Civil Procedure Commons^™

Dual Purposes Of A Plea Bargaining Simulation: Pedagogical Skills Training And Controlled Data Collection Experiment About Crime Victim’S Access To Justice Via Counsel, Tung Yin

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Mile V. Kirkbrae Country Club, 331 A.3d 1003 (R.I. 2025)., Taylor Payne

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreign States, Private Proxies, And “Discretionary” Torts On U.S. Soil, George K. Foster

Indiana Law Journal

The tortious act exception to sovereign immunity offers a vital path for tort victims to seek redress against foreign states for harms committed on U.S. soil. Yet some courts have narrowed the exception in troubling ways when rejecting claims alleging clergy abuse cover-ups, cyberattacks, and other serious misconduct. Some have held that the exception applies only to torts committed by state officials and employees, excluding private actors even when acting under state direction. Others have deemed conduct “discretionary”—and therefore immune—even when it patently violated U.S. law or contractual obligations. This Article challenges both readings. Drawing on legislative history, common law, …

Misinformation And The Jury, Gustavo Ribeiro

Indiana Law Journal

This Article bridges critical gaps between the growing body of social science research on misinformation and the persistent challenges jurors face in evaluating potentially unreliable evidence in courtrooms. Misinformation—a pervasive issue undermining decision-making in democratic societies—mirrors the difficulties jurors encounter in distinguishing truth from falsehood amid compelling but unreliable evidence. The consequences of such challenges are dire: wrongful convictions, racial disparities, and the erosion of public trust in the legal system.

This Article is the first piece of legal scholarship to provide a comprehensive discussion of current research on the psychological mechanisms underlying susceptibility to misinformation—such as the illusory truth …

Peeking Inside The Black Box: Discovery In Fair Housing Act Cases Arising From Ai Decision Making, Jessica Mahon Scoles

Faculty Scholarship

In today’s real estate market, more housing decisions are being automated. If artificial intelligence renders a biased decision, will the person impacted have any legal recourse? Commentators have expressed concern that the proprietary nature of AI will allow defendants in discrimination lawsuits to avoid discovery, effectively shielding their decision making from judicial scrutiny. This article examines whether AI and algorithm-related information is the discovery black box that some fear it to be.

Addressing the issue in the context of Fair Housing Act (FHA) litigation, the article argues that concerns about access to AI and algorithm-related discovery are overstated. In real …

How To Apply Hertz Corp. V. Friend In The Age Of Remote Work, John Andrikos

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The widespread adoption of remote work in the United States has strained the workability of the nerve center test of Hertz Corp. v. Friend. This comment analyzes how federal courts have applied the nerve center test to fact patterns involving partially or fully remote corporations. Further, it proposes a novel solution to this jurisdictional problem: the Key Person Test.

Kazarian V. New London Cnty. Mut. Ins. Co., 331 A.3d 984 (R.I. 2025)., Nicole Aprile

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Clinton V. Babcock, 332 A.3d 167 (R.I. 2025)., Greta Johnson

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Access Denied: The Injustice Of Plra Exhaustion, Rachel Kincaid

Marquette Law Review

Law students learn to “think like a lawyer” by studying appellate decisions that contain extensive reasoning and result from vigorous advocacy by lawyers on both sides. These well-reasoned decisions allow students to learn how to distill legal rules from judicial opinions: to focus on the rationale behind a court’s decision so that they might be able to predict how the court would deal with a different factual scenario. But this focus on extensively reasoned and argued appellate court opinions obscures the access-to-justice crisis plaguing our legal systems; most people cannot even afford to pay a lawyer to represent them, let …

Who Makes The Jury? Demographics And Decision-Making In The Jury Process., Ana B. Pons

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Within the American judicial system, juries have played a central role in promoting representation and fairness in the courtroom. However, limited information exists on whether prosecutorial decisions during jury selection, jury composition, or jury behavior differ based on the sex, race/ethnicity, type of case, political ideology, or geographic location of potential jurors. Following PRISMA guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes 48 peer-reviewed articles published between the 1940s and 2026 to examine whether prosecutorial decision-making and jury outcomes vary based on the sex, race/ethnicity, type of case, political ideology, or geographic location of potential jurors. Findings indicated that men are disproportionately selected …

Reconstituting A Constitution, And A Republic: The Architecture Of Authoritarian Rule, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A constitution can be remade without tearing it down, or even changing a single word. It is done by law. It is being done now—by the Supreme Court.

In each case, real people win, real people lose, real people suffer. Outcomes matter. But across the span of cases, the Court is tearing down our constitutional order of divided power—taking authority from the courts below, from Congress, the agencies, the states, and us, the people—and building a structure of unchecked power in itself. Procedure and remedies are constitutive of the judicial power. In a time of authoritarian threat, they are the …

The Civil Justice Business, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Our civil justice system rests on foundational commitments: to make rights real for those the law protects, whatever their station; to hold wrongdoers accountable, whatever their power; and to deter misconduct in a system that depends heavily on private enforcement. We put great faith in these values.

