Originalism and Summary Judgment

Over the last several years, the Supreme Court has revolutionized modern criminal procedure by invoking the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to strike down several sentencing innovations. This revolution has been led by members of the Supreme Court who follow an originalist method of constitutional interpretation. Recent work by the legal historian Suja Thomas has raised the question whether a similar originalist revolution may be on the horizon in civil cases governed by the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial. In particular, Professor Thomas has argued that the summary judgment device is unconstitutional because it permits judges to resolve a set of cases - those where the sufficiency of a party’s evidence is in dispute - that could only be resolved by juries at the time the Seventh Amendment was ratified. In this Article, I argue that Professor Thomas’s historical findings are an insufficient basis from which an originalist might conclude that summary judgment is unconstitutional. Professor Thomas\u27s analysis more or less rests on a comparison of jury practices in 1791 with jury practices today. But outside a context where one is trying to establish that a practice that existed at the time of the founding is still constitutional today, originalism cannot rest on a mere comparison of founding-era practices to modern practices. Not everything that juries did in 1791 was understood to be unchangeable absent a constitutional amendment. In order to separate the things that juries did that were important to the Seventh Amendment from the things that they did that were not, one must assemble a frame of reference external to the jury practices themselves. This external frame of reference might be assembled from many places - a comparison of founding-era lexicons to the constitutional text, an examination of founding-era statements on the question, an assessment of the original purposes of the Seventh Amendment, etc. - but it has to be assembled from somewhere. Professor Thomas has not yet focused her energies here. As such, more work needs to be done before an originalist can conclude summary judgment is unconstitutional

Objector Blackmail Update: What Have the 2018 Amendments Done

In 2012, I, along with Brian Wolfman and Alan Morrison, wrote a letter to the Federal Advisory Committee for the Rules of Appellate Procedure asking them to adopt a new rule to prohibit class members who file objections from dismissing their appeals in exchange for side settlements from class counsel... The new rule does not go as far as our letter recommended: it does not prohibit side payments but, instead, allows side payments if the district court that approved the class settlement also approves the side payment.7 I was skeptical when the new rule was adopted that it would mitigate objector blackmail. But now that we have had over one full year of experience with the new rule, we can take a look to see what the new rule has actually done. In this Essay, I attempt to do just that. In Part I of this Essay, I describe the problem of objector blackmail, why prohibiting side payments to objectors would be the best way to screen blackmail-minded objections from other objections, and why I did not think the new FRCP 23(e)(5)(B) would do so as effectively. In Part II, I examine what district courts have done with their new side payment approval authority over the first sixteen months. I found six orders by district courts on whether to approve side payments: four approvals and two denials. Although this is not much data, qualitative review of the orders does not inspire confidence that district court judges will have the requisite backbone to reject blackmail- minded side payments. On the other hand, the approved side payments may be less lucrative under the new rule. In Part III, I try to assess how these two contrary forces might weigh against each other by studying empirically whether the new rule has discouraged class action objectors from taking appeals. Although my methods are crude, they suggest there has been no slowdown in these appeals in the first year of the new rule

Objector Blackmail Update: What Have the 2018 Amendments Done?

In 2012, I, along with Brian Wolfman and Alan Morrison, wrote a letter to the Federal Advisory Committee for the Rules of Appellate Procedure asking them to adopt a new rule to prohibit class members who file objections from dismissing their appeals in exchange for side settlements from class counsel... The new rule does not go as far as our letter recommended: it does not prohibit side payments but, instead, allows side payments if the district court that approved the class settlement also approves the side payment.7 I was skeptical when the new rule was adopted that it would mitigate objector blackmail. But now that we have had over one full year of experience with the new rule, we can take a look to see what the new rule has actually done. In this Essay, I attempt to do just that. In Part I of this Essay, I describe the problem of objector blackmail, why prohibiting side payments to objectors would be the best way to screen blackmail-minded objections from other objections, and why I did not think the new FRCP 23(e)(5)(B) would do so as effectively. In Part II, I examine what district courts have done with their new side payment approval authority over the first sixteen months. I found six orders by district courts on whether to approve side payments: four approvals and two denials. Although this is not much data, qualitative review of the orders does not inspire confidence that district court judges will have the requisite backbone to reject blackmail- minded side payments. On the other hand, the approved side payments may be less lucrative under the new rule. In Part III, I try to assess how these two contrary forces might weigh against each other by studying empirically whether the new rule has discouraged class action objectors from taking appeals. Although my methods are crude, they suggest there has been no slowdown in these appeals in the first year of the new rule

