Civil Procedure

This is a course about the processes that courts follow in deciding disputes in noncriminal cases. It deals with the way in which conflicts are framed for courts, the stages through which litigation goes, the division of power among the various decision-makers in the legal system and between the state and federal courts, the territorial limitations on the exercise of judicial power, the principles that define the consequences of a decision once a court has finished with a case, and the special opportunities and problems of litigation involving multiple disputants. Throughout the course, considerable attention will be devoted to the ways in which our beliefs about fairness (in particular those embodied in the U.S. Constitution) shape the design of the process.