An Update on the New Federal Expert Discovery Rule: The Expert's Perspective

In December 2010, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 (FRCP 26) was amended to protect certain communications between a litigating counsel and its experts from discovery. The rule protects communications and draft expert reports and lays out new disclosure requirements for the so-called “treating physician” expert. Attorneys and experts who first read the rule commonly agreed that the rule would make expert discovery more streamlined and cost-effective while preserving an opposing party's right to obtain facts and data that were considered by the expert in formulating its opinion. However, many commentators on the amended FRCP 26 warned practitioners not to fully embrace the literal meaning of the rule until it was field tested by litigating attorneys and the courts had the opportunity to interpret a number of loosely defined terms during the course of resolving federal discovery disputes. Now, almost a year after the rule's first official publication, several courts have interpreted the key terms that appear in the rule and have expressed their interpretations in written opinions. The judicial holdings of these cases cover different aspects of the rule, and it is still too early to determine how the majority of federal courts will ultimately interpret it. However, a review of current case law indicates that the courts have, thus far, taken a practical and literal view of the amended rule and have not expanded or limited its scope beyond what was generally believed to be the intent of the rule. As a result, practitioners are still hopeful that the rule will make working with an expert more efficient and less cumbersome, to the benefit of experts, attorneys, and ultimately their clients.     

Shop un á Son Gout

An analysis of a number of books that deal with various aspects of shopping and marketing, offering insights into the way consumers are targeted by marketers and curious and fascinating aspects of consumer behavior.     

A Hohfeldian Analysis of Hobbesian Rights

This paper has a threefold purpose: first, to criticize the customary application of Hohfeld’s theory of rights to Hobbes’s juridical/political theory that reduces all Hobbesian rights to Hohfeldian privileges; second, to defend the appropriateness of a proper application of a Hohfeldian analysis of rights to Hobbes’s theory by responding to criticisms offered by Eleanor Curran; and, lastly, to reveal the value a Hohfeldian analysis offers in clarifying a Hobbesian right that has been generally misunderstood in the literature. I argue that a Hohfeldian analysis helps make sense of the complex juridical relationships between the sovereign, the perpetrator of crime, and the victim of crime involved in Hobbes’s treatment of the sovereign’s right to punish.