Civil Procedure Commons^™

Frivolous Defenses, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article is about civil procedure, torts, insurance, litigation, and professional ethics. This is an empirical piece with data drawn from a sample of 356 answers to 298 complaints in car crash lawsuits to identify various ways that, I argue, insurance defense lawyers evade the rules of civil procedure and, frankly, act unprofessionally.

The empirical center of this piece examines 356 answers in car crash personal injury cases in Colorado’s district courts. First, I situate these cases within dispute pyramid elements including the total number of miles-traveled within Colorado and also with respect to the volume of civil litigation.

The …

Appellate Courts And Civil Juries, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

In federal civil litigation, decision-making power is shared by juries, trial courts, and appellate courts. This Article examines an unresolved tension in the different doctrines that allocate authority among these institutions, one that has led to confusion surrounding the relationship between appellate courts and civil juries. At base, the current uncertainty stems from a longstanding lack of clarity regarding the distinction between matters of law and matters of fact. The high-stakes Oracle-Google litigation—which is now before the Supreme Court—exemplifies this. In that case, the Federal Circuit reasoned that an appellate court may assert de novo review over a jury’s verdict …

That's Not Fair Use: Why Rule 68 Copyright Defendants Canno Recover Post-Offer Attorney's Fees, Ryan Kaiser

American University Law Review

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68 (Rule 68) is a cost-shifting rule that allows a non-prevailing defendant who made an offer of judgment more favorable than the final judgment to recover costs incurred from the point the offer was made. Until the mid-1980s, whether the rule could apply to the attorney’s fees was the source of much debate. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court provided a partial answer when it decided Marek v. Chesny, holding that Rule 68 operates to preclude a civil rights plaintiff from recovering post-offer attorney’s fees. The Court stated that Rule 68 costs include all costs …

An Evaluation And Performance Measure Framework For Online Dispute Resolution Programs: Assessing Improvements In Access To Justice, Andrea L. Miller, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Kathryn Genthon

Faculty Publications

One type of programming designed to improve access to justice for civil litigants is online dispute resolution (ODR). ODR generally consists of an internet-based software platform on which litigants can resolve legal problems, including negotiating settlements or exchanging information to narrow the factual and legal issues in a formal court hearing. ODR programs were first developed by online commercial businesses such as PayPal, eBay, and Amazon to resolve disputes more effectively between buyers and sellers, but they are still a relatively new innovation in courts, with most programs launching within the past three years.

ODR programs are intended to increase …

The Privacy-Protection Hook In The Federal Rules, Steven Gensler, Lee Rosenthal

Other Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Getting Real About Procedure: Changing How We Think, Write And Teach About American Civil Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Civil Case Management, Paula Hannaford-Agor

Faculty Publications

Court rules are necessary, but insufficient by themselves to address problems of cost and delay. Instead, state courts today are embracing a considerably broader view of civil case management, one that encompasses the total constellation of court rules, business practices, culture and governance, and staffing and technology infrastructure. Effective case management now recognizes the importance of five core components that are necessary to achieve timely, cost-effective, and procedurally fair justice: (1) triage to ensure that cases receive attention proportional to their needs; (2) process simplification to remove procedural barriers that unnecessarily complicate litigation; (3) stakeholder engagement to ensure clear communication …

A Louisiana Theory Of Juridical Acts, Nikolaos A. Davrados

Louisiana Law Review

The article examines the concept of juridical act from both a comparative and Louisiana law perspective to establish the validity of the general theory of juridical acts and to determine the useful components drawn from each system.

Rethinking Standards Of Appellate Review, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

Every appellate decision typically begins with the standard of appellate review. The Supreme Court has shown considerable interest in selecting the standard of appellate review for particular issues, frequently granting certiorari in order to decide whether de novo or deferential review governs certain trial court rulings. This Article critiques the Court's framework for making this choice and questions the desirability of assigning distinct standards of appellate review on an issue-by-issue basis. Rather, the core functions of appellate courts are better served by a single template for review that dispenses with the recurring uncertainty over which standard governs which trial court …

Professor Aaron-Andrew Bruhl: Reflections On The Fall 2020 Semester, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Law School Personal Reflections on COVID-19

No abstract provided.

