Appellate Advocacy Blog

Rex Lee, the late Reagan-era solicitor general and president of Brigham Young University, once wrote that the Supreme Court’s “net contribution” to a “cohesive body of law” applying the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses “has been zero” and added that “some…
Continue Reading Personal Jurisdiction – Messy Jurisprudence that May Be in Even Greater Flux

It’s official: AI has passed the Uniform Bar Exam. GPT-4, the upgraded AI program released earlier this week by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, scored in the 90th percentile of actual test takers. “Guess you’re out of a job,” my wife said when…
Continue Reading GPT-4 Just Passed the Bar Exam. That Proves More About the Weakness of the Bar Exam Than the Strength of GPT-4.

Most (all?) ancient languages lacked punctuation and capitalization. Egyptian heiroglyphs, Homeric Greek, Akkadian, etc. were all written in what amounts to all caps with no spaces and no way to tell (other than training and context) where one word or…
Continue Reading The substantive importance of punctuation in legal arguments; or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon