The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process – Winter 2023 Issue Now Available The Winter 2023 issue of The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process (Volume 23, Issue 1) is now available. This special issue focuses on appellate issues in…
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Personal Jurisdiction – Messy Jurisprudence that May Be in Even Greater Flux
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…
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Revisiting George Orwell and Good Writing
This semester, I am lucky enough to be teaching a seminar I designed on bias in legal analysis and writing. The class has been a delight, and I am impressed every week by my thoughtful and dedicated students. In one…
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The power of contrast
On a deep and fundamental level, we crave contrast. Without different colors in our environment, we would be blind because our vision requires contrast to function. Music is monotonous without variation in tone, pitch, and volume. Diet is unpalatable without…
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More than "Frenemies."
I recently had the honor of running into an old moot court student as opposing appellate counsel. It was in a case where there had been some heated language exchanged by trial counsel over an issue that was of serious…
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GPT-4 Just Passed the Bar Exam. That Proves More About the Weakness of the Bar Exam Than the Strength of GPT-4.
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…
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ChatGPT and Legal Writing
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can, among other things, compose music, play games, and generate student essays and examination answers. Indeed, ChatGPT has already been studied to assess its efficacy on law school examinations. One study, for example,…
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Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, March 17, 2023
Each week, the Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup presents a few tidbits of news and Twitter posts from the past week concerning appellate advocacy. As always, if you see something during the week that you think we should be sure…
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The substantive importance of punctuation in legal arguments; or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon
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…
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Guest Post: Can ChatGPT Prepare Me for Oral Argument?
This is a guest post by Jayne Woods, Associate Teaching Professor of Law at University of Missouri School of Law. All faults in fixing bullets points are Professor Dysart’s. As Spring approaches, many legal writing faculty are gearing up to…
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Licensing Paid Blogs?
When your appellate practice focuses heavily on constitutional issues, as mine does, it is hard not to look at news stories and imagine the upcoming litigation. I had that reaction when I saw what is only a bill in Florida,…
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The Rhetoric of ChatGPT: What ChatGPT Had to Say About Its Connection to Rhetoric and What We Can Learn from That Response
What appellate lawyers should know about ChatGPT and rhetoric based on ChatGPT’s response to the question.
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Advice for Law Students on Oral Argument
After judging a regional round of the National Appellate Advocacy Competition this weekend in Los Angeles, it was apparent immediately that the law students participating in this competition demonstrated intelligence, talent, and persuasiveness. Indeed, the participants were quite impressive and…
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ChatGPT & Grammar
This past weekend I was at a conference in Las Vegas. At the conference, my colleague Diana Simon presented on her recent book–The (Not Too Serious) Grammar, Punctuation, and Style Guide to Legal Writing. During the social time after the…
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When Your Opponent’s Brief is a Headscratcher
“I’m glad you have to write the reply brief, not me.” That’s the whole email I received from a prominent appellate advocate who had written an amicus brief supporting my position after he had read opposing counsel’s brief. The difficulty…
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The 2023 Justice Donald L. Corbin Appellate Symposium
On March 30 and 31, the Pulaski County Bar Foundation will be hosting its Annual Justice Donald L. Corbin Appellate Symposium at the University of Arkansas Little Rock Bowen School of Law. This national symposium honors the late Justice Donald…
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