Federal Judge Seeks Patent Cases, Jonas Anderson, Paul Gugliuzza

Working Papers

Imagine the following advertisement popping up on Craigslist: "FEDERAL JUDGE SEEKS PATENT CASES! (Waco) — Former patent litigator, recently appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, longs for the intellectual challenge of a good patent fight. Can promise special procedural rules, efficient discovery, and speedy trials. Dismissal, stay, or transfer of case extremely unlikely. File in Waco and get the patent court you've always dreamed of!" That probably seems bizarre. Still — and startlingly — it accurately portrays what’s happening right now in the Western District of Texas. One judge, appointed to the court less …

Covid, Crisis And Courts, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, Jessica Steinberg

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Our country is in crisis. The inequality and oppression that lies deep in the roots and is woven in the branches of our lives has been laid bare by a virus. Relentless state violence against Black people has pushed protestors to the streets. We hope that the legislative and executive branches will respond with policy change for those who struggle the most among us: rental assistance, affordable housing, quality public education, comprehensive health and mental health care. We fear that the crisis will fade, and we will return to more of the same. Whatever lies on the other side of …

Civil Procedure As A Critical Discussion, Susan Provenzano, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

This Article develops a model for analyzing legal dispute resolution systems as systems for argumentation. Our model meshes two theories of argument conceived centuries apart: contemporary argumentation theory and classical stasis theory. In this Article, we apply the model to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as a proof of concept. Specifically, the model analyzes how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure function as a staged argumentative critical discussion designed to permit judge and jury to rationally resolve litigants’ differences in a reasonable manner. At a high level, this critical discussion has three phases: a confrontation, an (extended) opening, and …

Extraterritoriality As Choice Of Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The proper treatment of provisions that specify the extraterritorial scope of statutes has long been a matter of controversy in Conflict of Laws scholarship. This issue is a matter of considerable contemporary interest because the Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws proposes to address such provisions in a way that diverges from how they were treated in the Second Restatement. The Second Restatement treats such provisions—which I call geographic scope limitations—as choice-of-law rules, meaning, inter alia, that the courts will ordinarily disregard them when the forum’s choice-of-law rules or a contractual choice-of-law clause selects the law of a state as …

The Parable Of The Forms, Samuel L. Bray

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

It might be good for each department to have its own form, or it might be better to have one form for the whole campus. That is an open question. It depends on how different the repair requests are in different departments, and on the value of specialization. It depends on whether we want some complexity about the choice of forms or if we want radical simplicity about the number of forms, with all of the complexity residing within a single form.

So, too, it might be good to have different forms of action. That way, everyone knows upfront …

Rethinking The Conflicts Revolution In Personal Jurisdiction, Jesse M. Cross

Faculty Publications

It is widely acknowledged that, from roughly 1940 to 1970, a revolution occurred in Conflicts of Law. Referred to as the “Conflicts revolution,” this movement remade nearly every legal test in the field. According to conventional wisdom, this revolution rejected the same idea in each instance: namely, that Conflicts tests should be grounded in a theory of sovereignty. Instead, the argument goes, it pivoted the field to pragmatic tests that focus on practicality, fairness, and convenience.

As this Article explains, this conventional wisdom is incorrect. It misunderstands the intellectual revolution that remade the field, and it has generated needless confusion …

Conceptualizing Appealability: Resisting The Supreme Court's Categorical Imperative, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This paper draws on insights from cognitive psychology to understand how courts conceive of categories of orders. Cognitive psychologists have shown that people understand the world using not only "classical categories" based on logical definitions, but also "conceptual categories" based on fuzzier, intuitive concepts of similarity and typicality. This paper approaches appealability as a two-step process-first, categorizing the order and, second, applying the appropriate doctrine. Previous interventions have focused on whether different doctrines use rules or standards at the second step. This paper focuses on the initial categorization step.

