Whether a trial court may enter summary judgment against a party without allowing that party to conduct discovery

QUESTION PRESENTED As a matter of course, litigants regularly file lawsuits without having access to all the information that may be necessary to prove their case. If litigants always possessed such information, the procedures and methods that our justice system has developed would be far more limited than they has come to be. And while, to date, there has been no written mandate on the subject, it is generally presumed that a litigant will be afforded some opportunity to review and discover information in the possession of other parties that have potentially aggrieved the litigant, except those cases where the litigant clearly does not have a valid claim to begin with (i.e. where a case is successfully challenged by a Rule 12 motion to dismiss). The ultimate question underlying this petition, then, is whether litigants, should, as a right be able to utilize early-stage discovery, or whether the trial courts can unilaterally prevent litigants from discovering any such information, or to verify and test information presented to them. Formally stated, the question presented by this petition is thus: I. Whether a trial court may enter summary judgment—other than on purely legal grounds— against a party when the court has not allowed that party to discover information possessed by the movant.