Yearly Archives: 2017

Rethinking Judicial Independence

Jun 5, 2017 Marin K. LevyAdd a Comment

It is an extraordinary time when the following sentence—“it is hard to underestimate the importance of [X]”—has a plethora of topics all credibly vying for the position of “X.” Appreciating the competition, one would be hard-pressed not to include the independence of the judiciary as a prime candidate. When the eventual President calls into question the impartiality of a judge based on the judge’s “heritage” or when a court’s ruling on the administration’s travel ban might not be heeded, at least two conclusions can be drawn. First, the independence of the judiciary is presently being tested. Second, the independence of the judiciary may well be needed more than ever. Against such a backdrop, it is vital for current scholarship to provide a way to think through and assess that independence.

Enter Tara Leigh Grove’s thoughtful new article, The Origins (and Fragility) of Judicial Independence.

Drawing in part from her own (excellent) past work, Grove undertakes a significant examination of the independence of the federal judiciary. She traces the historical arcs of several key contestations between the judicial branch and one of its sibling branches, including the failure to comply with a court order, the potential removal of a judicial officer outside the impeachment process, and court packing. Though these contestations have received scholarly attention before, Grove brings them together in a new way. In so doing, she provides a persuasive account of how these various attempts to curb the courts were not only not verboten, but were embraced in the early days of the judiciary—and how political actors ultimately reversed their course.

To focus on one key interbranch standoff, Grove provides an important analysis of the history of court packing. Contrary to its current “off-the-wall” status (to use a Jack Balkinism), Grove points out that in the nineteenth century, Congress several times packed and unpacked the Supreme Court, at least in part for partisan gain. The article then examines FDR’s infamous 1937 proposal to increase the size of the Court and the debates surrounding that plan. (Here, Grove keeps good company. Others, such as my colleagues Curt Bradley and Neil Siegel, have also done important work identifying the constitutional conventions surrounding court packing.) For Grove, the point is that although there was some pushback against the President’s plan when first proposed, it was not until the late 1950s that court packing came to be viewed as a “negative precedent,” based on the way political actors publicly spoke about the ill-fated attempt. That treatment continues even to this day. Grove points to comments made in the context of now-Justice Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court to show that the convention against court packing is alive and well.

Grove ultimately draws together this and other episodes to make a larger statement about the independence of the judiciary. To use the author’s words, what we may today take for granted—specifically, the existence of certain norms or conventions against various court-curbing measures—we may need to reconsider. The text and structure of our Constitution do not put them in place. And Grove’s careful rendering of the past informs us that none of the attempts to encroach upon the judiciary’s power had to be resolved as each was. Those of us playing at home should keep in mind the contingent nature of the courts’ trajectory, and that what has been done can be undone in the future.This article makes a substantial contribution to the existing literature on judicial independence and simultaneously prompts several important questions. For one, might there be other ways of gauging judicial independence beyond the clearly significant ones Grove investigates? For example, in the early 2000s Congress contemplated requiring courts of appeals to publish all of their opinions, contrary to the courts’ own decision(s) to dispose a majority of cases via “unpublished” orders. This led to a confrontation between Congress and the judiciary and a question about the extent to which the courts’ own power to decide the form of its decisions could be curbed. I mention this point not to begin a game of everyone-pull-out-their-favorite-interbranch-contestation (that should be reserved strictly for social gatherings), but to question how we know we are looking at the “right” moments between the judiciary and its sibling branches and whether it might be worth including others in the canon.

Another question looks beyond the federal courts to their state counterparts. To again focus on court packing, it is remarkable how this court-curbing measure is “off the wall” with respect to the former, but is apparently on-the-wall with respect to the latter. A new report by Alicia Bannon and Nathaniel Sobel at the Brennan Center documents an increased politicization of state courts through various legislative measures, including recent attempts to increase or decrease the size of state appellate courts across the country. We might wonder more broadly to what extent conventions within the federal judiciary translate to the states. If the answer is “not much,” we should ask why this is so, and what this means for the independence of our state courts.

