John B. Snyder, III (Baltimore) has published Dispositions Unsettled: What Tax Court Procedure Can Teach Us About Federal Civil Procedure, 36 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 359 (2010). Here is the abstract:

In the federal district courts, cases may be disposed of any of three ways: by trial, by motion, or by settlement. The district courts have embraced settlement through managerial techniques, while Supreme Court decisions have granted them expansive powers to dispose of cases on motion. Simultaneously, legal scholars have argued that settlement and dispositions on motion threaten the legal system itself, depriving litigants of the right to jury trials and obscuring the law. Few attempts have been made to reconcile these positions or to provide guidance to the district courts beyond encouraging more jury trials.

This article examines the attitudes of both the judicial and scholarly communities toward the three forms of disposition. It concludes that, far from resting on fundamental issues of law, these groups’ conceptions of the relative values of the modes of disposition are simply based on different normative understandings of the purpose of disposition itself. Courts see their goal as resolution, providing results in particular cases. The academic community, on the other hand, considers public vindication of rights, not specific results, as the primary goal of disposition.

As a illustration of the fact that the district courts’ and the academy’s views merely rest on different conceptions of the role of disposition, this article reviews the very different view of dispositions entertained by the United States Tax Court, which values trial and settlement equally, while disfavoring dispositive motions. Using the practices and attitudes of the tax court as examples, the article then provides prescriptions to enable the district courts to reconcile the goals of resolution and vindication and lend dignity to each of the three forms of disposition.