Managerial Judges: The Long View

Professor Brooke Coleman has carefully tracked rule-makers' attempts to manage this discontent, accurately observing that for several decades "the Civil Rules Committee has been occupied with how to fix civil discovery"4 Despite amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJudicature Vol. 107; no. 1; pp. 45 - 46
Main Author Dow, Robert M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago Duke Law Center for Judicial Studies 01.01.2023
Subjects
Attorneys
Case management
Employment
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
Litigation
Pilot projects
Pretrial discovery
Resnik, Judith
United States > US
Illinois
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Summary:Professor Brooke Coleman has carefully tracked rule-makers' attempts to manage this discontent, accurately observing that for several decades "the Civil Rules Committee has been occupied with how to fix civil discovery"4 Despite amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect in 1983, 1993, 2000, and 2006, the view persisted among judges, lawyers, and academics "that the civil justice system was still in a crisis, and that discovery was a major cause of this discord. Around the same time, a group of experienced lawyers from both sides of the "v.," working closely with the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), developed a pattern discovery protocol for use in adverse action employment discrimination cases.6 This pilot program began in late 2011 and ultimately involved more than 50 federal district judges handling almost 500 cases across ten districts.7 While the study found no statistically significant difference in case-processing times between the pilot cases and comparison cases, it appears that pilot cases were more likely to settle.8 These protocols remain in use in some districts.9 The larger project emerging from the 2010 Duke Conference culminated in the 2015 amendments to Rules 26 and 37. In this volume, Judges Kuhl and Highberger have brought their decades of experience managing complex cases in the nation's single-largest unified court system to bear in a significant contribution to the discussion.14 The judicial role in the largest case agglomerations in both state and federal court is too substantial to be described by any other term than "managerial."
ISSN:0022-5800