Spencer's Civil Procedure, A Contemporary Approach, 7th (Interactive Casebook Series)

The 7th Edition of Civil Procedure: A Contemporary Approach is designed to provide a clear and actively engaging presentation of civil procedure in a manner that enables both students and professors to assess learning success throughout the course.

The Seventh Edition fully incorporates all amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure through December 1, 2024, as well as a few case law developments since the 2021 publication date of the Sixth Edition.

Extensive coverage of personal jurisdiction is provided in this edition given the Supreme Court’s continued engagement of the topic in recent years. This edition also discusses recent developments with respect to the complex issues surrounding the exercise of personal jurisdiction based on virtual contacts, corporate registration, and general jurisdiction as well as the standards for asserting personal jurisdiction in the class action context.

As with each new edition, the text is brought up-to-date with the latest Supreme Court decisions issued since the previous edition. Notable among these are National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024) (applying the Iqbal standard to find that the requisite plausibility standard had been satisfied); Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 597 U.S. 179 (2022) (legislators satisfied standard for intervention of right under Rule 24); Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, 144 S. Ct. 2117 (2024) (right to a jury in SEC actions seeking civil monetary penalties for fraud); Kemp v. United States, 596 U.S. 528 (2022) (a “mistake” under Rule 60(b)(1) includes a judge’s errors of law); Culley v. Marshall, 601 U.S. 377 (2024) (preliminary hearing not required in civil forfeiture cases); Dupree v. Younger, 598 U.S. 729 (2023) (legal challenges raised during summary judgment but not subsequently raised before the trial court may be raised and reviewed on appeal); and Brownback v. King, 592 U.S. 209 (2021) (district court order dismissing Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) claims based on governmental immunity was a judgment on the merits for purposes of the FTCA’s judgment bar).

Because the Supreme Court has remained active in the area of interpreting the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) since publication of the Sixth Edition, the Seventh Edition includes those new cases: Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC, 601 U.S. 246, 256 (2024), Coinbase, Inc. v. Suski, 602 U.S. 143, 147 (2024), Smith v. Spizzirri, 601 U.S. 472, 478 (2024), Morgan v. Sundance, 596 U.S. 411 (2022), and Viking River Cruises, Inc v. Moriana, 596 U.S. 639 (2022). Relevant decisions from the lower courts issued since the Sixth Edition are included throughout the book as appropriate as well.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) makes its first appearance in this edition in the context of discussing Rule 11, featuring Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443, 448 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), a case infamous for highlighting the misuse of generative AI to produce a court filing that hallucinated nonexistent legal precedent, and United States v. Cohen, 724 F. Supp. 3d 251, 258 (S.D.N.Y. 2024), which declined to impose sanctions for a similar misuse of the technology.

Finally, discussions pertaining to discovery, defaults and default judgments, voluntary and involuntary dismissals under Rule 41, judicial case management, arbitrability under the FAA, judgment as a matter of law, and the motion to alter or amend the judgment under Rule 59(e) are filled out with some additional detail and insights as compared with previous editions.

This edition, like the one that preceded it, integrates references to online assessment tools in the CasebookPlus™ platform. These consist of a bank of 300 multiple-choice questions that provide comprehensive assessment of the topics covered in this book, with detailed feedback consisting of explanations for both correct and incorrect responses. This feature provides an unparalleled opportunity to engage with the material actively as the course progresses and permits students and professors to determine the extent to which the material is being learned. The bank of questions also serves as excellent preparation for the civil procedure component of the Multistate Bar Exam and the NextGen Bar Exam.