Also known as: undue burden framework · undue burden test · undue-burden test · undue burden standard · undue burden · Casey framework
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
2 senses
A procedural rule permitting a party to withhold electronically stored information from discovery when the sources are not reasonably accessible due to undue burden or cost. The responding party must demonstrate inaccessibility on a motion to compel or for protective order. A court may still order production upon a showing of good cause by the requesting party.
A standard for reviewing regulations that substantially interfere with protected constitutional interests. The regulation is invalid if it places a substantial obstacle in the path of the protected interest. The framework requires courts to assess the practical effect of the restriction.
Each sense below has its own examples, sources, and questions.
A procedural rule permitting a party to withhold electronically stored information from discovery when the sources are not reasonably accessible due to undue burden or cost. The responding party must demonstrate inaccessibility on a motion to compel or for protective order. A court may still order production upon a showing of good cause by the requesting party.
Uptown Apparel served discovery requests on Urban Logistics seeking ten years of archived email backups stored on decommissioned servers. Urban Logistics moved for a protective order, showing that restoring the data would require specialized vendors and cost over four hundred thousand dollars with no active system holding copies. The court evaluated whether good cause justified ordering production despite the inaccessibility.
Ulysses Maritime sought extensive production from Upstream Petroleum covering five years of lab notebooks and offsite archives. Upstream Petroleum moved for a protective order after certifying that it had conferred with opposing counsel and that the archives were not reasonably accessible. The court considered whether the requested scope imposed undue burden warranting limits on frequency or extent of discovery.
Umar Underwood served a subpoena on Ugo Uberti demanding production of confidential commercial records held in remote storage. Ugo Uberti moved to quash, demonstrating that compliance would require extensive forensic work and impose significant expense on a nonparty. The court assessed whether the subpoena subjected the recipient to undue burden requiring modification or denial.
3 common questions
The responding party must demonstrate that the sources are not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. Once that showing is made, the requesting party may still obtain an order by establishing good cause after considering proportionality factors.
Supporting sources
A standard for reviewing regulations that substantially interfere with protected constitutional interests. The regulation is invalid if it places a substantial obstacle in the path of the protected interest. The framework requires courts to assess the practical effect of the restriction.
State regulations required all nonprescription contraceptives to be sold only through licensed pharmacists and barred sales to minors under sixteen without physician approval. Adult and minor plaintiffs challenged the rules, showing that the channeling and approval requirements created substantial practical obstacles to obtaining lawful products. The court examined whether the restrictions imposed an undue burden on the fundamental privacy right to contraception.
The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982, as amended in 1988 and 1989, established several requirements governing the performance of abortions within the Commonwealth. The Act required a woman seeking an abortion to provide informed consent after receiving specific information from a physician or counselor at least twenty-four hours before the procedure. It mandated that a minor obtain the informed consent of one parent, subject to a judicial bypass option. It further required a married woman to sign a statement confirming that she had notified her husband of her planned abortion, unless certain exceptions applied. The Act also imposed reporting obligations on facilities providing abortion services and defined a medical emergency exception to the various requirements. Before any of these provisions took effect, the petitioners brought suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The petitioners were five abortion clinics and one physician representing himself as well as a class of physicians who provide abortion services. They sought declaratory and injunctive relief and challenged each provision as unconstitutional on its face. The District Court entered a preliminary injunction. After conducting a three-day bench trial, the District Court held all the provisions unconstitutional and entered a permanent injunction against their enforcement by Pennsylvania. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part. It adopted the District Court's factual findings and legal analysis except with respect to the spousal notification requirement. The Court of Appeals upheld the spousal notification requirement as constitutional and applied the undue burden standard in evaluating the provisions. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider the constitutionality of the challenged provisions of the Pennsylvania statute.
2 common questions
The framework asks whether the regulation places a substantial obstacle in the path of adults or minors seeking lawful contraception. Restrictions that channel all sales through pharmacists or impose physician approval for minors are invalid if they significantly impair practical access.
Supporting sources
…of our dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence has been the principle that the States may not impose regulations that place an undue burden on interstate commerce, even where those regulations do not discriminate between in-state and out-of-state businesses. See Brown-Forman Distillers Corp. v. New York State Liquor…
…the District Court agreed, and concluded that Washington's assisted-suicide ban is unconstitutional because it "places an undue burden on the exercise of [that] constitutionally protected liberty interest." The District Court also decided that the Washington statute violated the Equal Protection Clause's requirement that…
…turn to the specific provisions of the Pennsylvania statute at issue. The Court of Appeals applied what it believed to be the undue burden standard
…instance, the welfare residence requirements are alleged to be unconstitutional on two grounds: first, because they impose an undue burden upon the constitutional right of welfare applicants to travel interstate; second, because they deny to persons who have recently moved interstate and would otherwise be eligible for…
…in that it makes unlawful a range of alternative responses that would be reasonable but would fall short of imposing an "undue burden
A party may move for a protective order when discovery would cause undue burden or expense. The motion must certify a good-faith effort to resolve the dispute, and the court may limit the scope or allocate costs to protect the responding party.
