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The Supreme Court held in Burford v. Sun Oil Co. that federal courts, through an exercise of equitable discretion, could abstain from asserting subject matter jurisdiction over challenges to state administrative agency orders. Since Burford, the Court has failed to reconcile abstention with either Congress’s subject matter jurisdiction statutes or the Constitution, which both arguably require federal courts to exercise jurisdiction when the subject matter is proper. Instead of relying on equitable discretion, I believe federal courts can and should ground Burford abstention in constitutional and statutory restrictions on the types of power that federal courts may exert. Article III of the Constitution and the federal question, diversity, and removal jurisdiction statutes require federal courts to abstain from asserting jurisdiction when doing so would require federal courts to take nonadjudicative action.

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act effectively repealed aspects of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by creating a new statutory section governing joinder of accused infringers and consolidation of actions for trial in most patent infringement cases. This new law codifies a substantial barrier to joinder and consolidation for trial. In so doing, it frustrates the promotion of liberal standards both for evaluating the sufficiency of pleadings and for evaluating the propriety of joinder of parties—two of the primary policies embraced by the drafters of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Remarkably, Congress adopted the new statutory section despite the absence of any detailed scholarly analysis prior to its enactment regarding these issues, sparse legislative history analyzing perceived problems with the relevant Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the lack of any consideration of the new statutory section by the Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. This Article provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons for the enactment of the new statutory section, the competing policies animating the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the appropriate interpretation and application of the new law. Such analyses have, to date, been absent from the legal conversation.

This Note argues that modern-day patent litigation lacks sufficient consideration of public policy concerns. In order to remedy this, I propose three potential solutions that would broaden standing in patent declaratory judgment actions, thereby allowing more plaintiffs who are likely to raise such arguments to have their day in court. First, I discuss expanding standing within the Supreme Court’s MedImmune framework, which requires courts to apply a broad all-the-circumstances test in determining patent declaratory judgment standing. Within this test, I urge courts to consider (1) the degree to which a potential infringer raises important public policy concerns and (2) the extent to which the potential infringer has a unique economic incentive to challenge the patent-at-issue. Second, I consider altering the framework for standing in patent declaratory judgment actions based on a reassessment of the fundamental justifications for standing doctrine generally. Observing that the traditional justifications for a standing requirement—and the separation of powers justification in particular—do not apply in the context of patent declaratory judgment actions, I suggest that the Supreme Court might craft a new standing framework. Third, I explore the extent to which Congress might statutorily expand standing in such cases. I conclude by noting that the post-grant opposition procedure created by the America Invents Act—the patent reform legislation signed into law in September 2011—is insufficient to assuage unease regarding the lack of public policy arguments in patent litigation. Courts might therefore look to standing in order to address this problem.

The civil litigation system aims to resolve disputes in an efficient, centralized, and final manner. In the context of mass tort litigation, one technique courts often use to achieve these goals is what I call “scaling up”: holding individual trials, and then applying results from these trials to similarly situated individuals. Scaling up, however, presents two difficulties. First, the technique risks compromising defendants’ Due Process rights by creating impermissible settlement pressure. Second, scaling up requires the initial court to structure the litigation so that it may serve as a template for follow-on proceedings; where this is not done, attempting to graft the results of one proceeding onto the remaining group of similarly situated individuals may simply lead to more protracted litigation.

Yet these difficulties are not inherent to the technique; in fact, courts can scale up in a way that avoids these problems. In order to mitigate the Due Process problem, courts should not apply the results of individual trials to subsequent trials involving similar claims until a substantial number of trials have been completed, and until it has become clear that any verdicts unfavorable to defendants are not flukes or outliers. And to ensure that scaling up does not simply lead to more protracted litigation, the initial trials should be structured so as to maximize the likelihood that individuals in follow-on litigation can invoke the findings under the issue preclusion doctrine of Parklane Hosiery v. Shore. The American Law Institute has made a proposal with these considerations in mind with respect to issue classes. This Note argues that a similar approach should be taken in the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) process, where most mass tort litigation occurs today. This approach would be particularly useful if applied to one device that is being used with increasing frequency in the MDL process: the bellwether trial.

When the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were promulgated in 1938, they reflected a policy of citizen access for civil disputes and sought to promote their resolution on the merits rather than on the basis of the technicalities that characterized earlier procedural systems.The federal courts applied that philosophy of procedure for many years. However, the last quarter century has seen a dramatic contrary shift in the way the federal courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have interpreted and applied the Federal Rules and other procedural matters. This shift has produced the increasingly early procedural disposition of cases prior to trial. Indeed, civil trials, especially jury trials, are very few and far between today.

The author examines the significant manifestations of this dramatic change, and traces the shift in judicial attitude back to the three pro-summary judgment decisions by the Supreme Court in 1986. Furthermore, he goes on to discuss the judicial gatekeeping that has emerged regarding (1) expert testimony, (2) the constriction o class action certification, (3) the enforcement of arbitration clauses in an extraordinary array of contracts (many adhesive in character), (4) the Court’s abandonment of notice pleading in favor of plausibility pleading (which, in effect, is a return to fact pleading), (5) the intimations of a potential narrowing of the reach of in personam jurisdiction, and (6) a number of limitations on pretrial discovery that have resulted from Rule amendments during the last twenty-five years.

All of these changes restrict the ability of plaintiffs to reach a determination of their claims’ merits, which has resulted in a narrowing effect on citizen access to a meaningful day in court. Beyond that, these restrictive procedural developments work against the effectiveness of private litigation to enforce various public policies involving such matters as civil rights, antitrust, employment discrimination, and securities regulation.

