Procedure, Responsibility, and Institutional Design
I write about civil procedure and institutional design — not as an academic exercise, but because the same structural failures that distort litigation outcomes also distort governance, regulation, and public trust.
My scholarship focuses on how institutions make decisions under conditions of information overload — and how responsibility, legitimacy, and judgment break down when systems can no longer determine what happened with sufficient clarity to justify coercive outcomes.
This work is grounded in procedural realism in the tradition of Roscoe Pound — the view that procedure is not a neutral framework but an active instrument of institutional power, and that its failures are systemic rather than moral. Where Pound diagnosed the gap between law in books and law in action, this scholarship diagnoses the gap between procedure as designed and procedure as it operates in a data-saturated world. The task, as Pound understood it, is not to exhort participants to behave better inside broken systems. It is to redesign the systems.
Methodological foundation — Procedural RealismFederal civil procedure was designed for a world of information scarcity. That world has disappeared. This Article argues that the resulting dysfunction of civil discovery reflects an epistemic failure, not a moral one — procedures designed to manage scarce, human-generated evidence cannot reliably transform modern, machine-generated data into knowledge usable for adjudication. As a result, discovery increasingly allocates outcomes by endurance and leverage rather than by merits.
Drawing on Roscoe Pound's procedural realism, it argues that discovery has inverted from a truth-seeking mechanism into a form of economic coercion, and proposes FRCP 2.0 — a surgical reconstruction of Rules 26 through 37 — to restore judicial ownership of fact development, anchor discovery to disputed elements, and incorporate computational assistance without delegating human judgment. Reconstructing discovery is not an exercise in innovation. It is an act of institutional renewal.
"Litigation is a civilized society's substitute for bloodshed."
Civil justice is economic infrastructure. When it becomes high-friction — slow, discovery-heavy, and expensive — it functions as a broad enforcement tax on commerce. This paper constructs an auditable Justice Drag model from measured anchors: $248B in tort overhead as a measured floor, $1.32T as the central annual estimate, representing 4.3% of GDP.
The paper documents the structural increase from 0.62% of GDP in 1950 to 2.07% in 2022, models the capital-velocity cost of a 34.8-month median filing-to-trial, and estimates that FRCP 2.0 at scale would recover $111B–$1.04T in annual value. The case for reform is not merely procedural. It is macroeconomic.
The institutional defense of civil litigation is, at its economic foundation, a time-arbitrage business. Elite defense firms bill at rates between $1,500 and $3,000 per hour. The revenue model depends on duration. The defense does not need to win. It needs to persist.
This paper describes proof-first architecture — assembling the evidentiary record before filing rather than through discovery — and demonstrates how it converts preparation into procedural velocity. Five discrete mechanisms, each grounded in existing Federal Rules, compress timelines from 54 months to 16–22 months. Duration elasticity exceeds recovery elasticity by 1.9×. The fund that controls procedure controls returns. No new rules required.
FRCP 2.0 is not only a procedural framework. It is a platform architecture. This paper describes the technical and institutional design of a smart-enforcement infrastructure — a repeatable, auditable system that converts disputed obligations into determinations and payments with predictable cost and timing.
Three layers: AI-driven proof architecture and evidentiary sensemaking; blockchain-anchored audit trail and judgment registry; cryptographic smart-contract escrow that executes payment automatically upon determination. The $70–75B e-discovery burden exists because the current system requires retrospective reconstruction of facts that in a proof-first environment would never need to be reconstructed. FRCP 2.0 is as easy as ABC.