discusses how battle of the forms issues were resolved …

Of Rules And Standards: Reconciling Statutory Limitations On "Arising Under" Jurisdiction, Richard D. Freer

Faculty Articles

Article III authorizes and the Judicial Code grants federal subject matter jurisdiction over civil cases "arising under" federal law. The Supreme Court has interpreted these words differently, however, in their constitutional and statutory contexts. While the constitutional text is read broadly, the Court has imposed three limitations on the same words in the statutory grants of federal question jurisdiction: (1) the ''well-pleaded complaint" rule; (2) a requirement that the federal issues be sufficiently "direct" or "central', to the dispute to justify access to the federal courts; and (3) a requirement that the federal assertion be "substantial." These limitations are meant …

Class Actions And The Poor., Henry Rose

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between Defense Counsel, Policyholders, And Insurers: Nevada Rides Yellow Cab Toward "Two-Client" Model Of Tripartite Relationship. Are Cumis Counsel And Malpractice Claims By Insurers Next?, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

It happens constantly in civil litigation. An insurance company hires a lawyer to defend its policyholder from a third party’s claim of injury. But just who is the lawyer’s “client?” Is it the policyholder who is the named defendant in the case and is “represented” in court proceedings? Or is it the insurer who, in most cases, selected the attorney, pays the attorney, supervises the litigation, and has (by the terms of the liability insurance policy) the right to settle the case, even over the objections of the policyholder? Ordinarily, the liability insurer has both the duty to defend a …

Lawyer Professional Responsibility In Litigation, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

A perennially-vexing litigation issue concerns the limits of permissible attorney argument. More than a few lawyers have been tripped up by the occasional fuzziness of the line between aggressive advocacy and improper appeals to passion or prejudice. See Craig Lee Montz, Why Lawyers Continue to Cross the Line in Closing Argument: An Examination of Federal and State Cases, 28 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 67 (2001-2002)(problem of violations results from lack of uniformity and clarity of ground rules as well as errors of counsel). In Cohen v. Lioce, 149 P.3d 916 (Nev. 2006) the Nevada Supreme Court both provided significant guidance …

Reconsidering Procedural Conformity Statutes, Thomas O. Main

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Symposium: A Right To Counsel In Civil Cases: Civil Gideon In Maryland & Beyond, Leigh Goodmark

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address: Seeking A Right To Appointed Counsel In Civil Cases In Maryland, Stephen H. Sachs

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Faces Of Open Courts And The Civil Right To Counsel, Steven D. Schwinn

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice Delayed Is, Once Again, Justice Denied: The Overdue Right To Counsel In Civil Cases, Debra Gardner

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

Managing Preservation Obligations After The 2006 Federal E-Discovery Amendments, Thomas Y. Allman

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The 2006 E-Discovery Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (2006 Amendments or the Amendments) do not directly address the onset or scope of preservation obligations. As noted in the September 2005 Report of the Standing Committee of the Judicial Conference recommending adoption of the 2006 Amendments, preservation obligations “arise from independent sources of law” and are dependent upon “the substantive law of each jurisdiction.” However, the Amendments have a major impact on how parties must analyze and execute preservation obligations involving electronically stored information (“ESI”).

The 2006 Amendments To The Rules Of Civil Procedure: Accessible And Inaccessible Electronic Information Storage Devices, Why Parties Should Store Electronic Information In Accessible Formats, Benjamin D. Silbert

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Discovery jurisprudence is a cornerstone of civil litigation in the United States. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as adopted in 1938, introduced a broad discovery process, which was not a previously accepted practice. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have been revised several times since 1938, reflecting the evolution of society. However, prior to 2006, 1970 was the last time the discovery rules were amended to take into account changes in information technology. In the last thirty-seven years, technological advances in electronic storage and communication have changed the way people live and how business is conducted, beyond what could …

Procedural Fairness: A Key Ingredient In Public Satisfaction, Kevin Burke, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Trial Of Zacarias Moussaoui, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

