Litigation Discovery and Corporate Governance: The Missing Story About the "Genius of American Corporate Law"

Strikingly absent from the entire corporate governance and corporate litigation debate is a unique feature of American civil procedure that deserves special attention: the modern civil discovery regime. This Article attempts to fill this gap. We argue that modern discovery, first established by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, has had a profound impact on the evolution of shareholder litigation, corporate governance, and the culture of corporate disclosure in the United States.