Special Masters' Incidence and Activity. Report to the Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Civil Rules and Its Subcommittee on Special Masters.

摘要

This report examines how pretrial and posttrial special master activity can take place under a rule designed to limit special master appointments to trial-related fact-finding in exceptional cases.8 In commissioning the Federal Judicial Center to conduct this study, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules' Subcommittee on Special Masters indicated its awareness that special master activity had expanded beyond its traditional boundaries. The subcommittee expressed an interest in learning how that phenomenon occurred in the face of a static and restrictive rule. More specifically, the subcommittee wanted to know how often and under what authority judges appointed special masters to serve at the pretrial and posttrial stages of litigation, whether any special problems arose in using special masters, how courts' use of special masters compared with their use of magistrate judges, and whether rule changes are needed. We responded to the subcommittee's request by examining docket entries and documents in a random national sample of closed cases in which appointment of a special master was considered. We followed up with interviews of judges, attorneys, and special masters in a select subset of that sample.