Summary Judgment in Employment Discrimination Cases

Theodore Eisenberg (Cornell) and Charlotte Lanvers (Disability Rights Educ. & Defense Fund) have just posted on SSRN their empirical study of the effect of the Supreme Court's 1986 summary judgment trilogy on cases in two federal districts.  Their thesis was that the 1986 trilogy, which relaxed the standard for granting summary judgment, would increase the summary judgment rate.  Their data showed little or no such increase except in employment discrimination cases.  In one district -- the Northern District of Georgia -- the summary judgment rate for employment discrimination cases doubled after the 1986 trilogy.

See Summary Judgment Rates Over Time, Across Case Categories, and Across Districts: An Empirical Study of Three Large Federal Districts.

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