These questions further underscore the importance of what Grove has hit upon. The Origins (and Fragility) of Judicial Independence provides a careful and persuasive account of a vital topic, making a substantial contribution to an already robust literature. Such a contribution is critical now. One can only hope that her conclusion about the judiciary’s fragile independence is not tested any time soon.

What Judges Can Do About Implicit Bias

May 22, 2017 Suja A. ThomasAdd a Comment

For some years now, scholars have discussed the influence of implicit bias on decision-making. While many argue that conscious bias is decreasing,¹ studies show that the impact of unconscious bias is significant. Although scholars, including Judge Andrew Wistrich and Jeffrey Rachlinski, have shown that judges possess such bias, judges—SCOTUS included—have not been sufficiently aware of the problem. The relatively recent change to the standard for dismissing a claim on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion illustrates this point.

In Bell Atlantic Corporation v. Twombly, Justice Souter formulated the new plausibility standard for deciding whether a claim should be dismissed. Later, in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, Justice Kennedy expounded on this new interpretation, stating that a judge should rely on her “judicial experience and common sense” to decide whether a claim should be dismissed. Despite the importance of this modern invocation, the Court cited no evidence to support relying on these intuitions. Scholars, including Steve Burbank, publicly questioned the use of this information as inviting subjective judgments by judges to dismiss cases that they disfavor. But courts continue to embrace this SCOTUS-endorsed phrase and employ it in their quest to decide whether claims should be dismissed. Should they?

Judge Wistrich and Rachlinski’s important contribution to a new American Bar Association book, Ensuring Justice: Reducing Bias, should call into question the Iqbal rule that courts use their judicial experience and common sense. The authors show that judges’ decision-making may be compromised by implicit bias and discuss what judges can do to combat this bias.

The authors first explain that people decide in two different ways: intuitive and deliberative. Intuitive decision-making is instinctual and emotional—referred to at times by psychologists as System 1 reasoning. Deliberative decision-making involves consciousness, effort, and time and is referred to at times by psychologists as System 2 reasoning. Where the two types of reasoning conflict, people—including judges—tend to rely on intuition.

But intuition can hamper judicial decision-making. For example, studies have shown that a number that is irrelevant to a determination of damages can influence a judge’s decision regarding damages and that a judge likely also will consider inadmissible evidence. Additionally, while judges may deny the influence of emotions, emotions are a part of intuitive decision-making. Based on irrelevant emotions, judges may decide an issue of statutory interpretation favorably for the defendant because of certain characteristics of that individual, such as why they took a drug. Intuition also tends to make people possess bias toward their own groups. For example, a study demonstrated that a group of judges exhibited bias toward litigants from their own state. Racial bias may be another type of in-group bias. Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the authors found that judges possess the same level of implicit bias against African-Americans as most lay adults.

These studies show judges are human—sharing problems that the rest of us face. Thankfully, judges can try to combat these issues. First, deliberative, System 2 decision-making can help judges avert their reliance on intuition—that is, knowing they have bias can help judges avoid their bias. Second, several different tests and methods can aid judges. For example, they can take the IAT, which permits them to understand that they may need to account for implicit bias and alerts others to the need for training judges who possess such bias. Because judges tend to think they are better than most at avoiding racial bias, actually taking the test will be a particularly useful first step to lessen the effects of bias.

In addition to awareness through the IAT, the authors propose a variety of ways to combat bias, only a few of which I highlight here. Increasing from one to three the number of trial judges who decide any important issue is a particularly innovative, interesting proposal. While the authors recognize the difficulty of implementation given the current allocation of resources, their idea is compelling because of the noted research on how outcomes improve by increasing diversity on appellate panels. Additionally, I want to point out that historically the importance of more than one judge deciding an issue was recognized. In late eighteenth-century England, a panel of three judges would determine issues such as whether a new trial should be ordered in a case or whether a case should be dismissed on a demurrer.