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A court must quash or modify a subpoena that subjects a person to undue burden. The analysis focuses on the expense, time, and technical difficulty of compliance, particularly for nonparties.
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State C enacted a procurement statute limiting bids on certain projects to firms with a principal place of business inside the state and imposing a special tax only on out-of-state awardees. National Steel, an out-of-state bidder, challenged the provisions after being declared ineligible. The court assessed whether the location rule and tax constituted an undue burden on interstate commerce.
Dean Milk Co. is an Illinois corporation engaged in distributing milk and milk products in Illinois and Wisconsin. It challenged two sections of an ordinance of the City of Madison, Wisconsin, regulating the sale of milk and milk products within the municipality's jurisdiction. One section made it unlawful to sell any milk as pasteurized unless it had been processed and bottled at an approved pasteurization plant within a radius of five miles from the central square of Madison. Another section prohibited the sale of milk or the importation, receipt or storage of milk for sale in Madison unless from a source of supply possessing a permit issued after inspection by Madison officials, but expressly relieved municipal authorities from any duty to inspect farms located beyond twenty-five miles from the center of the city. Dean Milk Co. purchased and gathered milk from approximately 950 farms in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, none being within twenty-five miles of Madison. Its pasteurization plants were located at Chemung and Huntley, Illinois, about sixty-five and eighty-five miles respectively from Madison. The company was denied a license to sell its products within Madison solely because its pasteurization plants were more than five miles away. The milk it sought to sell was supplied from farms and processed in plants licensed and inspected by public health authorities of Chicago and labeled Grade A under the Chicago ordinance adopting the rating standards recommended by the United States Public Health Service. The City of Madison is the county seat of Dane County, within which are some 5,600 dairy farms with total raw milk production in excess of 600,000,000 pounds annually and more than ten times the requirements of Madison. The area defined by the ordinance with respect to milk sources encompassed practically all of Dane County and included some 500 farms which supply milk for Madison. Within the five-mile area for pasteurization were plants of five processors, only three of which were engaged in the general wholesale and retail trade in Madison. Inspection of these farms and plants was scheduled once every thirty days and was performed by two municipal inspectors, one of whom was full-time. Dean Milk Co. contended below that both the five-mile limit on pasteurization plants and the twenty-five-mile limit on sources of milk violated the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin upheld the five-mile limit on pasteurization and ordered the complaint dismissed for want of a justiciable controversy as to the twenty-five-mile limitation. Dean Milk Co. appealed, contesting both rulings and invoking the jurisdiction of the United States Supreme Court under 28 U.S.C. § 1257(2). The Health Commissioner of Madison testified that he had submitted the provisions in controversy and an alternative proposal based on section 11 of the Model Milk Ordinance recommended by the United States Public Health Service, which imposes no geographical limitation on location of milk sources and processing plants but excludes milk not produced and pasteurized conformably to standards as high as those enforced by the receiving city. Both the Health Commissioner and the milk sanitarian of the Wisconsin State Board of Health agreed that a local health officer would be justified in relying upon the evaluation by the Public Health Service of enforcement conditions in remote producing areas.
View caseCongress enacted a statute prohibiting possession of firearms in school zones. A student charged under the law moved to dismiss, arguing that the prohibition exceeded federal authority. The court evaluated whether the regulation imposed an undue burden on interstate commerce by reaching purely local activity without a sufficient nexus to economic effects.
In March 1992, Alfonso Lopez, Jr., a twelfth-grade student at Edison High School in San Antonio, Texas, arrived at school carrying a concealed .38-caliber handgun and five bullets. Acting on an anonymous tip, school authorities confronted Lopez, who admitted possessing the weapon. Local police arrested him and charged him under Texas law with firearm possession on school premises. The following day, state charges were dismissed after federal agents charged Lopez with violating the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. A federal grand jury indicted him on one count of knowing possession of a firearm at a school zone. Lopez moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing that the statute exceeded Congress's power to legislate control over public schools. The district court denied the motion, concluding that the statute was a constitutional exercise of Congress's power to regulate activities affecting commerce because the business of schools affects interstate commerce. After a bench trial, the court found Lopez guilty and sentenced him to six months' imprisonment and two years of supervised release. Lopez appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which reversed the conviction, holding that the statute was beyond Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the case.
View caseThe framework no longer supplies a federal constitutional right to abortion. States may regulate or prohibit abortion without violating a federal privacy right, though other constitutional claims remain available.
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