On the horrific morning of September 11, 2001, when planes crashed into buildings and fell from the sky, Zacarias Moussaoui was sitting in a jail in Minnesota facing immigration charges. Even if he had not been arrested three weeks earlier, when he raised suspicion by paying large sums to a flight training school to learn to pilot a Boeing 747 despite his never having piloted a small plane, it seems unlikely that Moussaoui would have been the twentieth hijacker on one of the four doomed planes. Nonetheless, largely because of the convenient fact that he was alive and in custody, …

Zaranska V. U.S. Department Of Homeland Security, Bethany L. Ow

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reassessing The Purposes Of Federal Question Jurisdiction, John F. Preis

Law Faculty Publications

For ages, judges and legal academics have claimed that federal question jurisdiction has three purposes: to provide litigants with a judge experienced in federal law, to protect litigants from state court hostility toward federal claims, and to preserve uniformity in federal law. Because federal claims, for the most part, have always been cognizable in state courts, these purposes imply that state courts are less experienced, more hostile, and more likely to adjudicate federal law in ways that decrease the uniformity of federal law. Despite the ongoing allegiance to this conception of federal question jurisdictionand by implication, state court adjudication of …

Non-Pecuniary Interests And The Injudicious Limits Of Appellate Standing In Bankruptcy, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

Standing to appeal bankruptcy court orders today is limited to those with a pecuniary interest. This prudential limitation is based on the person aggrieved requirement of Section 39(c) of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 - a requirement that was not included in the Bankruptcy Code. This article examines the extensive differences between the Act and the Code, the potential justifications for extending the pecuniary interest test in spite of the omission of the person aggrieved requirement, and the potential ramifications for parties and the integrity of the bankruptcy process. This analysis suggests that standing to appeal bankruptcy orders should be …

Proving Lost Profits Under Daubert: Five Questions Every Court Should Ask Before Admitting Expert Testimony, Robert M. Lloyd

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

How Can Japanese Corporations Protect Confidential Information In U.S. Courts?, Masamichi Yamamoto

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

U.S. courts have seen a significant increase in the number of lawsuits involving both U.S. and Japanese corporations. In deciding these cases, U.S. courts may have to choose how to apply the attorney-client privilege to in-house lawyers retained by corporations in Japan, where the legal system and discovery rules are fundamentally different from those of the United States. U.S. courts would most likely analyze these situations under the Remy-Martin/Minolta test and recognize the attorney-client privilege only for managers of legal departments in Japanese corporations, not for other non-bengoshi (non-licensed) in-house lawyers. This will change in the near future, however, when …

Nonjurisdictionality Or Inequity, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

This short piece, written for the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, responds to Professor Scott Dodson's comment on Bowles v. Russell, titled Jurisdictionality and Bowles v. Russell. Dodson proposes to navigate a path between Justice Thomas's majority opinion and Justice Souter's dissent by embracing Thomas's use of mandatory and Souter's argument for deeming appellate deadlines nonjurisdictional. Considering the systemic, equitable policies underlying Rule 4(a)(6) and the prototypical examples distinguishing jurisdictional rules (those delineating classes of cases) from nonjurisdictional claim-processing rules, this nonjurisdictional alternative makes sense. It is the mandatory aspect of Professor Dodson's proposal that concerns me; it leaves no …

Cafa's Impact On Class Action Lawyers Symposium: Fairness To Whom - Perspectives On The Class Action Fairness Act Of 2005, Howard M. Erichson

Faculty Scholarship

Procedural reforms alter litigation options directly, but they alter the litigation landscape in more ways than reformers anticipate. Three years ago, Congress dramatically expanded federal jurisdiction with the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), a statute drafted with no love for class action plaintiffs' lawyers. Those lawyers have adapted to the statute, in part, by altering their forum-selection and claim-selection strategies. Analysis of these adaptations offers an emerging picture of the statute's impact on class actions and class action lawyers. CAFA's impact on the class action bar deserves particular attention because, although the statute speaks the language of subject …

Against Irreparable Benefits, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

In a recent essay in The Yale Law Journal, Douglas Lichtman argues that courts considering preliminary injunctions should account for irreparable benefits in addition to irreparable harms. This is a provocative idea. If a preliminary injunction harms one party but benefits the other, and if both effects are equally difficult to subsequently undo, why focus on one effect (harm) and ignore the other (benefit)? There is a compelling geometric validity to this symmetry observation. But is this a valuable “flipping” exercise? Does it shed a new light and provide useful insight into the law of injunctions? In this Response I …

Anti-Federalist Procedure, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

"[T]he new federal government will ... be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments."

