Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog

Steinman on Bayefsky on Respect, Remedies & Article III

Today on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is my essay, Standing for Something More: Respect and Article III. I review a recent article by Rachel Bayefsky, Remedies and Respect: Rethinking the Role of Federal Judicial Relief, 109 Geo. L.J. 1263 (2021).

 

 

 

Appellate Courts and Civil Juries

The final version of my article, Appellate Courts and Civil Juries, 2021 Wisconsin L. Rev. 1, is now posted. It tackles the question of what standard of review appellate courts should use for findings made by civil juries. There’s a fair amount of confusion on this issue, because some appellate courts have conflated it with the framework for choosing the standard of appellate review for rulings by lower court judges. (The confusion is not helped by the extent to which the often elusive distinction between “law” and “fact” plays a role.)

This is also an issue that the Supreme Court is considering right now in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., a $9 billion lawsuit about Google’s use of Java programming code to develop its Android operating system. SCOTUS issued a specific order asking the parties to brief the appropriate standard of review for the jury’s verdict in favor of Google on its fair use defense. The Google case was argued at the beginning of this Term but is still awaiting a decision—here are some of my thoughts on the case from back in October after the oral argument: SCOTUS, Google v. Oracle, and Appellate Review of Civil Jury Verdicts.

I enjoyed working on this piece, and I hope folks find it helpful. Special thanks to the great editors at the Wisconsin Law Review, who did a fantastic and timely job getting the article finalized—maybe even in time for SCOTUS to read it! Here’s the full abstract:

In federal civil litigation, decisionmaking 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 simply by characterizing a particular issue as legal rather than factual. But this approach misperceives the approach demanded by Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which permits judicial override of a jury's verdict only when "a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis" to reach such a verdict.

Rule 50's reasonable-jury standard does not permit de novo review of a jury's verdict on a particular issue. Rather, it requires deference to the jury's conclusion on that issue unless the reviewing court can explain why principles of substantive law or other aspects of the trial record render that verdict unreasonable. This deferential standard of review faithfully implements the text and structure of the Federal Rules and respects the jury's role in our federal system. Yet, it also preserves appellate courts' ability to provide meaningful clarification that will guide future decisionmakers.

 

 

 

Rethinking Standards of Appellate Review

I wanted to share a link to my recent article, Rethinking Standards of Appellate Review, 96 Ind. L.J. 1 (2020), which is now in print and available on SSRN. The piece is an effort to make sense of a topic that has been an area of frequent interest for the Supreme Court: For any given issue that a trial court might decide, should the appellate court review the lower court’s ruling de novo? Or should it review the ruling deferentially, say, for clear error or abuse of discretion? (In recent years the Court has granted cert to choose the standard of appellate review for a wide array of issues, ranging from a child’s habitual residence under the Hague Convention, to a creditor’s insider status under federal bankruptcy law, to whether to enforce an EEOC subpoena, to whether to award attorney fees in a patent case.)

The article digs into the how and why of the Court’s framework for making this choice, and I ultimately argue that we should scrap the enterprise of assigning distinct standards of appellate review on an issue-by-issue basis. It’s not because the concerns that animate the Court’s approach are unimportant. Rather, it’s because the purposes of appellate review—principally, error correction and law clarification—are better served by a uniform template for review that informs the substantive merits of every appellate decision. As I put it in the abstract:

The error-correction role of appellate courts would be optimized by a unified inquiry into whether the appellate court’s likelihood of reaching the correct decision is higher than the trial court’s. This new standard would consider both general institutional advantages (such as the trial court’s superior ability to assess witness credibility) and case-specific indicia of correctness (such as the appellate court’s level of confidence or particular strengths or weaknesses in the trial court’s analysis). This inquiry can be joined with the Supreme Court’s long-standing view that appellate courts may always correct legal errors de novo, regardless of the broader standard of review that applies to a particular issue. That power to correct legal errors, combined with the ability to identify conditions that increase or decrease the likelihood that a court’s decision on a particular issue is correct, would enhance the law-clarification function of appellate decisions.

I touch on other issues as well, including the expenditure of appellate court energy, appellate review of constitutional issues and so-called “legislative facts,” the possibility of asymmetric appellate review, and what even constitutes a “legal error” anyway? This was a fun piece to write (notwithstanding the math in it), and I had a great experience working with the editors in Bloomington during a very unusual time. Thanks again!