This paper makes two contributions to the study of federal appealability. …

The Procedural Foundations Of Intellectual Property Information Regulation, Ira Steven Nathenson

Lewis & Clark Law Review

In the academy, legal scholarship on intellectual property, or “IP,” abounds, most of it focusing on the substance of IP. Far less, however, is written about the procedural aspects of IP. This Article focuses on the often-ignored proce- dural foundations of IP and suggests—at a minimum—that procedure so thoroughly pervades IP that IP’s true foundations might be in procedure rather than substance. Considering “IP as procedure” may further allow us to recog- nize that IP procedures may need to be reconceptualized within a broader field of information regulation procedures.

I. II.

Foreword, Robert Klonoff

Lewis & Clark Law Review

This Symposium is entitled, “Class Actions, Mass Torts, and MDLs: The Next 50 Years.” It consists of a collection of articles by leading scholars and practitioners. All of the articles were presented at a live conference—co-sponsored by the Pound Civil Justice Institute—held at Lewis & Clark Law School on November 1 and 2, 2019.

Searching For A Summary Judgment Equivalent In Quebec Procedural Law, Kathleen Hammond

Dalhousie Law Journal

The summary judgment is a procedural mechanism that is meant to improve the efficiency of civil litigation by allowing a judgment to be delivered in a summary way, and without the need for a full trial. It is seen as an important tool for dealing with the growing problem of access to justice in Canada. Reform to Ontario’s summary judgment rules in 2010, and a liberal interpretation of the Ontario rules in the case of Hryniak v Mauldin, 2014, have led to a greater reliance by parties on summary judgment motions in Ontario. This trend is also apparent in other …

Procedural Law, The Supreme Court, And The Erosion Of Private Rights Enforcement, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Foreword, National Injunctions: What Does The Future Hold?, Suzette Malveaux

Publications

This Foreword is to the 27th Annual Ira C. Rothgerber Jr. Conference, National Injunctions: What Does the Future Hold?, which was hosted by The Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School, on Apr. 5, 2019.

Choice Of Law As Extraterritoriality, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This contribution to Resolving Conflicts on the Law: Essays in Honour of Lea Brilmayer (published under the title Choice of Law as Geographic Scope Limitation) argues that the choice-of-law question commonly addressed by state and foreign courts is conceptually identical to the question addressed by federal courts in determining whether a federal statute applies to a dispute having foreign elements. The latter question is clearly understood today to relate to the statute’s territorial scope. State courts have long conceptualized the choice-of-law question in the same way. Faced with a state statute addressing the issue before it and phrased in …

Machine Learning And The New Civil Procedure, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

There is an increasing emphasis in the legal academy, the media, and the popular consciousness on how artificial intelligence and machine learning will change the foundations of legal practice. In concert with these discussions, a critical question needs to be explored-As computer programming learns to adjust itself without explicit human involvement, does machine learning impact the procedural practice of law? Civil procedure, while sensitive to technology, has been slow to adapt to change. As such, this Article will explore the impact that machine learning will have on procedural jurisprudence in two significant areas-service of process and personal jurisdiction.

The Article …

Better By The Dozen: Bringing Back The Twelve-Person Civil Jury, Steven Gensler, Lee Rosenthal, Patrick Higginbotham

Other Faculty Publications

A jury of 12 resonates through the centuries. Twelve-person juries were a fixture from at least the 14th century until the 1970s. Over 600 years of history is a powerful endorsement. So too are the many social-science studies consistently showing that a 12-person jury makes for a better deliberative process, with more predictable (and fewer outlier) results, by a more diverse group that is a more representative cross-section of the community. And yet, most federal judges today routinely seat civil juries without the full complement of 12 members. Why? Because in 1973 the United States Supreme Court said it was …

Establishing Climate Change Standing: A New Approach, Ian R. Curry

Pace Environmental Law Review

Climate change is one of the thorniest political, legal, and economic issues of our time. Therefore, a new legal approach to the issue is required. This Note proposes a streamlined approach for climate change standing, one that assumes injury in fact and causation for a class of discernible climate change harms. A streamlined approach will enable litigants harmed by climate change to seek redress in court, providing an outlet for redress where there has previously been none. Part II of this Note discusses the constitutional doctrine of standing. It begins with a summary of Article III and the logic behind …

Due Process Supreme Court Appellate Division

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy Supreme Court Appellate Division Second Department

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.