Hacker News Reader

Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

For non lawyers: a request for summary judgment is something any lawyer will do, possibly multiple times in a case. And the vast majority of the time, they’re denied. It does not mean that their case is a slam dunk or anything; just that they want the judge to prematurely end the matter in their favor.

It’s almost a useless motion, but because it has worked sometimes, your lawyer would be stupid to not try it.

In other words, an article saying that a party requested summary judgment doesn’t really mean anything. I’m almost certain the other party filed one as well.

View on HN

According to a 2006 study of Federal district courts,

> Summary judgment motions are filed in fewer cases than the bench and bar might expect. They are filed in approximately 13.7% of cases, with this proportion varying between 9.7% and 22% depending on the district. Thus, summary judgment motions are not filed in every case in the federal courts, as it sometimes seems to judges and lawyers

[1] https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...

EDIT: Correction, study published in 2018 of cases closed in 2015. Not sure where 2006 came from....

So many cases in the legal profession are settled out of court almost immediately, I wouldn't take many statistics like this at face value.

Once you filter out the majority of legal cases that accrue, say, less than a thousand total billable hours, I imagine filing summary judgements in these "serious" cases is quite common.

In this particular instance though, a the summary judgement ruling is pretty much going to be what the whole case is about. A trial would be to determine the facts of the case, like "Did archive.org distribute copies of books?", and there's really no question about that. A summary judgement asks the question "Assume we did what the plaintiff says we did, do we have a right to do that anyway?". And that's really the only question this case will answer.

That's not entirely true I don't think?

A jury trial determines facts, but a bench trial can still occur.The difference between a bench trail is things like discovery, which can be enormously expensive.

They did, and it's to prevent the Archive from lending out digital copies at all. https://www.eff.org/document/hachette-v-internet-archive-hac...

A summary judgement can also be strategically useful as it tends to force the other party to spell out their legal arguments in detail earlier in the case. Even if the SJ is denied it can be beneficial in targeting discovery requests.

It’s said that it avoids objections of inadequate counseling at a higher court. How true is that?

That doesn’t sound “American”legal.

In the US, summary judgment is a procedure used in civil cases, typically one party seeking money from the other. Ineffective assistance of counsel is a criminal concept.

Not for civil cases. To win on summary judgment, there essentially has to be no genuine dispute of facts. So you often do not bother filing for summary judgment.

It's more appropriate when the dispute can be decided on purely legal grounds that don't need a juries input.

Ah, so basically the Internet Archive is asking the judge, "hypothetically, assuming we did everything they are accusing us of, we assert that the law would still be on our side, yeah?"

Whereas if the Internet Archive suspected what they were being accused of wasn't legal, summary judgement wouldn't be appropriate, and they might want to go to trial to try to prove their case that they aren't actually doing what they're being accused of?

It's not quite so far as "assuming," but pretty much.

There is no point in a summary judgement in a "he said she said" or when there is conflicting evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com