"[T]he Constitution of the United States ... recognizes and preserves the autonomy and independence of the States-independence in their legislative and independence in their judicial departments. . . . Any interference with either, except as [constitutionally] permitted, is an invasion of the authority of the State and, to that extent, a denial of its independence."

The understanding expressed by these opening quotes-that the national government was designed to be one of limited powers that would refrain from encroaching …

The Forum Defendant Rule In Arkansas, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

Section 1441(b) of the removal statute prohibits removal of a diversity case if a defendant is a citizen of the state in which the case was originally filed. The bar to removal is known as the Forum Defendant Rule. Is removal in violation of the Forum Defendant Rule a jurisdictional or nonjurisdictional defect? The characterization matters because a jurisdictional defect can be raised at any time, while a nonjurisdictional defect must be raised within a specific period of time or is waived. The Supreme Court has not resolved the characterization, but a number of circuit courts, including the Eighth Circuit, …

Pleading Standards After Bell Atlantic Corp. V. Twombly, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

On May 21, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and gutted the venerable language from Conley v. Gibson that every civil procedure professor and student can recite almost by heart: that “a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitled him to relief.” This Essay explains how Bell Atlantic did so and discusses some of its implications for pleading claims in the future.

Reforming Federal Personal Injury Litigation By Incorporation Of The Procedural Innovations Of Scotland And Ireland: An Analysis And Proposal, Daniel H. Erskine

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

Federal procedure has embraced the referral of civil cases outside the court system to alternative dispute resolution. This article argues that by utilizing courts to settle cases through civil procedure, courts realize their central role in ensuring the quality of settlements produced through the judicial administration of justice. The purpose of this article is to provide litigants with an optional procedure to expeditiously resolve federal personal injury cases. The system proposed in this article incorporates Scottish and Irish civil procedural reforms into a coherent method for judicial officers to declare the settlement value of a personal injury action without referring …

Reassessing Damages In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

No coherent doctrinal statement exists for calculating open-market damages for securities fraud class actions. Instead, courts have tried in vain to fashion common-law deceit and misrepresentation remedies to fit open-market fraud. The result is a relatively ineffective system with a hallmark feature: unpredictable damage awards. This poses a significant fraud deterrence problem from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint.

In 2005, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to clarify open-market damage principles and to facilitate earlier dismissal of cases without compensable economic losses. Instead, in Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo, it further confused the damage issue by (1) perpetuating the …

Geographic Variation In Informed Consent Law: Two Standards For Disclosure Of Treatment Risks, David M. Studdert, Michelle M. Mello, Marin K. Levy, Russell L. Gruen, Edward J. Dunn, E. John Orav, Troyen A. Brennan

Faculty Scholarship

We analyzed 714 jury verdicts in informed consent cases tried in 25 states in 1985–2002 to determine whether the applicable standard of care (“patient” vs. “professional” standard) affected the outcome. Verdicts for plaintiffs were significantly more frequent in states with a patient standard than in states with a professional standard (27 percent vs. 17 percent, P = 0.02). This difference in outcomes did not hold for other types of medical malpractice litigation (36 percent vs. 37 percent, P = 0.8). The multivariate odds of a plaintiff’s verdict were more than twice as high in states with a patient standard than …

Civil Procedure To Enforce Transnational Rights?, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Continuing Violations Doctrine, Kyle Graham

Faculty Publications

It has been intimated that the uncertainty surrounding the continuing violations doctrine owes to a failure to grasp its origins and modem-day contours. This article treats this assertion as true, and tries to dispel at least some of this confusion. Toward this purpose, this article charts the conceptual landscape of this theory and explains how and why the doctrine has been and should be applied.

This analysis begins with the recognition of and distinction between two types of continuing violations. Though frequently confused or conflated, these two approaches are in fact quite different in both purpose and effect. The first …