The Preservation and Rejuvenation of Aggregate Litigation: A Systemic Imperative

Forgive me if I begin on an autobiographical note. Approximately fifty-five years ago I was a young lawyer transitioning into academe when I became indentured¿enthusiastically, I admit¿to my professional father, procedure teacher, and summer employer following my second law school year, Professor Benjamin Kaplan, of the Harvard Law School. He was then the Reporter for the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Through a series of byzantine circumstances, I became an informal assistant reporter.

I was then the Associate Director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, and one of my assignments was to convince Ben to present to the Advisory Committee a group of rule revisions I had developed relating to transnational litigation, an obscure and arcane matter at the time. That proved a relatively easy sell, and the proposals navigated the statutory rulemaking process successfully. But the quid pro quo was my commitment to help Ben with what was then at the top of the Advisory Committee¿s agenda¿the revision of the Federal Rules relating to claim and party joinder.