The Advisory Committee on Civil Rules asked the Federal Judicial Center to examine summary judgment practice across federal district courts as a means of assessing the potential impact of the proposed amendments to Rule 56. This report examined summary judgment activity in 179,969 cases terminated in the 78 federal district courts that had fully implemented the CM/ECF reporting system in Fiscal Year 2006.

The Federal Judicial Center has undertaken a long-term study of the impact of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) on the resources of the federal courts. The third interim report was delivered to the committee on April 16, 2007 for discussion at its April 19 meeting and reports on the results of statistical tests of the impact of CAFA on federal courts across the country.

Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 permits attorneys to cite to federal courts of appeals their unpublished opinions issued 2007 or later. Unpublished opinions issued before 2007 may be cited to the courts if permitted by the courts' local rules. This document is a summary table of the federal courts of appeals' local rules on citations to their unpublished opinions issued before 2007. The table is reprinted at 241 F.R.D. 328 (2007).

When a United States senator asked the federal judiciary to look into sealed settlement agreements, the Civil Rules Advisory Committee asked the Federal Judicial Center to undertake a research effort to discover how often settlement agreements are sealed in federal court and under what circumstances. The Center learned that the sealing of settlement agreements in federal court is rare, and typically the only part of the court record kept secret by the sealing of a settlement agreement is the amount of settlement. This article describes how the Center developed its research project to address the senator's concerns.

From 81 Chicago-Kent Law Review, 439-62 (2006).

For the published results of the research project, see Sealed Settlement Agreements in Federal District Courts (2004).