 

 

 

 

 

SCOTUS, Google v. Oracle, and Appellate Review of Civil Jury Verdicts

The Supreme Court’s first batch of oral arguments this Term included Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., a high-profile and high-stakes ($9 billion) lawsuit about Google’s use of Java programming code to develop its Android operating system. Google prevailed after a jury trial, but the Federal Circuit reversed. Google’s Supreme Court cert petition initially presented two questions: (1) whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found at trial, Google’s use of Oracle’s software interface constituted fair use for purposes of copyright law. That second question, however, prompted the Court to ask its own question: what was “the appropriate standard of review” for the jury’s fair use verdict?

I’ve written a piece that examines this standard of review issue, Appellate Courts and Civil Juries, 2021 Wisconsin L. Rev. 1 (forthcoming). There’s a lot more detail in the full article, but I wanted to highlight a few points in the wake of the recent oral argument—during which there were several questions about the standard of review.

Continue reading

Steinman on Notice Pleading in Exile

I just posted to SSRN my article, Notice Pleading in Exile, 41 Cardozo L. Rev. 1057 (2020). Here’s the abstract:

According to the conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal discarded notice pleading in favor of plausibility pleading. This Article—part of a symposium commemorating the Iqbal decision’s tenth anniversary—highlights decisions during those ten years that have continued to endorse notice pleading despite Iqbal. It also argues that those decisions reflect the best way to read the Iqbal decision. Although Iqbal is a troubling decision in many respects, it can be implemented consistently with the notice-pleading framework that the original drafters of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure had in mind.

Shout out to the Cardozo Law School, the Cardozo Law Review, and The Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy for hosting such an excellent symposium last spring. I’ll post links to all of the symposium pieces once they’re available.

 

Access to Justice, Rationality, and Personal Jurisdiction

My recent article, Access to Justice, Rationality, and Personal Jurisdiction, 71 Vand. L. Rev. 1401 (2018), is now up on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:

After more than twenty years of silence, the Supreme Court has addressed personal jurisdiction six times over the last six Terms. This Article examines the Court’s recent decisions in terms of their effect on access to justice and the enforcement of substantive law. The Court’s new case law has unquestionably made it harder to establish general jurisdiction—that is, the kind of jurisdiction that requires no affiliation at all between the forum state and the litigation. Although this shift has been justifiably criticized, meaningful access and enforcement can be preserved through other aspects of the jurisdictional framework, namely (1) the basic level of minimum contacts required for specific jurisdiction, and (2) the test for determining whether a case can proceed on a specific jurisdiction theory rather than having to satisfy the newly restrictive general jurisdiction standard.

This Article begins with a typology that identifies three situations where personal jurisdiction is most likely to threaten access to justice: the home-state scenario, the safety-net scenario, and the aggregation scenario. It then explains why the Court’s recent decisions support an approach to minimum contacts that will—in most cases—permit a plaintiff who is injured in his or her home state to file suit there. Even beyond the home-state scenario, a case should be evaluated under the more lenient specific jurisdiction standard as long as there is a rational basis for the forum to adjudicate the availability of judicial remedies in that particular case. This rationality standard coheres with the Court’s approach to other areas of law governing the permissible reach of a state’s sovereign power. And it can permit jurisdiction when other courts are inadequate or unavailable (the safety-net scenario) and when proceeding in a single forum is necessary for effective adjudication of claims arising from a common course of conduct (the aggregation scenario).

Thanks again to the editors at the Vanderbilt Law Review for their great work on the piece!

Marks, Hughes, and Biconditional Rules

The final version of my essay Nonmajority Opinions and Biconditional Rules, 128 Yale L.J. F. 1 (2018), is out. Here’s the abstract:

In Hughes v. United States, the Supreme Court will revisit a thorny question: how to determine the precedential effect of decisions with no majority opinion. For four decades, the clearest instruction from the Court has been the rule from Marks v. United States: the Court’s holding is “the position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.” The Marks rule raises particular concerns, however, when it is applied to biconditional rules. Biconditionals are distinctive in that they set a standard that dictates both success and failure for a given issue. More formulaically, they combine an if-then proposition (If A, then B) with its inverse (If Not-A, then Not-B).

