When Should a Case Be Dismissed? The Economics of Pleading and Summary Judgment Standards

Authors

Keith N. Hylton, Boston University School of LawFollow

Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

ISSN

2156-6208

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Language

en-US

Abstract

This paper applies a simple economic framework to the choice between pleading and summary judgment as points at which a claim can be dismissed. It concludes generally that pleading standards should vary with the evidentiary demands of the associated legal standards and the social costs of litigation. The common law's imposition of higher pleading standards for fraud claims is consistent with this proposition. The theory implies that the rigorous summary judgment standards that have been developed by antitrust courts should lead to a correspondingly rigorous assessment at the pleading stage.

Comments

Updated with published version of paper on 9/24/22

Working paper available on SSRN

Recommended Citation

Keith N. Hylton, When Should a Case Be Dismissed? The Economics of Pleading and Summary Judgment Standards , in 16 Supreme Court Economic Review 39 (2008).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/788