The rise of arbitration has been one of the most significant developments in civil justice. Many scholars have criticized arbitration for, among other things, “privatizing” or “delegating” the state’s dispute-resolution powers and allowing private parties to abuse those powers with virtual impunity. An implicit assumption underlying this critique is that civil procedure, in contrast to arbitration, does not delegate significant state...
Civil Procedure
One of the most dramatic exercises of a court’s equitable authority is the nationwide injunction. Although this phenomenon has become more prominent in recent years, it is a routine fixture of the jurisprudence of federal courts. Despite the frequency with which these cases arise, there has been no systematic scholarly or judicial analysis of when courts issue nationwide injunctions and little discussion of when they should issue such relief. This Note examines the claim that judges have improperly granted summary judgment where a reasonable jury could find for the non-moving party. It begins by reviewing the literature on summary judgment, particularly three opinions the Supreme Court issued in 1986, as well as claims about the propriety of summary judgment in fact- intensive civil rights cases. To test... It has been an obsession of modern civil procedure to design ways to reveal more before trial about what will happen during trial. Litigants today, as a matter of course, are made to preview the evidence they will use. This practice is celebrated because standard theory says it should induce the parties to settle; why incur the expenses of trial, if everyone knows what will happen? Rarely noted, however, is one complication: The impact of... When a trademark registered with the Patent and Trademark Office is infringed, section 32 of the Lanham Act provides the trade¬mark registrant the opportunity to seek remedies in federal court. Thanks to a broad definition of “registrant,” the Act in fact extends standing beyond the registrant herself to her “legal representatives,” among others. This language has prompted courts to puzzle over the proper definition of a “legal representative.”...