Civil Procedure Commons^™

A New Hope: Tortious Interference With An Expected Inheritance In Rhode Island, Rebecca M. Murphy, Samantha M. Clarke

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

2016 Survey Of Rhode Island Law: Cases And Public Laws Of Note

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of The Uniquely Adversarial Nature Of The U.S. Legal, Economic And Political System And Its Implications For Reinforcing Existing Power Hierarchies, Areto A. Imoukuede, Jim Wilets

Journal Publications

This article argues that the uniquely adversarial nature of the United States litigation system, rooted in the medieval English system of "trial by battle," has replicated itself in almost all aspects of American society, distinguishing the United States from even its common law counterparts that shared the genesis of their legal systems in English "trial by battle." This "trial by battle" is often characterized in the context of speech by terms such as the 'marketplace of ideas," or in the context of economics by terms such as "the law of the jungle.," Even resolution of basic Constitutional concepts are subject …

Ab(Ju)Dication: How Procedure Defeats Civil Liberties In The War On Terror, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Prescription For Overcoming Gender Inequity In Complex Litigation: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Wal-Mart V. Dukes On Employment Discrimination Class Actions Five Years Out: A Forecast That Suggests More Of A Wave Than A Tsunami, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Class Action-Barring Mandatory Pre-Dispute Consumer Arbitration Clauses: An Example Of (And Opportunity For) Dispute System Design?, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Ultimately, this essay will conclude that a private, ad hoc dispute system design process did lead to the insertion of class action waivers in mandatory pre-dispute consumer arbitration clauses. In-house and outside counsel certainly played key roles in initiating this process, but it is unclear that any individual lawyers could claim credit or responsibility as "designers." The representatives of dispute resolution organizations, meanwhile, played supporting roles-as providers of information and as amici in Supreme Court litigation. The essay will consider whether dispute resolution professionals could have managed their role in the process differently-and if so, why they would have managed …

Opening A Can Of Worms And Viruses: The Impact Of E-Service On E-Mail Users Everywhere, Jeffrey Wolber

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Facts Are Stubborn Things": Protecting Due Process From Virulent Publicity, Benjamin Brafman, Darren Stakey

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Implications Of A Revitalized 28 U.S.C. 1400(B): Identifying The Regular And Established Place Of Business For Patent Venue In The Internet Age, Steven Pepe, Samuel Brenner

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Public Believes Predispute Binding Arbitration Clauses Are Unjust: Ethical Implications For Dispute-System Design In The Time Of Vanishing Trials, Victor D. Quintanilla, Alexander B. Avtgis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article discusses a troubling cause of the decline in civil trials — the growing ubiquity of predispute binding arbitration clauses — and discusses tension between roles and responsibilities classically associated with zealous advocacy and the pressing need for new roles and responsibilities associated with ethical dispute system design.

Over the past decade, two interacting patterns have come to encourage transactional attorneys to engage in zealous advocacy when crafting predispute binding arbitration clauses in adhesion contracts. First, recent U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence broadly defers and delegates authority to those who create such clauses in adhesion contracts with little oversight. Second, …

Changing Course, Sergio J. Campos

Articles

No abstract provided.

Mandating Rule 11 Sanctions? Here We Go Again!, Edward D. Cavanagh

Faculty Publications

The House of Representatives has passed H.R. 720, a bill that would amend Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by re‑instituting mandatory sanctions for Rule 11 violations and essentially restoring Rule 11 to its contents under the 1983 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The legislation would mandate imposition of monetary sanctions and eliminate any restrictions on when a Rule 11 motion could be filed. The bill would thus scuttle the 1993 Amendments, which (1) entrusted the sanctions decision to the sound discretion of the trial court; (2) provided a 21‑day safe harbor period that …

Monopolies In Multidistrict Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

When transferee judges receive a multidistrict proceeding, they select a few lead plaintiffs’ lawyers to efficiently manage litigation and settlement negotiations. That decision gives those attorneys total control over all consolidated plaintiffs’ claims and rewards them richly in common-benefit fees. It’s no surprise then that these are coveted positions, yet empirical evidence confirms that the same attorneys occupy them time and again.

