Rule 37 Discovery Sanctions-The Need for Supreme Court Ordered National Uniformity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Joel Slawotsky"Nearly a quarter century has elapsed since the Supreme Court last addressed in a significant fashion discovery sanctions under Rule 371 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.2 In the ensuing years, the federal district and appellate courts 3 have been without further guidance with respect to policies and procedures for sanction imposition.4 However, notwithstanding the dearth of Supreme Court opinions on discovery sanctions, it is generally * Joel Slawotsky is an attorney with RUBINBAUM LLP in New York.The author is a former law clerk to the Honorable Charles H. Tenney, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.1. Subsequent to its initial adoption in 1938, Rule 37 has been amended four times, most recently in 1993.The historical perspective of Rule 37 is provided in detail in the official notes to the Rule and they require no further elaboration.With respect to the 1993 amendments, the sense that discovery abuse had become rampant led to their development.See Craig Enoch, Incivility in the Legal System?Maybe It's the Rules, 47 SMU L. REV.199, 222 (1994).2. See National Hockey League v. Metropolitan Hockey Club, Inc., 427 U.S. 639 (1976).While the Supreme Court mentioned Rule 37 in three subsequent opinions, Cunningham v. Hamilton County, Ohio, 119 S. Ct. 1915 (1999), Insurance Corp. of Ireland, Ltd.V. Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinee, 456 U.S. 699 (1982), and Roadway Express, Inc. v. Piper, 447 U.S. 752 (1980), it was in National Hockey, 427 U.S. at 641-43, that the Court articulated the goals of Rule 37 and provided "some guidance" to the district and circuit courts.It should be noted that the Court did uphold the trial court's Rule 37 sanctions each of the last four times the Court reviewed discovery sanctions.See Cunningham, 119 S. Ct. at 1922-23; Insurance Corp. of Ireland, 456 U.S. at 709; Roadway Express, 447 U.S. at 767-68; National Hockey, 427 U.S. at 643.3. While this article deals with sanctions in federal courts, the problem of discovery abuse exists in state courts as well.See
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".