This past week, I had the privilege of opening the Mid-Year Conference of the California Judges Association with a speech about the rule of law and how we can preserve it. The topic was one the group requested, and it…
Continue Reading Justices, Not Judges

Last year marked my 25th year of coaching moot court. This year was the first year for our program to win ABA NAAC. I think the two are related, and wanted to share some thoughts on what I’ve learned over…
Continue Reading Lessons in Resilience from Moot Court

The recent oral argument before the United States Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, which concerns presidential immunity, provides several lessons about how to argue a case effectively and persuasively. Although the attorneys for the petitioner and respondent used…
Continue Reading Lessons in Appellate Advocacy from the Supreme Court’s Oral Argument in Trump v. United States

On April 25, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump v. United States, the case in which former President Trump’s lawyers will argue, among other things, that a president has absolute immunity from the criminal charges that covers…
Continue Reading Absolute Presidential Immunity as an Appellate Strategy

Recently, I saw a long listserv conversation about teaching first-year and LLM students to properly format block quotes. You might remember from your law review days that block quotes are long quotes of “fifty or more words.” See The Bluebook,…
Continue Reading An Argument Against Block Quotes

As readers of this blog know, I love a good book. If the book covers a Supreme Court case it is all the better. And if it also concerns my maternal ancestors, well I am guaranteed to love it. A…
Continue Reading Book Review–A Promise Kept

During your legal career, whether in litigation, at trial, or on appeal, you will invariably encounter a “difficult” adversary. For this article, “difficult” does not refer to exceptionally talented adversaries. Rather, it refers to attorneys who, for lack of a…
Continue Reading Tips for Dealing with a Difficult Adversary

Lawyers love precedent. And we love it so much that we often fail to stop and consider why we do what we do. Instead, we blindly follow what we’ve seen before, even when that precedent is nonsensical. And that is…
Continue Reading The Unnecessary Parenthetical (“Parenthetical”)

Yes, the Barbie movie is everywhere but with good reason. It touches on numerous aspects of gender roles in society, including our legal system. Warning: spoiler alert if you haven’t yet seen the movie. At the beginning of the movie,…
Continue Reading Lawyer Barbie and the Role of Emotion in the Law

The general rule in appellate courts throughout the country is that a reply brief is limited to raising matters preserved in the trial court, issues argued in the opening brief, or arguments made in the response brief. The rationale for…
Continue Reading Hoisted on Their Own Petard: The Appellate Motion to Strike

The Journal of Appellate Practice & Process is looking for one or two more articles or essays for our Summer 2024 issue. In particular, we are looking for articles that focus on either the work of state appellate courts or…
Continue Reading Journal of Appellate Practice & Process Looking for State-focused Articles

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the United States Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions.[1] Specifically, the Court held that race-based considerations in the admissions process violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.[2] Writing for the majority,…
Continue Reading The Optics of Ending Affirmative Action

The old adage “better late than never” certainly applies to the latest issue of the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process. Here is a press release from NITA, our editing partner, announcing its release: Journal of Appellate Practice and Process…
Continue Reading The newest issue of the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process