The authors propose a number of other ways to reduce implicit bias in the judiciary. Another favorite of mine is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is popular these days. It’s used in companies and classrooms to train people to recognize their thoughts and emotions that arise, but to let go of them to be in the present. We encourage students at the University of Illinois to consider practicing it to reduce stress. The authors argue that mindfulness may help judges curb their reliance on inappropriate reactions.

Judge Wistrich and Rachlinski recognize that there are also indirect ways that implicit bias can be countered. For example, judges may rely less on intuitive decision-making if the time for decision-making were increased and more written opinions were required.

The authors also emphasize that others who help judges, such as police and prosecutors, should be trained to combat the implicit bias that they possess.

Judge Wistrich and Rachlinski’s chapter and previous work on implicit bias in the judiciary are incredibly important. The chapter helps us to understand influences on judicial decision-making and how to combat these problems. Through the chapter, the ABA book, and other efforts, such as training of judges by the Federal Judicial Center under the leadership of Judge Jeremy Fogel, important efforts to reduce implicit bias are underway.

Lastly, the authors’ chapter on implicit bias should specifically call into question the Supreme Court’s admonition in Iqbal that judges should rely on their “judicial experience and common sense”—a phrase—as I mentioned—that the trial and appellate courts continue to invoke in their opinions.

But the Feds Do It That Way!

May 8, 2017 Lumen N. MulliganAdd a Comment

Although state courts handle roughly ninety-five percent of all civil cases, federal procedural law dominates reform initiatives, academic discussions, and legislative attention. In line with this federal focus, there continues to be a push for state court systems to conform their civil procedural rules to the most recent amended version of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In their new article, Stephen Subrin and Thomas Main reject this unreflective state emulation of federal procedure.

Subrin and Main begin by demonstrating that the original promise that the Federal Rules would lead to universal uniformity has not been met. They track this lack of uniformity across four dimensions.

First, the promise of trans-substantive uniformity has not been met. That desire pushes Federal Rules drafters toward a standards-based approach, as opposed to a rules-based approach, to procedural law. This, in turn, leads to substantial disuniformity in practice, given the discretion inherent in a standards-based system.

Second, the promise of uniformity across federal districts has not been met. Subrin and Main point to the explosion of Local Rules made pursuant to Federal Rule 83; the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990, with its requirement that each district adopt a plan to address the expense and delay of litigation; and general orders, standing orders, special orders, scheduling orders, minute orders, and other practices of individual judges, all of which diminish uniformity across federal districts. See, e.g., Guidelines and Orders (D. Kan. 2017).

Third, prior to the adoption of the Federal Rules in 1938, the Conformity Act of 1872 provided intrastate uniformity of procedure (at least for suits at law) between state courts and federal courts sitting in the same state. While the adoption of the Federal Rules disrupted this intrastate uniformity, the drafters assured the bar that the states would soon adopt the Federal Rules and restore intrastate uniformity. While small-population states by and large adopted the Federal Rules as their state procedural model by the mid-1970s, nine out of ten of the largest-population states still have not. And, Subrin and Main claim, even the adopting states themselves often decline to enact newly promulgated, substantial amendments to the Federal Rules.

Fourth, because they assumed states would adopt the Federal Rules as a model, the drafters promised interstate uniformity of procedure as well. For the reasons recounted above, this promise has not been met, either. Subrin and Main’s point in demonstrating these failings in the creation of intra-jurisdictional uniformity is to suggest that the entire goal of creating unity by way of textual rule is quixotic. Thus, they suggest, the entire goal of seeking state and federal procedural unity is not a sound one.