Appellate courts on both sides of the circuit split that prompted the grant of certiorari in Hughes have overlooked the special features of biconditional rules. If the Supreme Court makes the same mistake, it could adopt a misguided approach that would unjustifiably create binding law without a sufficient consensus among the Justices involved in the precedent-setting case. This Essay identifies these concerns and proposes ways to apply Marks coherently to non-majority opinions that endorse biconditional rules.

The Supreme Court hears oral argument in Hughes tomorrow (3/27).

 

Hughes v. United States: SCOTUS to address the binding effect of non-majority opinions

At the end of this month, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Hughes v. United States. One of the issues the Court will address is how to identify the holding of a decision that lacks a majority opinion. I’ve posted on SSRN a draft of my essay, Non-Majority Opinions and Biconditional Rules, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal Forum, that examines a particularly challenging aspect of this puzzle. Here’s the abstract:

In Hughes v. United States, the Supreme Court will revisit a thorny question: how to determine the precedential effect of decisions with no majority opinion. For four decades, the clearest instruction from the Court has been the rule from Marks v. United States: the Court’s holding is “the position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.” The Marks rule raises particular concerns, however, when it is applied to biconditional rules. Biconditionals are distinctive in that they set a standard that dictates both success and failure for a given issue. More formulaically, they combine an if-then proposition (If A, then B) with its inverse (If Not-A, then Not-B).

Appellate courts on both sides of the circuit split that prompted the grant of certiorari in Hughes have overlooked the special features of biconditional rules. If the Supreme Court makes the same mistake, it could adopt a misguided approach that would unjustifiably create binding law without a sufficient consensus among the Justices involved in the precedent-setting case. This Essay identifies these concerns and proposes ways to coherently apply Marks to non-majority opinions that endorse biconditional rules.

The particular decision at issue in Hughes is Freeman v. United States, where the Court split 4-1-4 regarding when certain defendants are eligible to seek a sentence reduction based on a retroactive lowering of the sentencing guidelines. The government in Hughes is arguing: (1) a smaller set of defendants are eligible to seek a sentence reduction under Justice Sotomayor’s concurring opinion in Freeman than under Justice Kennedy’s plurality opinion in Freeman; (2) therefore, the Freeman concurrence is the “narrowest” and is binding under the Marks rule; and (3) the defendant in Hughes is ineligible for a sentence reduction under the Freeman concurrence’s test.

The parties in Hughes disagree about Point #1 because of some uncertainty regarding the scope of the test endorsed by the Freeman plurality. But even if the government is correct on Point #1, there’s a fundamental flaw in the analysis of which opinion is narrowest. Put simply: if the Freeman concurrence would deem a narrower universe of defendants to be eligible, then it would necessarily deem a broader universe of defendants to be ineligible. This is precisely the sort of problem that can arise when applying Marks to biconditional rules. The only plausible way for the Freeman concurrence to be the Court’s complete holding is to count the views of dissenting Justices—an approach that the Supreme Court has never endorsed and that is contrary to the prevailing understanding of Marks.

There’s been a lot of great work on the Marks rule lately, including recent articles by Richard Re and Ryan Williams. It will be very interesting to see how the Court handles these questions.

 

 

 

Case Law

I’ve just posted my recent article, Case Law, 97 B.U. L. Rev. 1947 (2017). Here’s the abstract:

Although case law plays a crucial role in the American legal system, surprisingly little consensus exists on how to determine the “law” that any given “case” generates. Lawyers, judges, and scholars regularly note the difference between holdings and dicta and between necessary and unnecessary parts of a precedent-setting decision, but such concepts have eluded coherent application in practice. There remains considerable uncertainty about which aspects of a judicial decision impose prospective legal obligations as a matter of stare decisis and to what extent.

This Article develops a counterintuitive, but productive, way to conceptualize case law: the lawmaking content of a judicial decision should be only those decisional rules that the court states explicitly and that can be framed in the form (If P, then Q). Future courts would not, however, be required to reconcile their decisions with other findings, conclusions, or reasons that the precedent-setting court offers. Although these other elements of a judicial decision could remain influential, they would not impose binding obligations as a matter of hierarchical stare decisis.

