Whether a district court may compel a party that has not engaged in discovery-related misconduct to produce documents that are neither relevant nor responsive

QUESTION PRESENTED Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1) defines “the scope of discovery” in federal civil cases as “any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case[.]” A party may object to discovery requests, and inform the requesting party that “materials are being withheld,” insofar as they exceed “the scope of Rule 26(b).” Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(C). For its part, “the court must limit the * * * extent of discovery” if “proposed discovery is outside the scope permitted by Rule 26(b)(1).” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) (iii). Early in discovery in this multi-district antitrust litigation, the district court entered a case management order (CMO) requiring petitioners, dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers, to produce millions of documents containing any of various broad search terms, but forbidding them to “withhold prior to production any documents based on relevance or responsiveness.” The court made no finding of discovery-related misconduct. A divided Third Circuit panel denied mandamus, stating that district courts have broad discretion to compel document production and that the CMO allowed petitioners to attempt to “claw back” irrelevant documents after they were produced. The question presented is: Whether, contrary to Rule 26(b), this Court’s decisions, and the decisions of five circuits, a district court may compel a party that has not engaged in discoveryrelated misconduct to produce documents that are neither relevant nor responsive.