Call for Papers -- AALS Section on Civil Procedure

The Civil Procedure Section of the AALS will present a panel, “The Rising Bar to Federal Courts: Beyond Pleading and Discovery,” at the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.  The panel will run from 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, January 3, 2015, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.  This panel brings together a group of people with different roles and perspectives to provide insights and commentary on the effects of civil procedure rules and doctrine on the current federal court docket.  Confirmed outside speakers include a United States District Court judge, an empirical researcher from the Federal Judicial Center, a plaintiffs’ side attorney, and a lawyer from the defense bar. 

The Section seeks 1-2 academic speakers/papers for further perspective on how developments in rules and case law are acting at the federal trial court level to affect and restrict the nature of the court docket.  While tremendous attention has been given to Twombly/Iqbal and discovery rules, our panel seeks to go beyond these two “usual suspects” to focus on other developments in doctrine and rulemaking that also alter the potential for court access, including, but not limited to, issues around personal jurisdiction, mandatory ADR, transnational litigation, and class actions.    

The selected author(s) will present their papers at the AALS annual meeting in January 2015 in Washington, D.C.  Neither the AALS nor the Section is able to provide travel funding.  The selected authors and all panelists will have the opportunity to publish their papers in the Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development (St. John’s Law School), subject to final approval by the journal editors. 

All draft papers must be submitted by Tuesday, September 2, 2014.  Please send submissions to Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Chair of the Section on Civil Procedure, by email to [email protected].  Respondents will be notified of the Section’s decision by the end of September.