Now that I’m in the real world, I’ve come to realize most people not only have not heard of the FJC, they also may have never visited. If you’re ever in DC the FJC is in the large glass building right next to Union Station. You don’t even have to catch a cab to get there, and the people are very nice.

By the way, I spent a dozen years working for the Federal Government at the start of my legal career, but I used a lot of energy trying to stamp out acronyms in our written material. That was so long ago, however (I left in 1988), that FJC might not have existed yet.

FJC = Federal Judicial Center = www.fjc.gov

Difficult to link to specific portions of the fjc site because they use frames and pdfs (icky) but I believe it is Willging & Wheatman, An Empirical Examination of Attorneys’ Choice of Forum in Class Action Litigation (2005). (There are several follow-up studies as well.)

But from this particular report see, e.g., p. 4: “Our data, however, lend little support to the view that state and federal courts differ greatly in how they resolve class actions. For example, state and federal courts were equally unlikely to certify cases filed as class actions. Both state and federal courts certified classes in fewer than one in four cases filed as class actions.” etc.

I seem to recall that CAFA passed in February, 2005; this report was released shortly after the date of passage due to political pressure from the anti-empirical-evidence lobby (the AEEL!).

[If that doesn’t do it for you, refer to NCSC (”National Center for State Courts”) statistics here: www.ncsconline.org/D_Research/csp/CSP_Main_Page.html This data is not CAFA-specific but does consistently point to the fact that there is no tort explosion going on in state courts, that individuals rarely win, etc.)

CAFA = ridiculous

The FJC’s report damning this legislation was held back (!) until *after* the vote.

This is a true story.