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In a litigation environment that features managerial judges, few trials, and increasing volumes of fact evidence, discovery is often what shapes and determines a case. The process is largely invisible to the public and the courts, and the rules of civil procedure do little to guide it. Instead of being a rule-governed process, civil discovery is to a large extent shaped by what this Article terms Discovery Culture: the norms and practices that govern everyday discovery practice and evolve over time within legal communities. This Article introduces the concept of Discovery Culture, explores its nature as an extralegal practice, and examines the implications for a civil justice system that has Discovery Culture at the very core of its operations. It argues that the formal rules have ceded so much ground to cultural norms that the discovery process, as currently practiced in the federal judicial system, is more akin to an environment of "order without law" than to an environment governed by law in a traditional positivist sense. Ensuring adequate procedural protections requires a recognition of the central role of Discovery Culture in the discovery process, and procedural measures to make its norms and practices visible and evaluable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge crisis that has been causing turmoil in the social sciences for the past few years represents a fundamental shift in scientists' understanding of what it takes to create reliable science. This crisis, now known as the Replication Crisis, has thrown the spotlight on research practices that undermine the reliability of research results in ways that are typically invisible and cannot be remedied or made visible after the fact. There is ample reason to believe that the defects of method uncovered in the course of the Replication Crisis are at least as pervasive in litigation science as they are in academic science. Yet the legal profession has failed to recognize and address them. This Article is the first to address the broad implications of the Replication Crisis for the production of scientific knowledge in a civil-litigation context. Drawing on insights from the Crisis, it argues that current procedural practice is simply incapable of providing a court with the information it needs to make an accurate assessment of the reliability of scientific evidence. The Article identifies a number of core principles, drawn from the response of academic science to the Replication Crisis, that can guide reforms to the treatment of scientific evidence in civil litigation. It argues that shoring up the courts' capacity to evaluate scientific evidence requires a rethinking of the entire chain of creation of scientific knowledge and a reframing of the role of the court in that chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular simulations were performed for the adsorption of methane, ethane and propane in MFI- and MOR- type zeolites with various nonframework sodium and framework aluminium densities. The position of the nonframework sodium cations determined by Monte Carlo simulations is in agreement with positions determined by X-ray diffraction.