In the second half of the article, Subrin and Main more pointedly address why states’ unreflective emulation of the Federal Rules constitutes poor policy. They offer numerous grounds for consideration:

1. The Federal Civil Rules Advisory Committee has been biased toward defendants for decades, recounting a series of studies in support of this proposition. The Federal Committee obsesses over “big discovery” cases, although such cases form a very small statistical slice of the federal civil docket, (I hope the reader will excuse one lengthy parenthetical, but this is a point worth repeating often: There is no empirical evidence for the idea that discovery is explosively expensive in the overwhelming majority of cases. See Emery G. Lee III & Thomas E. Willging, Fed. Judicial Ctr., National, Case-Based Civil Rules Survey: Preliminary Report to the Judicial Conference 43 (2009), (concluding that, at the median, discovery cost about 1.6% of the stakes for plaintiffs and 3.3% of the stakes for defendants in 2009 with the median stakes coming in at $160,000); Emery G. Lee III & Thomas E. Willging, Defining the Problem of Cost in Federal Civil Litigation, 60 Duke L.J. 765, 773–74 (2010) (finding that “[discovery] costs are generally proportionate” to client stakes in the litigation); Thomas E. Willging et al., An Empirical Study of Discovery and Disclosure Practice Under the 1993 Federal Rule Amendments, 39 B.C. L. Rev. 525, 525, 531 (1998) finding similar results just ten years earlier); see also James S. Kakalik et al., Inst. for Civil Justice, Discovery Management: Further Analysis of the Civil Justice Reform Act Evaluation Data xxvii (1998), http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2009/MR941.pdf (“Discovery is not a pervasive litigation cost problem for the majority of cases.”). Explosive discovery cost cases account for 5%-15% of cases, depending on the year or the study. See, e.g.,  Suja A. Thomas & Dawson Price, How Atypical Cases Make Bad Rules: A Commentary on the Rulemaking Process, 15 Nev. L.J. 1141, 1147–49 (2015).) much less the state court dockets.

2. State and federal systems face meaningfully different dockets and different docket concerns. Awards in state court are radically lower, with nearly 75% of matters resolving for less than $5200. More parties are unrepresented in state court, with 75% of matters involving at least one pro se party. Matters resolve more rapidly in state court, with nearly 75% of matters coming to resolution in less than a year. And state-court cases skew greatly toward non-complex collection actions, with contract claims accounting for 66% of the state dockets and torts accounting for but 7% of the docket.
3. The multiplicity of post-1938 amendments to the Federal Rules have rendered federal procedure more expensive to litigants, more time consuming, and more subject to judicial discretion. Doubling down on the expense point, they argue that the federal approach requires more judicial-branch financial resources than most states can afford.
4. States can and should experiment with procedure.

There is much to appreciate in this paper. Subrin and Main’s argument constitutes a helpful reminder that state courts are not a discount brand of the federal courts. They are different institutions performing different tasks, working under different funding models, and serving different stakeholders. As someone who works on his state civil rules advisory committee, I appreciate the reminder that the needs of the state courts often are substantially different from those of the federal system’s. I fully embrace their full-throated federalism approach in principle.

Other aspects of the paper, however, gave me some pause. Subrin and Main express great discomfort with district court discretion in procedure, typically on the ground that a standards-based approach does not lead to uniformity. Assuming this is true, I do not see why a state court system should overly care about uniformity in procedural outcomes per se, assuming uniform application of a discretionary standard. This is to say, I do not see Subrin and Main make the argument that discretionary standards per se are to be avoided in state courts where, one presumes, there is not a historical commitment to uniformity akin to that found with the Federal Rules. Discretion often is good. Implementing state procedural policy though adjudication could avoid many of the problems with rules in the first place, because case-by-case decisionmaking is more flexible, dynamic, and incremental than rulemaking, in addition to being cheaper and easier to utilize in some circumstances.