This rule-centered approach would allow judicial decisions to clarify the law when such clarifying rules are justified and desirable, but otherwise leave the slate clean for courts to confront unresolved questions in future cases with the full participation of future litigants. As to the concern that judicially announced rules may sweep too broadly, this Article’s approach would leave future courts free to develop distinguishing rules in a way that serves many of the same purposes as the conventional understanding of how cases may be distinguished, but that reduces the risk of disingenuous distinctions, enhances rather than muddies case law’s clarifying benefits, and avoids conceptual and definitional problems inherent in the current approach. This Article’s framework also helps to resolve a host of other difficult puzzles relating to judicial decision-making, including the controversy surrounding unpublished opinions, the stare decisis effect of decisions that lack a majority opinion, and how to identify and resolve tensions within case law.

Thanks once again to the editors at the Boston University Law Review and to my colleagues who gave me such great comments and suggestions.

 

 

Steinman on Delaney on Strategic Avoidance

Now running on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is my essay, Comparative Avoidance. I review Erin Delaney’s recent article, Analyzing Avoidance: Judicial Strategy in Comparative Perspective, 66 Duke L.J. 1 (2016).

 

 

 

Third Circuit Decision on Standing, Pleading, and NSA Surveillance

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued its decision in Schuchardt v. President of the United States (3d Cir. No. 15-3491). The plaintiff filed a lawsuit challenging NSA surveillance activities, but the district court dismissed for lack of standing. The Third Circuit reversed, with an opinion that begins:

This appeal involves a constitutional challenge to an electronic surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Elliott Schuchardt appeals an order of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania dismissing his civil action for lack of jurisdiction. The District Court held that Schuchardt lacked standing to sue because he failed to plead facts from which one might reasonably infer that his own communications had been seized by the federal government. Because we hold that, at least as a facial matter, Schuchardt’s second amended complaint plausibly stated an injury in fact personal to him, we will vacate the District Court’s order and remand.

The court goes on to discuss the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, as well as the general pleading standard set forth in Twombly and Iqbal.

Download Schuchardt (3d Cir)

It’s worth noting that a case similar to Schuchardt is currently pending in the Fourth Circuit. Wikimedia Foundation  v. NSA (4th Cir. No. 15-2560) is scheduled for oral argument in December. If readers are interested, below is a link to an amicus brief in the Wikimedia case that I filed on behalf of various civil procedure and federal courts professors:

Download Wikimedia v NSA (4th Cir) Law Professor Amicus Brief

 

 

 

 

 

 

The End of an Era? Federal Civil Procedure After the 2015 Amendments

My article on the 2015 amendments to the FRCPs is now in print. It’s The End of an Era? Federal Civil Procedure After the 2015 Amendments, 66 Emory L.J. 1 (2016). Here’s the abstract:

The recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were the most controversial in decades. The biggest criticisms concerned pleading standards and access to discovery. Many feared that the amendments would undermine the simplified, merits-driven approach that the original drafters of the Federal Rules envisioned and would weaken access to justice and the enforcement of substantive rights and obligations.

This Article argues that the amendments that came into effect on December 1, 2015, do not mandate a more restrictive approach to pleading or discovery. Although there was legitimate cause for alarm given the advisory committee’s earlier proposals and supporting documents, the final amendments — in light of their text, structure, and accompanying advisory committee notes — should be interpreted to preserve notice pleading and a robust discovery process. The more significant lesson of the 2015 amendments, therefore, may be to confirm the view that the amendment mechanism of the Rules Enabling Act is unlikely to generate consequential changes to the Federal Rules (for better or for worse). The process leading to the 2015 amendments was teed up almost perfectly for opponents of meaningful access and enforcement to make real, detrimental changes to federal pleading and discovery standards. Yet the final amendments ultimately did not do so.

Accordingly, the key battleground following the 2015 amendments will be in the federal courts themselves, as judges are called upon to interpret and apply the rules in particular cases. No doubt aware of this fact, Chief Justice Roberts has taken various steps to spin the recent amendments as making more significant changes than they actually do. These post-amendment moves are not legally authoritative and do not modify the law of civil procedure. But the Chief Justice and his allies may win the day if they are able to dominate the gestalt surrounding the 2015 amendments in a way that persuades lower court judges to take a more restrictive approach. Properly interpreted, the 2015 amendments do not support the Chief’s narrative. Recognizing this will be crucial for ensuring access and enforcement going forward.

 

 

 

 

The Rise and Fall of Plausibility Pleading?

