Erieblogging: The Final Day

Well, I said I was going to post an un- or underexplored question about Erie every day for the month, and that is what I did, as andy-kaufmanesque as the results may have been. People sometimes ask me how I can write so much on Erie (I’m at five articles and have a few more in the works). It may be myopia, but to me the topics of my papers are as different from one another as contract and tort. There isn’t really one Erie doctrine—“Erie” is a code word for a huge set of heterogeneous constitutional and subconstitutional problems that arise from the existence of federal courts (especially federal trial courts) within our federal legal system. That, at any rate, is what I’ve tried to show.

As for my final question, it is this: What can other federal legal systems with federal courts tell us about Erie? Australia, for example, has a federal legal system, federal courts, and even diversity jurisdiction. But things, I am told, look very different (and more Swiftian) down under.  

(Parallel posted on Michael Green's Civ Pro Blog.)