Document Type

Foreword

Publication Date

1998

Publication Information

73 Notre Dame L. Rev. 891 (1997-1998)

Abstract

In 1998 the legal community of the United States should stop and take stock of two epochal events in the history of the federal judicial system. One of those events, as readers of a procedure symposium do not need to be told, is the sixtieth anniversary of the introduction of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I shall have more to say about that event presently, but I want first to devote a few paragraphs to a second event, one which proceduralists ignore at their peril. The event I have in mind is the initiation of a new era of federal constitutional adjudication. That era took definitive shape on April 25, 1938, when the Supreme Court announced two decisions of transcendent importance to the articulation of the role of the federal courts in American life in the modem era. Legal academia routinely assigns one of these decisions to the civil procedure course and the other to the constitutional law course, thereby obscuring from our students view the significance that those two decisions have when they are considered together. The first of these decisions is Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins; the second is United States v. Carolene Products Co.

Comments

Reprinted with permission of the Notre Dame Law Review.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.