My latest article, The Rise and Fall of Plausibility Pleading?, has just been published in the Vanderbilt Law Review. It builds on some of my earlier work on pleading (here and here), focusing on the Supreme Court’s post-Iqbal decisions on pleading standards (e.g., Johnson v. City of Shelby; Wood v. Moss; Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Siracusano). Here’s the abstract:

The Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and its 2009 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal unleashed a torrent of scholarly reaction. Commentators charged these decisions with adopting a new pleading regime, "plausibility pleading," that upended the notice-pleading approach that had long prevailed in federal court. Whether a complaint could survive a motion to dismiss — it was argued — now depends on whether the court found the complaint plausible, allowing courts to second-guess a complaint’s allegations without any opportunity for discovery or consideration of actual evidence. Lower courts began to cite Twombly and Iqbal at a remarkably high rate, and empirical work revealed their effect on both dismissal rates and litigant behavior.

Although Twombly and Iqbal were troubling on many levels, the rise of a newly restrictive form of plausibility pleading was not inevitable. There was — and still is — a path forward that would retain the notice-pleading approach set forth in the text of the Federal Rules themselves and confirmed by pre-Twombly case law. This Article describes this reading of Twombly and Iqbal, and explains how more recent Supreme Court pleading decisions are consistent with this understanding. It is crucial, however, that these post-Iqbal decisions and the approach to pleading they reflect receive the same attention that accompanied Twombly, Iqbal, and the rise of plausibility pleading. Otherwise the narrative that Twombly and Iqbal compel a more restrictive pleading standard may become further entrenched, compounding the adverse effects of those problematic decisions.

 

 

Atlantic Marine, Forum-Selection Clauses & Erie

I started off this month talking about Erie, so here’s another Erie post to bring things full circle. Back in the fall, I was glad to participate in the Hastings Law Journal’s symposium on last Term’s SCOTUS decision in Atlantic Marine Construction Co. v. United States District Court. Atlantic Marine was a unanimous decision—authored by Justice Alito—on how and when to enforce forum-selection clauses in federal court. It’s a set of issues that only a civil procedure professor could love, and if you teach civil procedure Atlantic Marine may already be on your syllabus.

The symposium issue is now out. You can find links to all of the articles here, including contributions by Andrew Bradt, Kevin Clermont, Scott Dodson, Robin Effron, Linda Mullenix, Steve Sachs, and Brad Shannon. My piece is Atlantic Marine Through the Lens of Erie, and here’s the abstract:

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Atlantic Marine clarified several things about the enforcement of forum-selection clauses in federal court. But something important was missing from Justice Alito’s opinion — the Erie doctrine. Erie, of course, helps to determine the applicability of state law in federal court, and state law potentially has a lot to say about contractual forum-selection clauses. Indeed, Erie was front and center the last time the Court confronted the enforcement of forum-selection clauses in federal court, when it decided Stewart Organization v. Ricoh a quarter century ago. 

This article for the Hastings Law Journal’s symposium on Atlantic Marine examines that decision through the lens of Erie, and explores the role that Erie and state law should play in the Atlantic Marine framework. Atlantic Marine may appear at first glance to mandate virtually unflinching enforcement of forum-selection clauses. But Justice Alito’s approach in Atlantic Marine applies only when the forum-selection clause is “contractually valid.” Properly understood, Erie requires federal courts to look to state law to decide this question — at least in diversity cases. To allow federal courts to disregard state law in applying Atlantic Marine would raise several troubling Erie concerns: geographic relocation contrary to what would occur in state court; changing the substantive law that would govern the ultimate merits of the litigation in state court; and overriding state contract law and contractual remedies via the sort of federal common law that Erie forbids.

My thanks once again to the students, organizers, and panelists, as well as to the DJ who was able to find some Rod Stewart tracks without any advance notice. I learned a lot and had a great time.

[Cross-posted at PrawfsBlawg]

 

Ohio Supreme Court Decision on Standing & Jurisdiction

I have a guest post over at Legally Speaking Ohio about an interesting Ohio Supreme Court case on standing and jurisdiction. The decision is Bank of America v. Kuchta, which Marianna Bettman aptly called “a field day for civil procedure geeks.”

