In 1938, the promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) (pursuant to the Rules Enabling Act) created for the first time a comprehensive discovery system in U.S. federal courts. The FRCP authorized broad discovery into "any matter, not privileged, which is relevant to the subject matter in the pending action, whether relating to the claim or defense of" either party. Due to the influence of progressive law professor Edson R. Sunderland, an enthusiastic proponent of broad discovery, the FRCP expressly authorized the complete family of discovery methods familiar to American litigators today. What made the FRCP so revolutionary was that although many state governments had regularly allowed one or more methods of discovery, no one state nor the federal government had ever attempted to allow litigators to use "all" of them, as Sunderland frankly admitted to the Advisory Committee that drafted the FRCP. As a result, the United States has the broadest discovery system in the world.