Civil justice, for all its lofty goals, is also a business. Attorneys and liability insurers have long held economic stakes in litigation, bounded by their own professional and regulatory norms. Now, a new litigation finance industry has arisen: outside investors supply equity capital—divorced from legal representation and liability management—and take returns directly from …

Much Ado About Misjoinder: An Alternative To Fraudulent Misjoinder To Preserve Defendants’ Right To Removal In Pharmaceutical And Medical Device Products Liability Cases, Alexander Flaum

Cardozo Law Review

Unresolved questions surrounding the contours of the fraudulent misjoinder doctrine have understandably led to reluctance by courts to adopt it, despite its utility in protecting defendants’ access to federal court. This is particularly troubling in the context of pharmaceutical and medical device products liability cases. It is common in these actions for plaintiffs, whose only connection is having consumed a particular pharmaceutical product at different points in time and for different durations, to strategically join in one action to defeat complete diversity and prevent removal to federal court. However, federal courts are not powerless to prevent such procedural gamesmanship. By …

Rethinking Courtroom Presence In The Virtual Era, Jenia Iontcheva Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Technological innovation has made virtual appearances by criminal defendants increasingly common. These appearances have advanced efficiency but also raised questions about the scope of both the right and the duty of defendants to be physically present in court. Should judges, for example, be allowed to hold virtual arraignments, even if a defendant wishes to appear in person? Can defendants opt for virtual appearances at will? While courts are beginning to address these questions, they have yet to develop a coherent framework to evaluate when virtual appearances are constitutional and appropriate. This Article seeks to contribute to this project by examining …

Qui Tam Legislation And Article Ii: State Constitutional Precursors To The “Take Care” Clause, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

Anglo-American legislation since the fourteenth century has often authorized “popular” or “qui tam” enforcement, in which an uninjured “common informer” litigates to collect a forfeiture for violation of a statute. Popular enforcement has become considerably less common than in earlier centuries, but remains important because of the qui tam provisions of the federal False Claims Act (FCA). In Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States ex rel. Stevens, the Supreme Court rejected an Article III standing challenge to qui tam litigation, concluding that the long history of popular enforcement means qui tam suits present cognizable “cases and controversies of …

Michael Scott Is Not A Juror: The Limits Of Ai In Simulating Human Judgment, Sean Harrington, Hayley Stillwell

Faculty Articles

Can AI replace human jurors? More specifically, can large language models predict how jurors interpret evidence and reach decisions based on legally salient facts and demographic characteristics? As legal scholars and practitioners increasingly explore AI-generated jury simulations, this Article offers the first empirical test of whether models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini can faithfully replicate juror reasoning. The answer, for now, is no. Across a series of mock trial scenarios involving redacted confessions, GPT- 4, Claude, and Gemini repeatedly failed to replicate how real jurors interpret evidence or exercise judgment. Their errors were not random, but systematic. Hidden prompts, built-in …

It’S (Not All) Personal: Civil Litigation And The Values Of Rights Of Action, Hanoch Dagan, Avihay Dorfman, Issi Rosen-Zvi

American University Law Review

Existing approaches to civil litigation, both regarding its theoretical underpinnings and its practical instantiations, take diametrically opposing perspectives on the value of personal rights of action. Some view them as inviolable and thus vehemently oppose any mandatory arbitration clauses and treat class actions as presumptively dubious. Others have no principled objection to either, as they perceive personal rights of action as mere technologies that are painlessly dispensable if the substantive values underlying the claim at hand can be realized more effectively through a more efficient mechanism.

In this Article, we reject both of these ‘all or nothing’ approaches and offer …

Tyranny Of A Feather: Asymmetry In Civil Burdens Of Proof, Thomas O. Main

American University Law Review

Civil litigation suffers from a paradox that is at once self-evident, unfair, and overlooked: the trial process promises equality between plaintiffs and defendants under the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, even as the pretrial process is skewed dramatically in defendants’ favor. At trial a plaintiff needs only “50% plus a feather” to tip the scales and prevail, reflecting a commitment to equal treatment of the parties. Pretrial, however, the playing field tilts steeply: plaintiffs alone must navigate a procedural gauntlet of motions that impose pleading and production burdens for which defendants face no equivalent. This entrenched asymmetry in pretrial practice has become so …

Politics As Usual: Racial Pay Inequity And The Illusion Of Inclusion In The Rise And Fall Of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, And Accessibility Executive Orders, Francois C. Melville

West Chester University Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects

This research examines pressing moral policy questions of our time: who determines when the United States of America has fulfilled its broken promise of equality for all, and what constitutes an appropriate measure of reparative justice. It interrogates why the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Executive Orders (EOs) implemented across presidential administrations, intended to advance social equity, were grounded in conflict and symbolic gestures rather than scientifically evidenced issues such as wage inequality directly linked to upward career mobility. Race conscious policy generates cultural clashes centered on the perception that gains made by Black and Brown Americans come at the …

When The Internet Attacks, Craig Cowie

Cardozo Law Review

Courts have struggled with applying personal jurisdiction in cases involving intentional torts where the defendants act outside the forum, and the problem is particularly apparent and acute when the defendants use the internet to commit the tort. For example, is there jurisdiction when a defendant doxxes someone and calls for violence? What if they leave a bad Yelp review? Or tweet a defamatory statement? Courts have used many tests for determining whether personal jurisdiction is appropriate in these situations, but there has been relatively little recent scholarship on whether these tests are appropriate for analyzing personal jurisdiction in these contexts. …