 

 

Steinman on Larsen on Factual Precedents

Now running on the Courts Law section of JOTWELL is my essay, Judicial Fact Making. I review Allison Orr Larsen’s article, Factual Precedents, 162 U. Pa. L. Rev. 59 (2013).

 

To Say What The Law Is

The NBA starts its all-star break today. The U.S. Supreme Court is on break as well, and it too is right at the midpoint of the season. The Term has already been quite active on the civil procedure and federal courts front, with decisions on personal jurisdiction, Younger abstention, transfer of venue, the Class Action Fairness Act, and appellate jurisdiction. And there’s more on the horizon:

• Walden v. Fiore (venue and personal jurisdiction);
• Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund (class actions);
• Wood v. Moss (on qualified immunity and, perhaps, pleading standards more generally);
• Highmark v. Allcare and Octane Fitness v. Icon Health (two cases on awarding attorneys’ fees in patent cases);
• Petrella v. MGM (laches in civil copyright claims)
• Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v. Arkison (Article III and bankruptcy proceedings);
• UBS Financial Services v. Union de Empleados de Muelles (Rule 23.1’s pre-suit demand requirement)

Why do we pay so much attention to these cases? For most court-watchers, it’s not because there is a strong interest in whether a Massachusetts gravel supply company underpaid its benefit fund obligations. Rather, it’s because of what the Supreme Court’s decisions mean going forward. Because of stare decisis, judicial decisions can prospectively bind future courts just as an Act of Congress or a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure can. In many areas of procedure, Supreme Court decisions may be the most significant lawmaking acts we’re going to see.

With that in mind, I thought I would share a link to my recent article, To Say What the Law Is: Rules, Results, and the Dangers of Inferential Stare Decisis, 99 Virginia L. Rev. 1737 (2013). The article was driven in part by the struggle to figure out the precedential effect of controversial Supreme Court decisions like Wal-Mart and Iqbal. But I try to tackle more generally the question of what parts of a judicial decision should actually create binding law, and in what way. Here’s the abstract: 

Judicial decisions do more than resolve disputes. They are also crucial sources of prospective law, because stare decisis obligates future courts to follow those decisions. Yet there remains tremendous uncertainty about how we identify a judicial decision’s lawmaking content. Does stare decisis require future courts to follow the rules stated in a precedent-setting opinion? Or must future courts merely reconcile their decisions with the ultimate result of the precedent-setting case? Although it is widely assumed that a rule-based approach puts greater constraints on future courts, two recent Supreme Court decisions — Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes and Ashcroft v. Iqbal — turn this conventional wisdom on its head. In both cases, what the Court said about the governing rules was not inherently controversial, and would leave courts with considerable flexibility going forward. But what the Court did in applying those rules — the ultimate results in Wal-Mart and Iqbal — could be very destabilizing if stare decisis mandates consistency with those results in future cases.

This article assesses competing approaches to stare decisis, and argues that the lawmaking content of a judicial decision should be only the rules that the court states in deciding the case. While the end result may be instructive, enlightening, or valuable for any number of reasons, it should not create binding obligations on future courts as a matter of stare decisis. A rules-only approach is an unconventional position (even those who favor rule-based stare decisis typically presume that consistency with results is also required). But it strikes the optimal balance. To infer binding obligations from results alone creates a risk that — as with Wal-Mart and Iqbal — future courts will be forced to intuit more radical legal changes than the precedent-setting court actually embraced. Put simply, a judicial decision should create binding law only to the extent that it says what the law is. Unless and until new legal rules are declared (whether by the judiciary in later cases or by legislation), courts should be free to operate within the existing legal framework, without being required to reconcile their decisions with the mere results of earlier ones.

Thanks again to the editors at the Virginia Law Review, who did a fantastic job on the article, and to the many colleagues who gave me such terrific feedback and suggestions. 