Concerns about abusive and frivolous litigation, threats of extortionate settlements, and the high cost of today’s large-scale lawsuits motivate these deviations from the original philosophy of the Federal Rules, but these concerns fail to take proper account of other systemic values. The author argues that these assertions are speculative and not empirically justified, are overstated, and simply reflect the self-interest of various groups that seek to terminate claims asserted against them as early as possible to avoid both discovery and a trial. Indeed, they simply may reflect a strong pro-business and pro-government orientation of today’s federal judiciary. The author cautions that some restoration of the earlier underlying philosophy of the Federal Rules is necessary if we are to preserve the procedural principles that should underlie our civil justice system and maintain the viability of private litigation as an adjunct to government regulation for the enforcement of important societal policies and values.

The federal courts are currently divided on how to determine the diversity citizenship of trusts. Several circuits hold that trusts take the citizenship of their trustees. Another circuit holds that trusts take the citizenship of the trust’s beneficiaries, and yet another considers the citizenships of both the trustees and the beneficiaries. But beyond this circuit split, a more significant problem plagues the law in this area: The courts of appeals have failed to recognize the distinction between traditional and business trusts. The former—what is most commonly thought of as a trust—is a gift and estate planning tool. The latter is an alternative to incorporation, and is designed to run a business and generate profit for investors.

In this Note, I examine the differences between traditional and business trusts in the context of federal diversity jurisdiction. After discussing the history of diversity jurisdiction and the nature of these two forms of trusts, I explore the current circuit split over the citizenship rules for trusts. I then propose a new rule that fits within the current Supreme Court case law in the field: Traditional trusts take the citizenship of their trustees, while business trusts take the citizenship of their members—the beneficiaries. Having proposed a rule that depends upon the type of trust at issue, I conclude by explaining that a trust can be classified by determining the primary purpose for which it was organized.

The United States is distinct among nations in its constitutionalization of personal jurisdiction. This Note explains the intertwined history of U.S. specific jurisdiction law and the so-called “Hague Judgments Project,” which is facilitating negotiations toward a treaty regulating recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. This Note argues that the constitutionality of any such proposed treaty will remain uncertain unless U.S. courts clarify existing personal jurisdictional doctrine, particularly regarding the “jurisdictional filters” question: May U.S. courts lawfully recognize and enforce a foreign judgment issued upon a jurisdictional basis that would have been unconstitutional in domestic litigation? This Note answers “yes,” at least when the foreign court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction is compatible with internationally accepted norms. By proposing a cogent response to this question, this Note hopes to facilitate the negotiation and adoption of a future judgments convention.

Recent Supreme Court decisions such as American Express v. Italian Colors Restaurant, 133 S. Ct. 2304 (2013), and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011), represent dramatic developments with implications that extend far beyond the arbitration context. These decisions are a product of what the author refers to as the “contract model” of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). Heretofore largely unquestioned, the contract model posits the FAA’s original and dominant purpose as the promotion of private ordering in dispute resolution, as free as possible from state regulation. The model has, in turn, helped courts and commentators claim that the FAA requires arbitration agreements to be enforced strictly “according to their terms”—without regard to the way those agreements might compromise procedural values, such as when they preclude classwide relief.

This Article questions both the descriptive accuracy and normative persuasiveness of the contract model. It argues that when placed in their proper historical context, the FAA’s text and legislative history appear equally consistent (if not more so) with a purpose to improve upon the widely discussed procedural failings of the courts circa 1925. From this standpoint, the FAA can be understood as an offshoot of ongoing efforts at the time to reform procedure in the federal courts—efforts spearheaded by figures such as Roscoe Pound and Charles E. Clark, and that eventually culminated in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. The FAA, in short, was arguably a type of procedural reform.

These insights lead the author to propose a “procedural reform” model of the FAA, one that he contends is both more faithful to the statute’s history (legislative and otherwise) and more adept at answering the difficult questions that confront arbitration law in the age of “contract procedure.” The author considers two recent examples to illustrate.

Plaintiffs seeking to institute a civil action in federal court must plead the grounds for the court’s subject-matter jurisdiction over their claim; if they cannot adequately do so, their claim will be dismissed. Recently, courts have started to apply the plausibility rule announced in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal—which requires plaintiffs to plead facts plausibly showing their entitlement to relief—to the pleading of subject-matter jurisdiction. This Note argues that such a novel shift in how jurisdiction is pleaded is neither supported nor necessitated by Twombly and Iqbal and is fundamentally incompatible with long-settled jurisdictional doctrine. It therefore recommends that district court judges redouble their attention to the articulation of procedural rules of decision (eschewing reliance upon boilerplate) and desist from imposing heightened pleading of subject-matter jurisdiction without considering the question as a matter of first impression.

As many as 98,000 people die each year as a result of medical error. According to law and economics scholars, the solution to this problem is straightforward: When calibrated correctly, medical malpractice liability will force healthcare providers to internalize the cost of their negligence, incentivizing improvements to patient safety that will reduce medical error. Debate has raged for decades over the coherence of deterrence theory, but little attention has been paid to the erosion of one of its bedrock assumptions: that the procedural mechanism through which claims are to be resolved is litigation. Arbitration has become pervasive in the healthcare context, but its effects on medical malpractice liability’s ability to deter medical error have been largely overlooked by public health and legal scholars. This Note argues that the adoption of arbitration will not, as law and economics scholars assume, improve the medical malpractice regime’s ability to deter error. In addition to drawing on existing law and economics and public health scholarship to advance this descriptive claim, this Note studies the experience of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated healthcare consortium, in using arbitration to resolve medical malpractice disputes with its seven million members in California.