For these reasons, administrative law—which is my favored interpretive approach to procedural matters—contains several doctrines that allow administrators to exercise equitable discretion and soften the hard edges of bright-line rules in particular cases. As Glen Staszewski and I have discussed elsewhere, trial-court discretion can be a sound procedural policy precisely because trial-court judges are typically better situated than rules drafters or appellate judges to make fine-grained procedural decisions based on their relevant experience and perspective.

Several of Subrin and Main’s arguments described above can be fairly grouped under an agency-capture heading. To be sure, the federal Civil Rules Advisory system has flaws—big ones, as I have outlined in prior work. Yet there may still be good reason for states to adopt the content of the Federal Rules. First, state-court rule drafters are not freed from these same political and capture concerns. Many states craft rules as statutes. Yet, I do not believe state legislators en masse will have greater expertise in this area than the Federal Advisory Committee or be less pressured from intensive interest-group lobbying than the Federal Advisory Committee. Often, a policy of “Our state follows the federal rules” stops a lot of injury off the top. Second, even in states that have advisory drafting committees, there is little evidence that these drafters will not have biases and concerns over capture, be they pro-defense or otherwise, similar to the Federal Advisory Committee’s. Third, as Subrin and Main argue, state judiciary budgets are under extreme stress, meaning there are no funds for the empirical work, which we have at the federal level, that should inform sound state rule creation. Lastly, because the Federal Advisory Committee’s work is high-profile, various interest groups can organize to follow the Committee’s recommendations closely and object to reforms these competing interest groups deem ill-advised. For example, in response to the aggressive anti-discovery amendments flowing out of the 2010 Duke Conference, more than 2300 comments were lodged with the Federal Committee. These organized movements forced substantial changes to the amendments proffered. It is not clear to me that proposed state procedural reforms have the same avenues for dissent, even if they are as closely watched as the Federal Committee’s work—which seems a dubious proposition in many states to begin with. The point is that a preference for state-level rulemaking should not idealize state rule-drafting processes. They make sausage in the state house as well.

These thoughts aside, any serious student of procedure should read this piece. It is thoughtful. It is provocative. It is well researched. And it is a lot of fun to read. Download it while supplies last!

A Well-Pleaded Argument

Apr 24, 2017 Elizabeth G. Thornburg1 comment

I should start by putting my own bias on the table: I think the changes to pleading standards brought about by Twombly and (especially) Iqbal are a really bad idea. Procedural systems that turn on early pleading of factual detail have failed for centuries to provide either accurate or efficient results. Rather, gatekeeping based on pleadings encourages and rewards pleading disputes, leads to wasteful motion practice about degrees of particularity, and, worse, the dismissal of meritorious claims under conditions of information asymmetry. Even if I did not hold these views, however, I would find much to admire in Lonny Hoffman’s elegantly structured response to William H.J. Hubbard’s article, A Fresh Look at Plausibility Pleading, an article that doubts that “plausibility” analysis has much impact and suggests that plaintiffs with weak cases are better off losing quickly.

Hubbard’s piece is a fascinating thought experiment: what if there were no pleading standards, so that decisions about what cases to bring and how to plead them were entirely in the hands of plaintiff-side lawyers? It is generally agreed that lawyers play a gatekeeping role in litigation. In fact, lawyer gatekeeping itself represents only a tip of the no-lawsuit iceberg, since studies consistently show that most people with a potential justiciable claim do not even consult an attorney. (American Bar Association, Legal Needs and Civil Justice: A Survey of Americans, Major Findings of the Comprehensive Legal Needs Study (1994); Hazel Genn, Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999).) Nevertheless, Hubbard’s article contributed to the discussion by updating and attempting to quantify this effect.

Hoffman describes the way in which Hubbard combines economic theory with data from the Federal Judicial Center about median case values and litigation costs. As a result of this cost/benefit calculus, most meritless and very weak cases will not be brought at all. One might conclude from this that an additional rigorous screening mechanism is unnecessary (Hoffman) or unlikely to make a difference (Hubbard).

