Deborah R. Hensler
Volume 77, Special Issue, 39-41
As long as I have researched, written, and taught complex civil litigation, Rick Marcus has been my go-to person to find out what new civil procedure rules are in the making, why, and in response to whose pleas. I am not certain when I first met Rick, but I think it was when I was still the research director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ), long before I joined legal academia. From the inception of the ICJ, civil procedure reform was central to its agenda, and discovery was high on the ICJ’s sponsors’ agenda. To many, particularly those who regularly found themselves on the defense side, discovery was (and is) the great bugaboo of United States civil litigation. It was too much. It took too long, cost too much, and required too much attention from corporate leaders; this was the mantra of those who sought to rein in the discovery practice by amending the federal rules.