Court Opinion

ID: 9478875
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:01:24.536421+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:40.616426
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Rule 16(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure authorizes a district court to “direct the attorneys for the parties and any unrepresented parties to appear before it for a [pretrial] conference.” The word I have italicized could be thought to carry the negative implication that no represented party may be directed to appear — that was the panel’s conclusion — but I hesitate to so conclude in a case that can be decided on a narrower ground.
The main purpose of the pretrial conference is to get ready for trial. For that purpose, only the attorneys need be present, unless a party is acting as his own attorney. The only possible reason for wanting a represented party to be present is to enable the judge or magistrate to explore settlement with the principals rather than with just their agents. Some district judges and magistrates distrust the willingness or ability of attorneys to convey to their clients adequate information bearing on the desirability and terms of settling a case in lieu of pressing forward to trial. The distrust is warranted in some cases, I am sure; but warranted or not, it is what lies behind the concern that the panel opinion had stripped the district courts of a valuable settlement tool — and this at a time of heavy, and growing, federal judicial caseloads. The concern may well be exaggerated, however. The panel opinion may have had little practical significance; it is the rare attorney who will invite a district judge’s displeasure by defying a request to produce the client for a pretrial conference.
The question of the district court’s power to summon a represented party to a settlement conference is a difficult one. On the one hand, nothing in Rule 16 or in any other rule or statute confers such a power, and there are obvious dangers in too broad an interpretation of the federal courts’ inherent power to regulate their procedure. One danger is that it encourages judicial high-handedness (“power corrupts”); several years ago one of the district judges in this circuit ordered Acting Secretary of Labor Brock to appear before him for settlement discussions on the very day Brock was scheduled to appear before the Senate for his confirmation hearing. The broader concern illustrated by the Brock episode is that in their zeal to settle cases judges may ignore the value of other people’s time. One reason people hire lawyers is to economize on their own investment of time in resolving disputes. It is pertinent to note in this connection that Oat is a defendant in this case; it didn’t want its executives’ time occupied with this litigation.
On the other hand, die Not bricht Eisen [“necessity breaks iron”]. Attorneys often are imperfect agents of their clients, and the workload of our district courts is so heavy that we should hesitate to deprive them of a potentially useful tool for effecting settlement, even if there is some difficulty in finding a legal basis for the tool. Although few attorneys will defy a district court’s request to produce the client, those few cases may be the very ones where the client’s presence would be most conducive to settlement. If I am right that Rule 16(a) empowers a district court to summon unrepresented parties to a pretrial conference only because their presence may be necessary to get ready for trial, we need not infer that the draftsmen meant to forbid the summoning of represented parties for purposes of exploring settlement. The draftsmen may have been unaware that district courts were asserting a power to command the presence of a represented party to explore settlement. We should hesitate to infer inadvertent prohibitions.
The narrowly “legal” considerations bearing on the question whether district courts have the power asserted by the magistrate in this case are sufficiently equivocal to authorize — indeed compel — us to consider the practical consequences for settlement before deciding what the answer should be. Unfortunately we have *658insufficient information about those consequences to be able to give a confident answer, but fortunately we need not answer the question in this case — so clear is it that the magistrate abused his discretion, which is to say, acted unreasonably, in demanding that Oat Corporation send an executive having “full settlement authority” to the pretrial conference. This demand, which is different from a demand that a party who has not closed the door to settlement send an executive to discuss possible terms, would be defensible only if litigants had a duty to bargain in good faith over settlement before resorting to trial, and neither Rule 16 nor any other rule, statute, or doctrine imposes such a duty on federal litigants. See Strandell v. Jackson County, 838 F.2d 884, 887 (7th Cir.1987); Kothe v. Smith, 771 F.2d 667, 669 (2d Cir.1985); Del Rio v. Northern Blower Co., 574 F.2d 23, 26 (1st Cir.1978); Perez v. Maine, 760 F.2d 11, 12 (1st Cir.1985); National Ass’n of Government Employees, Inc. v. National Federation of Federal Employees, 844 F.2d 216, 223 (5th Cir.1988); Advisory Committee Notes to 1983 Amendments to Fed. R.Civ.P. 16. There is no federal judicial power to coerce settlement. Oat had made clear that it was not prepared to settle the case on any terms that required it to pay money. That was its prerogative, which once exercised made the magistrate’s continued insistence on Oat’s sending an executive to Madison arbitrary, unreasonable, willful, and indeed petulant. This is apart from the fact that since no one officer of Oat may have had authority to settle the case, compliance with the demand might have required Oat to ship its entire board of directors to Madison. Ultimately Oat did make a money settlement, but there is no indication that it would have settled sooner if only it had complied with the magistrate’s demand for the dispatch of an executive possessing “full settlement authority.”
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof: We should reverse the district court without reaching the question whether there are any circumstances in which a district court may compel a party represented by counsel to attend a pretrial conference.