Procedure, Politics, Prediction, and Professors: A Response to Professors Burbank and Purcell

Abstract

In this article I comment on four themes in the work of Stephen Burbank and Edward Purcell, two of the leading scholars of American civil procedure and procedural reform: (1) the relationship of substantive and procedural law; (2) the place of politics in procedural reform; (3) the difficulty of reliably predicting consequences of procedural reform; and (4) challenges that the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) and similar reforms present for law professors, both in their roles as researchers and writers, and as teachers of would-be lawyers.