Hoffman’s article proceeds to tackle important flaws in Hubbard’s descriptive and normative conclusions, starting with the problem of information asymmetry. Hoffman concisely describes the problem:

How do information imbalances that favor the defendant (such as those in cases that turn on the defendant’s state of mind or on wrongful conduct that occurred in private) interact with a strict pleading filter? And the answer, as many scholars have noted, is that, when relevant information is primarily in the possession of the defendant, plausibility pleading can create a catch-22: the plaintiff needs access to information to plead sufficiently, but a pleading stage dismissal denies her the information that would have enabled her to plead a nonconclusory, plausible claim.

Hubbard recognizes that there may be many meritorious cases in which a lack of information at the outset leads to dismissal in the “plausible” pleading regime, but argues that those cases are doomed to lose in any case – that it is a lack of “facts” rather than the pleading rules that defeat such a plaintiff. As Hoffman’s article points out, however, this is just wrong. It is not that there are no facts to support this type of claim, but that without discovery the would-be plaintiff has no access to those facts. We should not assume that case-supporting information would not be discovered. The problem is exactly that a pleadings-based dismissal prevents the equalizing of information, not that the information must forever remain asymmetric.

Further, the pleading barrier might skew the lawyer-gatekeeping process so that fewer claims are even filed – the lack of discovery forces the lawyer to evaluate the probability of success based solely on facts known to the potential plaintiff, unaided by discovery. This is true not because a loss at trial would be inevitable, but because the lawyer knows that the pleading rule will allow no discovery. Because of the combined effects of dismissals and gatekeeping, the pleading filter will mean that private enforcement of civil norms will fail when it should have succeeded.

Hoffman’s article also points out that pleading-based regimes increase cost and decrease accuracy. In order to understand why this is so, one must understand that Iqbal requires a two-step inquiry. First, judges are instructed to go through the complaint to identify and consider only allegations of facts, ignoring things that are conclusory. In cases in which the plaintiff knows, and can plead, direct evidence of the defendant’s liability, there will likely be no motion to dismiss filed.

Many cases, however, will turn on circumstantial “facts,” and ultimately on the question of whether those facts support the inference needed to prove liability. The tricky and unpredictable task of separating facts from conclusions may well lead judges to discard as “conclusory” allegations that explicitly draw those inferences, leaving only isolated nuggets of information. The question is often not “no facts” versus “conclusive facts.” It is “some facts” that are within the plaintiff’s knowledge at the pleading stage. Consider an employment discrimination example. Suppose that the complaint states that the plaintiff’s supervisor called her an “ugly bitch” on two occasions, but did not do so when explaining why the plaintiff was not promoted. That namecalling is a “fact,” but an allegation that the plaintiff was denied a promotion based on sex might be disregarded as conclusory. (I’d disagree with calling it conclusory, but it’s certainly possible that a judge would do so.)

The analysis thus turns to the second step: do the non-conclusory nuggets of information plausibly support the needed inference? Iqbal provides little guidance on what this test means or what the judge may consider, but does suggest that the inference must be at least as plausible as competing inferences (fifty percent or better?), and that the judge should use his “experience and common sense” in making this decision.

Not surprisingly, this sketchily explained, fact-dependent analysis makes it very difficult to predict how a judge would rule on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion in any particular case. Consider, again, the employment example. Does the judge’s experience suggest that the use of such language supports an inference that the supervisor’s attitudes toward women affected the promotion decision? Does the judge’s experience suggest that the language is meaningless locker room talk? If the motion to dismiss is denied, the plaintiff will have the opportunity to do discovery to try to unearth additional circumstantial evidence of discrimination, which could strengthen the basis for an inference of discrimination. If the motion is granted, the plaintiff will never have the opportunity to learn what information available only to the defendant might reveal. With nothing more than the sexist epithets, the plaintiff might lose even on summary judgment under substantive Title VII law; but the summary judgment decision would not be made until after an opportunity to do discovery, while the 12(b)(6) decision is based on only those “facts” available to the plaintiff at the outset.

