Jim Sensenbrenner: “Mr. Speaker, the Judicial Conference has amnesia and they did not look back into the history of what happened between…”

“Mr. Speaker, the Judicial Conference has amnesia and they did not look back into the history of what happened between 1983 and 1993 when the rules that this bill proposes were in place. In 1991, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rule did a survey and reviewed Rule 11. At that time 751 Federal judges found that an overwhelming majority of them, 95 percent, believed Rule 11 did not impede development of the law; 72 percent believed that the benefits of the rule outweighed any additional requirement of judicial time; 81 percent believed that the 1983 version of Rule 11 had a positive effect on litigation in the Federal courts; and 80 percent believed that the rule should be retained in its then-current form. That is what the judges who were on the bench at the time this rule was in effect said. The Judicial Conference ought to spend their time looking back at their own records and their own surveys rather than sending these types of letters advising us that what we are doing here is no good.”