Anytime repeat players exist and exercise both oligopolistic leadership control across multidistrict proceedings and monopolistic power within a single proceeding, there is concern that they will use their dominance to enshrine practices and norms that benefit themselves at …

Dynamic Regulatory Constitutionalism: Taking Legislation Seriously In The Judicial Enforcement Of Economic And Social Rights, Richard Stacey

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

The international human rights revolution in the decades after the Second World War recognized economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1966, regional treaties, and subject-specific treaties variously describe rights to food, shelter, health, and education, and set out state obligations for the treatment of children. When they first appeared, these international, economic, and social rights instruments raised questions about whether economic and social rights are justiciable in domestic legal contexts and whether they can be meaningfully enforced by courts …

Challenging Nonbank Sifi Designations: Ge, Metlife, And The Need For Reform, Drita Dokic

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created, among other things, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), an entity within the U.S. Department of the Treasury tasked with assessing and mitigating financial risk. Financial institutions with over $50 billion in assets are automatically deemed “systemically important.” However, under the Dodd-Frank Act, FSOC has the authority to designate non-bank companies engaged in financial activity as systemically important as well. Once designated as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI), these companies are subject to enhanced regulation and supervision by the Federal Reserve. Because the costs associated with such enhanced regulation …

The Modern Class Action Rule: Its Civil Rights Roots And Relevance Today, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

The modern class action rule recently turned fifty years old — a golden anniversary. However, this milestone is marred by an increase in hate crimes, violence and discrimination. Ironically, the rule is marking its anniversary within a similarly tumultuous environment as its birth — the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. This irony calls into question whether this critical aggregation device is functioning as the drafters intended. This article makes three contributions.

First, the article unearths the rule’s rich history, revealing how the rule was designed in 1966 to enable structural reform and broad injunctive relief in civil rights cases. …

Class Actions, Civil Rights, And The National Injunction, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

This essay is a response to Professor Samuel Bray’s article proposing a blanket prohibition against injunctions that enjoin a defendant’s conduct with respect to nonparties. He argues that national injunctions are illegitimate under Article III and traditional equity and result in a number of difficulties.

This Response argues, from a normative lens, that Bray’s proposed ban on national injunctions should be rejected. Such a bright-line rule against national injunctions is too blunt an instrument to address the complexity of our tripartite system of government, our pluralistic society and our democracy. Although national injunctions may be imperfect and crude forms of …

Taking A Second Look At Mdl Product Liability Settlements: Somebody Needs To Do It, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

This Article examines the forces that lead to the settlement of product liability cases gathered under the MDL statute for pretrial. The MDL procedure is ill-suited to this use, and does not envision the gathering of the underlying cases as a means of finally resolving them. Motivational factors affecting judges and lawyers have produced these settlements, and the conditions out of which they arise do not give confidence that they are fair or adequate. This Article concedes that MDL settlements are likely here to stay, and argues that we need a mechanism to check such settlements for fairness and adequacy. …

Network Investigation Techniques: Government Hacking And The Need For Adjustment In The Third-Party Doctrine, Eduardo R. Mendoza

St. Mary's Law Journal

Modern society is largely dependent on technology, and legal discovery is no longer limited to hard-copy, tangible documents. The clash of technology and the law is an exciting, yet dangerous phenomena; dangerous because our justice system desperately needs technological progress. The clash between scientific advancement and the search for truth has recently taken an interesting form—government hacking. The United States Government has increasingly used Network Investigation Techniques (NITs) to target suspects in criminal investigations. NITs operate by identifying suspects who have taken affirmative steps to conceal their identity while browsing the Internet. The hacking technique has become especially useful to …

Police Misconduct, Video Recording, And Procedural Barriers To Rights Enforcement, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