 

Joint Comment on the Proposed FRCP Amendments

This week, some colleagues and I submitted a joint comment opposing the recently proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Our letter addresses the proposals regarding the scope of discovery as defined by Rule 26(b)(1), the reduced presumptive limits on discovery devices, and the elimination of Rule 84 and the Forms. From the introduction: 

In our judgment, two key issues bear close consideration by the Committee as it considers how to proceed: (1) What problem does the Committee seek to solve? (2) On balance, how likely is it that the proposed amendments will improve the status quo? As in 1993 and 2000, the Committee is focused on addressing a perceived problem of excessive discovery costs. In supporting the current proposed amendments, the Committee recognizes that empirical data show no widespread problem, but nevertheless hopes that new across-the-board limits on discovery will lessen discovery costs in the small number of complex, contentious, high stakes cases where costs are high. The Committee is correct about the data: most critically, the Federal Judicial Center’s (“FJC”) 2009 closed-case study shows that in almost all cases discovery costs are modest and proportionate to stakes. As in 1993 and in 2000, evidence of system-wide, cost-multiplying abuse does not exist, and the proposed amendments are not designed to address the small subset of problematic cases that appear to be driving the Rule changes. We anticipate that, as with past Rule changes, untargeted amendments will fail to eliminate complaints about the small segment of high-cost litigation that elicits headlines about litigation gone wild; instead they will create unnecessary barriers to relief in meritorious cases, waste judicial resources, and drive up the cost of civil justice. The amendments are unnecessary, unwarranted, and counterproductive.*** In our view, the amendments are likely to spawn confusion and create incentives for wasteful discovery disputes. Even more troubling, by increasing costs and decreasing information flow, the proposed amendments are likely to undermine meaningful access to the courts and to impede enforcement of federal- and state-recognized substantive rights.

The comment was submitted on behalf of myself, Helen Hershkoff (NYU), Lonny Hoffman (Houston), Alexander Reinert (Cardozo), Elizabeth Schneider (Brooklyn), and David Shapiro (Harvard).

 

Erie and Magic Words

Now available on the Florida Law Review Forum is my short piece, Magic Words and the Erie Doctrine. It’s a response to a recent article by Sergio Campos, Erie as a Choice of Enforcement Defaults.

It’s a quick read at <3 pages, where “<3” actually means “less than 3” as opposed to a sideways emoticon heart.

--A

Is today's cert grant in Daimler v. Bauman a follow-up to Kiobel, or a follow-up to Goodyear?

Some early blog and twitter chatter casts the Supreme Court’s cert grant in DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman as a sequel to last week’s Kiobel decision on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Although Daimler is an ATS case, the Court does not seem poised to revisit its test (such as it is) for extraterritorial application of the ATS. The question presented in Daimler is about personal jurisdiction in general—actually, it’s about general personal jurisdiction in general. According to the defendant’s petition for certiorari, “[t]he question presented is whether it violates due process for a court to exercise general personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation based solely on the fact that an indirect corporate subsidiary performs services on behalf of the defendant in the forum State.”

This question calls to mind an issue from the Court’s 2011 Goodyear decision—one that Justice Ginsburg’s unanimous opinion acknowledged but did not address. The petitioners in Goodyear were foreign subsidiaries of an American parent company, and they objected to personal jurisdiction in North Carolina state court. Here’s an excerpt from the end of the Court’s opinion [131 S. Ct. at 2857]:

Respondents belatedly assert a “single enterprise” theory, asking us to consolidate petitioners' ties to North Carolina with those of Goodyear USA and other Goodyear entities. See Brief for Respondents 44–50. In effect, respondents would have us pierce Goodyear corporate veils, at least for jurisdictional purposes. See Brilmayer & Paisley, Personal Jurisdiction and Substantive Legal Relations: Corporations, Conspiracies, and Agency, 74 Cal. L. Rev. 1, 14, 29–30 (1986) (merging parent and subsidiary for jurisdictional purposes requires an inquiry “comparable to the corporate law question of piercing the corporate veil”). But see 199 N.C.App., at 64, 681 S.E.2d, at 392 (North Carolina Court of Appeals understood that petitioners are “separate corporate entities ... not directly responsible for the presence in North Carolina of tires that they had manufactured”). Neither below nor in their brief in opposition to the petition for certiorari did respondents urge disregard of petitioners' discrete status as subsidiaries and treatment of all Goodyear entities as a “unitary business,” so that jurisdiction over the parent would draw in the subsidiaries as well. 

One caveat, of course, is that the Supreme Court’s ultimate decisions do not always hew closely to the precise questions for which it has granted certiorari. But if the Court’s concern in Daimler is the extraterritorial application of the ATS, I suspect it would have GVR’d the case for reconsideration in light of Kiobel—as it did today with another Ninth Circuit ATS case (Rio Tinto v. Sarei).

--A