Author Description

This is the 2006 Supplement to Hazard, Tait and Fletcher's Cases and Materials on Pleading and Procedure, State and Federal, Ninth Edition. The authors have thoroughly revised and updated this popular casebook for the Ninth Edition. It features a comprehensive treatment of territorial and subject matter jurisdiction and of the Erie doctrine. The authors have substantially revised and reorganized chapters on pleading, joinder and class actions, discovery, disposition without trial, and trial. The treatment of basic preclusion doctrine has been reorganized, expanded, and clarified. Updates incorporate all the latest changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the latest Supreme Court decisions, and the latest statutes, including the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. The authors have added new sections on procedural due process, litigation costs and access to justice, Internet jurisdiction, electronic discovery, discovery ethics, settlement and court-annexed alternative dispute resolution, and judicial control of damage awards. There is increased attention throughout to comparative law perspectives on American procedure, including differences from, and conflicts with, other legal systems concerning discovery, jurisdiction, and judicial control of litigation. Material has been condensed, rewritten and reoriented to concentrate more on illuminating the principal cases and the major policy issues in the field. Tighter editing of principal cases and elimination of marginal materials have reduced the book's length by more than 100 pages from the Eighth Edition.