Originalism and Summary Judgment

Over the last several years, the Supreme Court has revolutionized modern criminal procedure by invoking the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to strike down several sentencing innovations. This revolution has been led by members of the Supreme Court who follow an originalist method of constitutional interpretation. Recent work by the legal historian Suja Thomas has raised the question whether a similar originalist revolution may be on the horizon in civil cases governed by the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial. In particular, Professor Thomas has argued that the summary judgment device is unconstitutional because it permits judges to resolve a set of cases - those where the sufficiency of a party’s evidence is in dispute - that could only be resolved by juries at the time the Seventh Amendment was ratified. In this Article, I argue that Professor Thomas’s historical findings are an insufficient basis from which an originalist might conclude that summary judgment is unconstitutional. Professor Thomas\u27s analysis more or less rests on a comparison of jury practices in 1791 with jury practices today. But outside a context where one is trying to establish that a practice that existed at the time of the founding is still constitutional today, originalism cannot rest on a mere comparison of founding-era practices to modern practices. Not everything that juries did in 1791 was understood to be unchangeable absent a constitutional amendment. In order to separate the things that juries did that were important to the Seventh Amendment from the things that they did that were not, one must assemble a frame of reference external to the jury practices themselves. This external frame of reference might be assembled from many places - a comparison of founding-era lexicons to the constitutional text, an examination of founding-era statements on the question, an assessment of the original purposes of the Seventh Amendment, etc. - but it has to be assembled from somewhere. Professor Thomas has not yet focused her energies here. As such, more work needs to be done before an originalist can conclude summary judgment is unconstitutional

A Tribute to Justice Scalia: Why Bad Cases Make Bad Methodology

The Vanderbilt Law Review asked me to write a short memorial tribute to my old boss, Justice Antonin Scalia, and I am fortunate that Dean Chemerinsky\u27s new book provides an apt occasion to do so. To be as blunt as the Justice would have been: he would have hated this book. Not because Dean Chemerinsky is not a gifted writer; he most surely is. But because the entire methodology of the book-a methodology I call bad-cases reasoning-was anathema to the Justice. The Justice may not have been right about everything, but he was right about this: bad-cases reasoning is bad methodology. In this Essay, I try to explain why

Politics of Merit Selection, The

In this Article, I undertake an evaluation of a method of judicial selection in use in many states that is known as merit selection. The merit system is distinctive from the other systems of judicial selection in use today in the powerful role it accords lawyers and, in particular, state bar associations. Proponents of the merit system contend that it is superior to the other forms of judicial selection - elections or appointment by elected officials - because state bar associations are more likely to select judges on the basis of merit and less likely to select judges on the basis of politics than are voters or elected officials. In this Article, I explain why I believe these claims are overstated. In Part II of this Article, I explain the origins and nature of the merit systems used in the United States. In Part III, I examine the claim that merit systems remove politics from the judiciary, showing how Legal Realism casts doubt on this claim. In Part IV, I explore how the political views of the bar might differ from those of the public at large, and I ask whether the proponents of merit selection can justify a system that produces judges who reflect the ideological preferences of the bar rather than the preferences of the electorate

The Constitutionality of Federal Jurisdiction-Stripping Legislation and the History of State Judicial Selection and Tenure

