Professor Howard M. Erichson, Maria L. Marcus Distinguished Research Scholar, teaches Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, Professional Responsibility, and Torts. He is a leading scholar on complex litigation, particularly the problem of resolving mass disputes, and was twice elected Fordham Law School Teacher of the Year in 2012 and in 2023. In this Q&A below, Erichson talked about his current scholarship, which focuses on severance and personal jurisdiction, and how it relates to his teaching.
What scholarship projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently doing research for two law review articles on different aspects of civil procedure—one about severance and another about personal jurisdiction.
OK, let’s start with “severance.” What is it and why are you writing about it?
When parties are improperly joined—for example, if multiple plaintiffs sue a defendant in one lawsuit but their claims don’t arise from the same transaction—a judge has the power to “sever” the lawsuit into multiple actions. This sounds straightforward, but the cases in this area get confusing, especially when they talk about the scope of a judge’s discretion. This project grows out of my work on the Wright and Miller treatise on Federal Practice and Procedure, where I am responsible for the volumes about joinder and misjoinder of parties. I’ve seen too much confusion in the way lawyers and judges talk about severance, so my goal in this article is to bring some clarity to this very technical but unfortunately muddy corner of civil procedure.
Turning to personal jurisdiction, what’s the nature of your project?
Personal jurisdiction is about territorial limits on the power of courts. In terms of law practice, it matters to lawyers who are deciding where they can file a client’s lawsuit. As a theoretical matter, it goes to the heart of questions about judicial power and due process of law. In a famous line of cases, the Supreme Court has developed the law of personal jurisdiction as a matter of constitutional due process. Law professors and lawyers love to complain that the law of personal jurisdiction is incoherent. My project is to address these criticisms by offering a defense of the logic of personal jurisdiction. It’s not that I agree with every decision in this area; there are absolutely cases I would have decided differently. But, unlike many of my academic colleagues, I see a coherence to this area of law that makes sense in terms of allocating judicial authority.
Why did you choose to focus on personal jurisdiction now?
The Supreme Court has shown a lot of interest in personal jurisdiction in recent years, and this topic creates some weird alliances of justices. I worry that the rising volume of attacks—both from the right (originalist attacks on due process precedents) and from the left (concerns that plaintiffs are too constrained in where they can sue defendants)—may encourage a coalition of justices to unravel an area of law that works reasonably well. By offering a clear picture of how the law of personal jurisdiction (or at least most of it) makes sense, I hope to ward off an unraveling that would do more harm than good. In the process, I am looking to offer a clear account of personal jurisdiction that courts and lawyers will find useful.
How does your research on severance and personal jurisdiction relate to your teaching?
Personal jurisdiction is one of the biggest and hardest topics that 1L students encounter in their course on Civil Procedure, which I teach every year. Every year I face the challenge of helping students grapple with the Supreme Court’s cases in this area. So, it’s incredibly useful to me, as a teacher, to spend time thinking deeply about the logic of these cases and the ways in which they are (or are not) justified in terms of judicial power and procedural policy. As for severance, that’s a topic that comes up briefly in my 1L Civil Procedure course, but it figures more prominently in my upper-level class on Complex Litigation.
It sounds like your students will really benefit from insights you get from this research.
Absolutely. But the benefits go both ways. It’s not just that my research makes me a better teacher, it’s also that my teaching makes me a better scholar. The classroom is a constant source of ideas for my research as students ask questions and as I continually refresh my classes and think about what’s unclear and unknown. After all, curiosity is the key to good scholarship, and my students’ curiosity fuels my own.
