Eric Fink's Library tagged venue →  View Popular

"When civil cases involving one or more common questions of fact are pending in multiple district courts, 28 U.S.C. § 1407 empowers the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) to centralize the cases in a single district court for pretrial proceedings. If the JPML chooses to centralize a multidistrict action, it possesses broad discretion to select a transferee district and judge. While many litigants believe that the selection of one transferee district or judge over another can significantly impact the outcome of the litigation, they often describe the JPML’s rationale supporting selection as opaque and the resulting selection decision as difficult to predict. In order to clarify the criteria on which the JPML relies when choosing a transferee district and judge, this Note presents an empirical study of several years of JPML transfer orders. This Note argues that, while predicting where the JPML will centralize a multidistrict action is difficult, an understanding of statistical trends in JPML selection of transferee district and judge leads to a better understanding of the factors that are most likely to influence the JPML in any given multidistrict action. "

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litigation law CivilProcedure courts venue

A Delaware federal judge's transfer of part of a patent infringement case involving software giant Microsoft Corp. to the Eastern District of Texas is the latest example of the federal courts' shifting approach to patent litigation venue battles. The decision is also notable in that the Eastern District of Texas, known as a plaintiff-friendly venue, has itself recently started to transfer cases to other venues in compliance with recent federal appellate decisions.

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law litigation CivilProcedure venue courts

Protecting defendants from being forced to litigate in unfair (i.e., unduly burdensome or inconvenient) forums has long been a limiting principle in the exercise of federal judicial power. Rules governing federal service of process and venue play a critical role in providing this protection, as they are the initial means by which plaintiffs select the place of trial. Surprisingly, the courts and the academy have expended comparatively little analytical energy to analyze how well these rules protect defendants from litigating in unfair locations. Utilizing first principles of rule precision and information analysis not previously applied in this context, this Article asserts that the rules governing federal service of process and venue largely fail in this task. By focusing on the connections between the defendant and the state in which the federal district court sits, venue and service of process rules call for limited information that ultimately provides a poor proxy for federal forum fairness. The crudeness of this proxy could more easily be excused if it provided a substantial benefit in the form of administrative simplicity. Unfortunately, the current regime is nothing if not baroque, consisting of a maze of rules, tests, and standards that elicit information which is, ultimately, a highly imprecise approximation of a defendant’s ability to litigate in a particular location. Though perfection is impossible, we can certainly do better. Accordingly, courts and scholars should end their attempts to refine the current tests in the hopes of better scrutinizing suboptimal information. Instead, this Article proposes both a reevaluation of the information used to determine forum fairness, and a reassessment of whether courts or litigants are in the best position to optimally use this information.

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law CivilProcedure litigation venue