The story of police reform and of "policing the police" has become the story of video and video evidence, and "record everything to know the truth" has become the singular mantra. Video, both police-created and citizen-created, has become the singular tool for ensuring police accountability, reforming law enforcement, and enforcing the rights of victims of police misconduct. This Article explores procedural problems surrounding the use of video recording and video evidence to counter police misconduct, hold individual officers and governments accountable, and reform departmental policies, regulations, and practices. It considers four issues: 1) the mistaken belief that video can "speak …

A Politics-Reinforcing Political Question Doctrine, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

The modern political question doctrine has long been criticized for shielding the political branches from proper judicial scrutiny and allowing the courts to abdicate their responsibilities. Critics of the doctrine thus cheered when the Supreme Court, in Zivotofsky I, announced a narrowing of the doctrine. Their joy though may have been short-lived. Almost immediately, Zivotofsky II demonstrated the dark side of judicial review of the separation of powers between Congress and the President: deciding separations of powers cases may permanently cut one of the political branches out of certain debates. Judicial scrutiny in a particular case could eliminate political scrutiny …

Who Has Standing To Sue The President Over Allegedly Unconstitutional Emoluments?, Matthew I. Hall

Scholarly Works

Three pending lawsuits challenge President Trump's practice of accepting payments and other benefits from foreign governments through his businesses as violative of the Foreign Emoluments Clause. They also allege that the President's practice of accepting payments and benefits from state or federal governmental units violates the Domestic Emoluments Clause. These actions raise interesting questions about the meaning of two little-discussed provisions of the Constitution. But before reaching the merits the courts will first have to grapple with issues of justiciability - in particular, with the question whether plaintiffs have "standing" to bring their claims in federal court. This article explains …

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Torts Met Civil Procedure: A Curricular Coupling, Laura G. Dooley, Brigham A. Fordham, Ann E. Woodley

Scholarly Works

Law students must become adept at understanding how various bodies of law interact-supporting, balancing, and even conflicting with each other. This article describes an attempt to achieve these goals by merging two canonical first-year courses, civil procedure and torts, into an integrated class titled ‘Introduction to Civil Litigation’. Our most pressing motivation was concern that students who study civil procedure and torts in isolation develop a skewed, unrealistic view of how law works in the real world. By combining these courses, we hoped to teach students early in their careers to approach problems more like practicing lawyers, who must deal …

Brief Of Professor Stephen E. Sachs As Amicus Curiae, Bnsf Railway Co. V. Tyrrell, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

[This brief was filed in support of the petitioner in No. 16-405 (U.S., cert. granted Jan. 13, 2017).]

BNSF Railway Co. should win this case, but on statutory grounds alone. BNSF makes three arguments:

1) That Daimler AG v. Bauman forbids Montana’s exercise of general personal jurisdiction here;

2) That Congress has not sought to license the state’s exercise of jurisdiction; and

3) That such a license would be void under the Fourteenth Amendment.

BNSF’s first two arguments are fully persuasive and decide the case. As a result, the Court should decline to reach the third argument. Not only is …

Human-Centered Civil Justice Design, Victor D. Quintanilla

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article introduces a novel approach to improving the civil justice system, referred to as human-centered civil justice design. The approach synthesizes insights and practices from two interdisciplinary strands: human-centered design thinking and dispute system design. The approach is rooted in human experiences with the processes, systems, people, and environments that members of the public encounter when navigating the civil justice system and how these experiences interact with the entangled web of hardships and legal adversities they face in the everyday.

Human-centered civil justice designers empathize with the intended beneficiaries and stakeholders of the civil justice system, seeking to deeply …

Repeat Players In Multidistrict Litigation: The Social Network, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams

Scholarly Works

As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal-agent concerns that plagued class-action attorneys linger. These circumstances are ripe for exploitation: few rules, little oversight, multi-million dollar common-benefit fees, and a push for settlement can tempt a cadre of repeat players to fill in the gaps in ways that further their own self-interest.

Although multidistrict litigation now comprises 36 percent of the entire federal civil caseload, legal scholars have …

Practical Ways To Achieve Proportionality During Discovery And Reduce Costs In The Pretrial Phase Of Federal Civil Cases, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Are We Insane? The Quest For Proportionality In The Discovery Rules Of The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.