Given this process, I find interesting two of Hoffman’s points about early merits decisions mandated by pleading practice. First, the newly invigorated motion to dismiss comes with a cost to the court system. The existence of a high-reward-low-risk motion to dismiss has increased the frequency with which such motions are filed. Why would a rational defendant not routinely file such a motion – given the fuzziness of the law, such motions will not violate Rule 11, will cost plaintiffs time and money, will reveal much about what the plaintiff knows (and does not know), and may even result in dismissal. As I have written previously, this is consistent with the experience of countries whose civil justice systems continue to use pleadings as a tool for screening and issue-narrowing – the energy that U.S. lawyers spend on discovery disputes is, in those countries, poured into fights about pleading.

Because the rate of pleadings-motion practice has increased, the cost to courts and parties of those motions has also increased. In assessing systemic impact, that cost must be subtracted from whatever savings might result from the early dismissal of a small number of cases (as Hoffman reminds us, Hubbard contends that since lawyers already avoid filing weak cases in most situations, this number will be small). Unsuccessful motions will take more time and result in no cost savings to the court or the parties. A 12(b)(6) dismissal, if without prejudice, allows the plaintiff a second chance to plead more “facts,” and in some situations the plaintiff might have access to the necessary information. But those motions that result in a more detailed amended complaint but not dismissal are also unlikely to save costs, unless the amended complaint limits the issues (and thus discovery) in a way that the original would not have done. For example, it seems unlikely that the amended complaint in Branham v. Dolgencorp (in which the court dismissed as insufficient a complaint that clearly met the requirements of the then-existing negligence form pleading) saved any expense that would have been incurred under the original bare-bones slip-and-fall complaint. Even successful motions to dismiss on the pleadings will vary in the marginal cost savings of foregone case management and dispute resolution prior to settlement (court) plus foregone discovery expense (parties). And while some parties and courts might save costs, it will come at the expense of increased costs for other courts and litigants.

Second, early pleadings-based decisions require an undesirable change in judicial role. Hubbard argues that early dismissal is better for plaintiffs, even in the case of the intentionally biased judge. It is still better, he suggests, to lose sooner than later. But, Hoffman argues, this straw-man image of judicial malice ignores the real problem: the common combination of sparse facts and implicit bias causes even well-meaning judges to make worse decisions. It is becoming increasingly clear that all of us, including judges, perceive the world through a set of attitudes and stereotypes – implicit biases – that arise out of precisely the factors that Iqbal directs judges to use in making plausibility decisions, our “experience and common sense.” While judges can make an effort to become more aware of, and try to counteract, their own biases, doing so is much more difficult in situations in which information is sparse. Returning to the problem of information asymmetry, the information-poor plaintiff may not be able to provide a rich enough body of “facts” to convince a judge, perhaps against his experience and common sense, that a needed inference is plausible.

Hubbard may be correct that we will not soon have conclusive empirical evidence about the impact of Twiqbal on access to justice. Unfortunately, Hubbard’s Fresh Look discounts the ability of the civil procedure process to counter other problems. Information asymmetry? That is the problem, not the pleading rule (even though a different pleading rule could allow information exchange). Biased judges? That is the problem, not a pleading rule that helps empower and disguise that bias (when a different pleading rule would deter bias-based outcomes). As Hoffman’s article demonstrates, information matters and reliable process matters. The world prior to Iqbal was different in important ways, and we should not assume away its effects.

Erie and Equity

Apr 4, 2017 James E. PfanderAdd a Comment

Michael Morley has many skills we admire in a scholar: he is doggedly productive; he has an easy command of the established authorities; and he typically identifies sources that shed new light on the problem he has chosen to tackle. Perhaps best of all, Morley has a canny eye for the kind of project that has become ripe for careful exploration. His new article on the federal equity power confirms this.

