Episode 8

THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL APPLICATION OF SUMMARY JUDGMENT IN FACTUALLY INTENSIVE INQUIRIES – (2009-2010 – Craig M. Reiser*)
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=jcl

I. Introduction

Although summary judgment was not always favored, the 1986 trilogy has transformed the device into a widely accepted and encouraged means of adjudicating without trial. Aimed to preserve judicialresources by “filtering out cases not worthy of trial,” summary judgment generally serves as the post-pleading analog to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which allows for pre-trial dismissal for failure to state a claim. Thus, summary judgment generally occurs after discovery and recognizes that going behind the pleadings can establish that triable issues do not, in fact, exist.

While the 1986 “trilogy” redefined the rules governing the summary judgment procedure by “providing a logical framework for deciding how and when it can be used,” the determination still is, in many respects, a product of judicial discretion. This Comment analyzes the extent to which the discretion inherent in the standard provides an avenue for judges to distort it, and evaluates the constitutional consequences of doing so. Specifically, wrongful application of the summary judgment standard could run afoul of the Seventh Amendment guarantee to “preserve[]” the right to a jury trial in cases at law. Although it is well-settled that summary judgment does notgenerally violate the Seventh Amendment, this verity is a mere product of the fact that the Seventh Amendment does not extend to cases where the summary judgment standard is met—that is, where there are no material factual issues to be tried. Thus, the Seventh Amendment guarantee of a right to trial by jury is violated by grants of summary judgment where there are “genuine issue[s] as to . . . material fact[s]” and a right to jury trial exists, because such grants entail a judge deciding questions reserved for the jury, Inappropriately granting summary judgment in such cases, then, is a particularly attractive option for the federal judge with an otherwise
crowded docket.

This Comment concludes that application of summary judgment in practice has the propensity to diverge from its legal standard in a way that brings question to its ostensibly settled constitutional basis— at least in factually intensive inquiries.

The Comment continues in this Part by: more fully discussing the summary judgment standard along with the device’s history, and discussing when there is a Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury.

Part II outlines the excessive force standard, and addresses the constitutional implications of wrongful summary judgment grants by analyzing four instructive cases in detail.

Finally, Part III discusses the policy considerations behind inappropriate summary judgment grants, and how judicial efficiency considerations bear on the constitutional violations the summary judgment standard may, at times, allow.