John Doe Defendants: Portents of Mystery, but Perhaps Not Diversity Jurisdiction

Tyler Mikulis proposes that courts allow cases with anonymous John Doe defendants "to continue under diversity jurisdiction" but that "plaintiffs ought to be required to make a good faith effort to identify the citizenship of any Doe defendants" and that courts should "allow limited, and temporary, jurisdictional discovery" to permit plaintiffs to do so.

A Sea Change in Class Action Jurisprudence? Olean v. Bumble Bee Foods LLC and Its Implications for Certifying Classes with Uninjured Members

Katherine Weaver discusses the Ninth Circuit's refusal in Olean v. Bumble Bee Foods LLC "to adopt a per se rule prohibiting class certification when the putative class contains more than a de minimis number of uninjured class members" and concludes that "lower courts grappling with this issue in the future should take into account the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in Mussat v. IQVIA, Inc." and treat classes as an "entity."

A Small World After All: Extending the Martindell Standard to Block Grand Jury Access to Sealed Foreign Discovery Materials Held at U.S. Law Firms

J. Sam Bonafede argues that to protect our civil litigation system, the Second Circuit should block DOJ's efforts to circumvent civil protective orders covering foreign-based discovery materials through well-timed grand jury subpoenas.

The Political Economy of Judicial Federalism by Michael E. Solimine

Professor Diego Zambrano’s recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Federal Expansion and the Decay of State Courts, is an institutional and comparative examination of federal and state courts as it pertains to judicial federalism. While judicial federalism has a long and complicated history, by most accounts, in the past several decades, both … Continue reading The Political Economy of Judicial Federalism by Michael E. Solimine

How Probable is “Plausible”? by Daniel A. Epstein

See Mr. Epstein's article in the Online Journal here The federal pleading threshold is probably the most confronted, least understood, threshold in American law. We know that to survive a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss in the post-Twombly and -Iqbal world, a pleading must state a claim to relief that is “plausible” on its face. … Continue reading How Probable is “Plausible”? by Daniel A. Epstein