We have enjoyed something of an equity renaissance in recent years. The Supreme Court has been busy, fashioning a body of federal equity law for application to a diverse array of problems. To be sure, the Court’s handiwork has drawn its share of criticisms, perhaps most pointedly from John Langbein. But it also has its share of defenders. In an elegant piece of writing (reviewed in JOTWELL), Sam Bray celebrated the Court’s new equity jurisprudence as a flexible body of principles drawn from the days of the divided bench. While Bray recognized that the Court’s equity might not pass muster as good history, he argued that it might nonetheless provide the foundation for a supple body of law.

Understanding the nature of federal equity power has become more pressing in the wake of the Court’s decision in Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center. There, the Court refused to treat an action to compel state compliance with a cooperative state-federal spending program as an entailment of the Supremacy Clause; instead, the Court explained that the right to seek an injunction to compel state official compliance with federal norms was a creature of federal equity. While such remedies were ordinarily available to enforce certain federal rights (as in Ex parte Young and its progeny), they were displaced in the particular case by a federal Spending Clause statute that appeared to place remedial control in the state’s overseers at the federal agency level. Private enforcement had been displaced.

Along comes Morley to make sense of the federal equity power. While he does not set out to solve the Armstrong problem, his paper possesses an admirable clarity. He would extend Erie to issues of remedial power that some federal courts continue to view as governed by the equity power of the federal forum. His approach would significantly curtail the availability of a freestanding body of federal equity in cases otherwise governed by state law. By contrast, when the substantive right traces to a foundation in federal law, Morley would recognize broader federal equity power.

In doing so, Morley marshals a good deal of common sense, pointing out that equitable remedies create the outcome disparities that ordinarily bring the Erie Doctrine into play. He also shows that one cannot fairly link the federal equity power to any positive source in the federal rules of civil procedure or in applicable federal jurisdictional statutes, thus leaving it exposed as a body of judge-made law to which the Erie doctrine (the “relatively unguided Erie choice”) applies with full force. Morley echoes conclusions that Steve Burbank also reached in a different context, arguing against the Court’s reliance on federal (rather than state) equitable principles in assessing the availability of Mareva injunctions in Grupo Mexicano.

One might fairly ask how much difference it will make if a federal court were to evaluate the propriety of preliminary injunctive relief under a federal or state standard; after all, most standards consider such matters as irreparable harm and likelihood of success on the merits. And a federal judge, sitting in diversity, will evaluate likelihood of success by looking at the merits of the claim under applicable state law. To the extent that equity calls for the exercise of judicial discretion in weighing matters of more or less, the way one frames the standard may matter less than the proverbial size of the chancellor’s foot. But where state law speaks in more absolute terms, either requiring or forbidding injunctions in specific settings, the choice of state or federal remedial law can make all the difference. In those settings, remedial choices have a more dramatic impact on outcomes and on forum preferences, thus triggering the concerns that continue to underpin Erie. When a state says no to an equitable remedy on matters governed by state law, federal courts should pay attention; after all, we would expect a state court to refrain from equitable enforcement of the federal norms that the Armstrong Court said were a matter for federal agency enforcement.

Morley teaches another important and subtle lesson. By describing the world of pre-Erie, free-wheeling federal equity and contrasting it with the more circumscribed perception of federal common law authority today, Morley helps us understand nineteenth-century perceptions of federal equity as a system of remedies. He also shows that it can be quite difficult to account for the particular content of much of the old doctrine. Sometimes equity took its cues from English practice, sometimes from perceptions of remedial adequacy at common law, sometimes from more localized considerations. In the welter of doctrines, one has difficulty distilling an essence of equity that readily translates to our very different world of litigation today, after the merger of law and equity. This offers a cautionary tale for a Court apparently devoted to dusting off the old books and plucking equity doctrines of old for use as the measure of federal equity today.