Plaintiphobia in the Supreme Court
17 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2013 Last revised: 14 Jan 2014
Date Written: December 26, 2013
Abstract
Through the years debate has raged over whether the Supreme Court’s summary judgment trilogy and Twombly-Iqbal pleading decisions had significant practical effects. To address that question, this article introduces a new empirical measure: the difference between the pretrial-adjudication judgment rates for the defendant and for the plaintiff. Plotting that rates’ difference over time suggests that the cases on summary judgment and pleading, which were far and away the two most major alterations of pretrial disposition during the last three decades, had a markedly anti-plaintiff impact.
Keywords: civil procedure, pleading, summary judgment, empirical
JEL Classification: K40, K41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation