Related Dispositive Motions

Related Dispositive Motions

Summary judgment is one of four motions that ask a court to decide a case as a matter of law on facts treated as established. Rule 56(a) states the summary judgment version: the court shall grant the motion if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and that the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.¹ The Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, the Rule 12(c) motion for judgment on the pleadings, and the Rule 50(a) motion for judgment as a matter of law ask for the same kind of decision.² A question that asks how a party can end a case as a matter of law is therefore asking you to choose among four vehicles, and the right choice depends on where the case stands.

The four motions differ primarily in timing, and timing decides how the facts become "established" for the court's use. A case builds its record in stages, and each motion draws on the stage it reaches:

Motion	Typical moment	Record the court decides on
Rule 12(b)(6)	After the complaint	Factual allegations in the complaint
Rule 12(c)	After the answer and any reply	Allegations in the complaint, answer, and any reply
Rule 56	Typically after discovery	Facts in the movant's and the nonmovant's materials
Rule 50(a)	During a jury trial, once a party has been fully heard on an issue	Evidence admitted at trial, after the plaintiff's case or on the full trial record

The Rule 12 motions work on the pleadings, the Rule 56 motion on materials gathered in discovery, and the Rule 50(a) motion on the evidence the jury has heard.³ Summary judgment typically follows discovery.⁴ Rule 56(b) sets the outer limit: unless a local rule or the court sets a different time, a party may move at any time until 30 days after the close of all discovery.⁵

One lawsuit can pass through all four stages. Dana sues Brightline Couriers for injuries from a collision with Lee, a Brightline driver, and alleges that Lee was acting within the scope of his employment. A motion to dismiss takes that allegation as true, so Brightline's dispatch records, which show Lee on a personal errand, cannot be used against it unless the court lets them in and thereby changes the motion.⁶ The records matter at summary judgment, where the court reads the materials the parties cite, and the testimony of Dana's witnesses matters at trial, where the court reads the evidence the jury has heard. The two subsections below follow Dana's case through those records.

Pleading Motions Compared

The three motions in this subsection put the same question to the judge on three different records. A Rule 12(b)(6) motion is decided strictly on the factual allegations in the complaint, which the court presumes true for purposes of the motion.⁷ A complaint states those facts in numbered paragraphs, count by count, and the court reads the paragraphs and takes them as given.⁸ Other Rule 12 motions also work on the words of the pleading. A Rule 12(f) motion, for example, raises the question whether particular allegations, such as calling a car a "death trap," may be stricken.⁹

Because the court takes the allegations as true, a motion to dismiss tests their legal sufficiency and leaves open whether the plaintiff can prove them.¹⁰ A complaint need not be detailed to pass that test. A manufacturer served with a bare-bones complaint alleging a design defect in a sedan and an injuring accident had little more than minimal notice of the claim, yet because the claim was adequately, if not very fully, stated, a motion to dismiss was not available to it.¹¹

That limit leaves a gap, and summary judgment fills it. Berlin sues Porter for malicious prosecution and properly alleges that Porter brought a criminal action against him without probable cause or a proper purpose and that the action terminated in his favor. Porter knows that the court "continued" the criminal case without a finding instead of dismissing it, and if that disposition is not a favorable termination, Berlin cannot win.¹² The continuance lies outside the complaint, so a motion to dismiss cannot reach it. A summary judgment motion can, because it takes facts shown to be undisputed as established and asks whether, on those facts, the movant is entitled to prevail as a matter of law without a jury.¹³

The Rule 12(c) motion widens the record by one pleading. Its record for decision is the complaint and the answer, together with the reply, if any.¹⁴ The answer adds the defendant's version of the facts, but allegations in any pleading remain allegations, so this motion, like the Rule 12(b)(6) motion, asks about the pleaded facts and does not ask for proof of them.

A summary judgment motion is the first of the three decided on evidence. Its record is the facts in the movant's supporting materials and in any opposing materials that would be admissible at trial.¹⁵ Rule 56(c)(1)(A) lists what a party may cite: depositions, documents, electronically stored information, affidavits or declarations, stipulations, admissions, interrogatory answers, and other materials in the record. The list names the products of discovery and similar materials and does not name the complaint.¹⁶ Rule 56(c)(2) polices the admissibility limit by letting a party object that cited material cannot be presented in a form that would be admissible in evidence.¹⁷

The change of record changes who must produce what. If the movant's papers show that no genuine dispute of material fact exists, the burden shifts to the opposing party to introduce outside evidence rebutting that showing, and if she introduces none, the movant's evidence is taken as true and summary judgment usually follows. Burden shifting lets summary judgment pierce the pleadings and assess the sufficiency of the evidence, and the rules ease the nonmovant's burden by allowing her to show why she cannot yet present evidence.¹⁸ Dana's allegation that Lee was acting within the scope of his employment carried her past a motion to dismiss. Against a motion backed by Brightline's dispatch records, the same allegation needs evidence behind it.

Rule 12(d) governs the passage from one record to the other. A movant who presents material outside the complaint in support of a Rule 12(b)(6) or Rule 12(c) motion can convert the motion, because if the court does not exclude the material, it must treat the motion as one for summary judgment.¹⁹ A motion captioned as a motion to dismiss, with an affidavit attached, may therefore be a summary judgment motion in substance.

Had Brightline attached nothing and argued only that the complaint's allegations fail as a matter of law, the court would have taken the allegations as true, applied the law, and decided a pleading motion from start to finish.²¹ Conversion turns on whether outside material enters the record and stays there, whatever the motion is called.

The court makes a choice at the point of exclusion. When a party attaches affidavits or other appropriate materials to a pleading challenge in order to refute the existence of a genuine factual dispute, and clearly means to test whether the allegations have any factual basis as well as whether they suffice on their face, the judge has discretion to treat the challenge as a summary judgment motion. That discretion is typically exercised in favor of converting unless the responding party was so surprised as to be prejudiced, and the court can always delay the hearing until the respondent has had time to prepare.²²

Two reasons support this treatment. A court that read Brightline's affidavit and still presumed the complaint true would apply a test that ignores the evidence on the page, while the Rule 56(a) question, whether a genuine dispute of material fact remains and whether the movant is entitled to judgment, fits the evidence.²³ And Dana, answering a motion that asked only whether her complaint was legally sufficient, had no reason to file evidence, so time to respond cures the surprise.²⁴

Steps two and three do the work that students most often skip. An exam answer should name the record the court actually used before it states the standard.

Judgment as a Matter of Law

Judgment as a matter of law under Rule 50(a) is summary judgment's counterpart at trial. A party may move when it "has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial and the court finds that a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis for the party on that issue," and that can happen at various points during trial.²⁶ The Supreme Court has equated the summary judgment standard with the standard for a directed verdict, the older name for this motion. The trial judge must direct a verdict if, under the governing law, there can be but one reasonable conclusion as to the verdict, but must not do so if reasonable minds could differ about the import of the evidence.²⁷ Rule 56(a) ends on the same phrase, "as a matter of law."²⁸

The resemblance goes beyond a shared label. The Court described the inquiry under each motion as the same: whether the evidence presents a sufficient disagreement to require submission to a jury or whether it is so one-sided that one party must prevail as a matter of law.²⁹ The alignment has a practical payoff. A plaintiff who could not survive judgment as a matter of law at trial would lose after a full trial anyway, and discovery lets the court learn that sooner, so summary judgment with its burden shifting works as a pretrial filter akin to the directed verdict.³⁰

What separates the motions is the moment each is made, and the moment fixes the record. In the Court's words, "summary judgment motions are usually made before trial and decided on documentary evidence, while directed verdict motions are made at trial and decided on the evidence that has been admitted."³¹ The documentary record is the one Rule 56(c)(1)(A) describes: depositions, affidavits, interrogatory answers, and the other materials the parties cite.³² The record for a Rule 50(a) motion is the evidence admitted, whether the motion comes after the plaintiff's case or on the full trial record.³³

The shared test does not produce identical results, because many courts are more reluctant to grant summary judgment than judgment as a matter of law. In theory the judge asks the same question on both motions, whether the party opposing the motion has offered enough evidence that a reasonable factfinder could find in her favor, but the setting of the two motions is strikingly different.³⁴ On summary judgment the judge reads affidavits and other documents, the opponent answers with papers of her own and has no cross-examination to lean on, and the motion may arrive before the parties have fully developed their cases. A judge who senses that the case will turn on facts the record has not fully brought out will likely conclude that the parties should present their evidence at trial before the case is taken from the jury.³⁵

The Chamberlain case shows the pattern. The evidence was largely testimonial, and cross-examination might have revealed inconsistencies in the defendant's witnesses' testimony or impeached their credibility, so a court had ample ground to conclude that a full trial might reveal a submissible case. In such cases judges tend to give the party opposing summary judgment the benefit of the doubt by letting the case proceed.³⁶ A Rule 50(a) motion arrives after that testing has occurred, so a court that hesitated over affidavits may find at trial that the testimony cannot carry the party's burden.

An exam stem may describe a defendant who, after the plaintiff rests before the jury, asks for "summary judgment" because the testimony never established an element of the claim. The argument may be sound, but the motion has the wrong name. A party who has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial seeks relief under Rule 50(a), and the court decides that motion on the evidence admitted at trial.³⁸