Few questions in the field of Federal Courts have captivated scholars like the question of whether Congress can simultaneously divest both lower federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear federal constitutional claims and thereby leave those claims to be litigated in state courts alone. Such a divestiture is known today as “jurisdiction stripping,” and, despite literally decades of scholarship on the subject, scholars have largely been unable to reconcile two widely held views: jurisdiction stripping should be unconstitutional because it deprives constitutional rights of adjudication by independent judges and jurisdiction stripping is nonetheless perfectly consistent with the text and original understanding of the Constitution. In this article, I show how the scholarly impasse that has pitted constitutionalism and judicial independence on the one hand versus text and history on the other can be overcome. In particular, I show that something important has changed in the years since the Constitution was ratified: the gap between the independence of state and federal judges. At the time of the founding, much like their federal counterparts, no state judges were elected and the vast majority of them enjoyed life tenure. Precisely the opposite is true today. As such, the consequences of depriving federal courts of jurisdiction to hear constitutional claims were much different then than they are today. Because state courts were the background against which Article III of the Constitution was written and ratified, these changes enable the answer to the question of whether jurisdiction stripping is constitutional to change as well. In other words, just because jurisdiction stripping was constitutional in 1789 does not mean it must be constitutional today, and it does not mean we must ignore the original understanding of the Constitution to reach that conclusion. The history I have uncovered in this article has the potential to reshape many other jurisdictional doctrines of the federal courts

Why Class Actions Are Something both Liberals and Conservatives Can Love

In Professor Redish\u27s review of my new book, The Conservative Case for Class Actions, he argues that liberals should oppose the class action because the cy pres doctrine used to distribute settlement money is democratically illegitimate and that conservatives should oppose it because it is inferior to government policing of the marketplace or no policing at all. But cy pres is a longstanding common law doctrine and relying on it is no more illegitimate than relying on any other common law doctrine that has not been abrogated by legislation. Moreover, contrary to popular caricatures, conservatives actually do believe the marketplace needs some policing, and, for all the reasons we prefer private solutions over government solutions in other areas, we should prefer a private police force staffed with class action lawyers over government bureaucrats

Do Class Action Lawyers Make Too Little?

Class action lawyers are some of the most frequently derided players in our system of civil litigation. It is often asserted that class action lawyers take too much from class judgments as fees, that class actions are little more than a device for the lawyers to enrich themselves at the expense of the class. In this Article, I argue that some of this criticism of class action lawyers is misguided. In particular, I perform a normative examination of fee percentages in class action litigation using the social-welfarist utilitarian account of litigation known as deterrence-insurance theory. I argue that in perhaps the most common class action -- the so-called small stakes class action -- class action lawyers not only do not make too much, but actually make too little. Indeed, I argue that it is hard to see as a theoretical matter why lawyers should not receive 100% of class judgments in small-stakes cases. Of course, it is unlikely that judges in the current political climate will feel comfortable awarding class action lawyers fees equal to 100% of judgments in any type of class action, small stakes or otherwise. Moreover, it is not entirely clear that judges have the legal authority to award fees at such a level. Nonetheless, even if judges cannot award 100% of small-stakes judgments to class action lawyers due to political or legal constraints, deterrence-insurance theory suggests that they should award fee percentages as high as they can in small-stakes cases, which, by any measure, are much higher than the percentages they tend to award now. Unfortunately, deterrence-insurance theory is unable to provide judges with as much guidance in large-stakes and mixed-stakes class actions

A Tribute to Justice Scalia: Why Bad Cases Make Bad Methodology

The Vanderbilt Law Review asked me to write a short memorial tribute to my old boss, Justice Antonin Scalia, and I am fortunate that Dean Chemerinsky\u27s new book provides an apt occasion to do so. To be as blunt as the Justice would have been: he would have hated this book. Not because Dean Chemerinsky is not a gifted writer; he most surely is. But because the entire methodology of the book-a methodology I call bad-cases reasoning-was anathema to the Justice. The Justice may not have been right about everything, but he was right about this: bad-cases reasoning is bad methodology. In this Essay, I try to explain why. When Justice Scalia was asked how it could be that one or another of someone\u27s favorite constitutional rights was not recognized by his originalist approach, he would often say something like the following: The Constitution does not guarantee everything that is good and it does not prohibit everything that is bad. It only guarantees or prohibits the specific things it enumerates. If you do not like the list, call your member of Congress.\u27 Yet, Dean Chemerinsky\u27s new book is little more than an indictment of the Supreme Court for not frequently enough recognizing Dean Chemerinsky\u27s favorite constitutional rights. The book proceeds along the following syllogism: bad things have happened; the Supreme Court did not stop them (or even brought them about); therefore, the Supreme Court is a failure