Wednesday, January 06, 2016
Had my first law school class of the term last night. I'm not sure how long I've been doing it now-- the case I use for the first session is from 2007, so I probably started a year or so later, since one of my rules is that I do not use actions which are active. In years past I have used exclusively tort cases, on the theory that all of the students are familiar with tort concepts, and that the basic skills and the basic rules of discovery are the same regardless of the type of dispute. Now I am beginning to wonder if those principles are going to hold up. First of all, I have long suspected that I will be lucky if I outlive the tort system as it presently operates in the US. It is not sustainable in its current form, and as Sam Cooke has told us, a change is going to come.
The other issue is that discovery practice in the commercial realm has changed radically, morphing towards something that much more closely resembles the model of the Federal Rules. This makes a good deal of sense, I think. The goal of discovery is, ultimately, to aide in the efficient resolution of disputes, but a look at the annotations to CPLR § 3101 tells a different story: discovery is actually a separate battlefield a great deal of the time, a tactic, or set of tactics used to thwart resolution on the merits, or at least to hold it at bay until conditions for one or the other party become more favorable.
So, yeah. we have a lot to talk about.
The other issue is that discovery practice in the commercial realm has changed radically, morphing towards something that much more closely resembles the model of the Federal Rules. This makes a good deal of sense, I think. The goal of discovery is, ultimately, to aide in the efficient resolution of disputes, but a look at the annotations to CPLR § 3101 tells a different story: discovery is actually a separate battlefield a great deal of the time, a tactic, or set of tactics used to thwart resolution on the merits, or at least to hold it at bay until conditions for one or the other party become more favorable.
So, yeah. we have a lot to talk about.
// posted by Bill @ 10:01 AM 
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