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 Future of Citations: Moving Them, Modifying Them, or Just Cleaning Them Up
Ah, citations. Some appellate advocates may see these as the bane of their writing existence. But, of course, they perform an important–indeed, an essential–function in supporting an appellate advocate’s argument. Without them, a judge reading your brief would never know…
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Latinate v. Anglo-Saxon terms in legal writing
English is a funny animal. It reached its namesake land after the Roman Empire fell and tribes from Northern Germany and Denmark (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) invaded and settled what had up to then been peopled by people who spoke…
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Rethinking First Amendment Jurisprudence
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the rights to freedom of speech and religion, which are essential to liberty and an informed citizenry. Indeed, the original purpose of the First Amendment was, among other things, to create…
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Paragraphs and Pilcrows
This blog has featured paragraph-pertinent musings before. Today I hope to share a little about the petite pilcrow, offer some guidelines for proper paragraphing, and provide a tip for formatting with pilcrows in legal writing. What is a pilcrow? If…
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Should courts dispense with the Table of Authorities?
Pending before the Arizona Supreme Court is a petition to change court rules and dispense with the table of citations in state briefs. According to the full petition,
The Table of Citations is no longer needed to help a reader navigate to a particular cited source because most briefs are filed in electronic format with searchable text. Cumulatively, appellate litigants spend an unjustifiable amount of time and resources creating Tables of Citations.
The authors claim that readers now use “searchable text and hyperlinks to navigate the brief and locate cited authorities,” rather than the table. The tables, are incredibly
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A call for law over politics
In the novel Guy Mannering, Sir Walter Scott wrote that a “lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.” As lawyers and especially as appellate advocates, we aspire to creating an edifice where the rule of law governs and not simply the politics of the day. We seek to design the law to withstand political winds while capable of change though remaining true to rules and standards that sensibly apply regardless of the ascendant ideologies.
It is not an easy task,
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Third Circuit’s Proposed Filing Time Rollback Would Reduce Practitioners’ Autonomy
The Third Circuit has been in my news feed this week. Chief Judge Michael Chagares has proposed to roll back the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ filing deadlines from 11:59 pm to 5:00 pm. The offered justification for the proposal?…
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Implicit Bias Challenged, If Not Debunked
In recent years, the concept of implicit bias – the belief that all individuals harbor unconscious biases that affect their choices and actions – has been embraced by many law schools and the American Bar Association. In fact, the ABA…
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Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, January 27
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…
Continue Reading Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, January 27
Concrete Economics on the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has recently offered strikingly similar answers to two seemingly disparate questions. The first concerns Article III standing to bring a case in federal court: What does it mean to show a “concrete and particularized injury in fact”…
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What is Your Best Case?
“What is your best case?” That’s a question that many an appellate judge asks during oral argument. Sometimes, there is an obvious answer: Smith v. Jones holds that the very inaction of the defendant in this case constitutes a breach…
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“Read Everything” Is Good Advice at Any Stage of a Case or a Lawyer’s Career
Happy 2023. I hope the new year is going well for all of you. As I began moving my students from objective office memos to the joy of appellate brief writing this month, I used a slide titled: “Read Everything.”…
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Your Legal Writing Process
Sure, if you had years to write your legal documents (like other types of writers do), your documents would all be great. But we legal writers don’t have years to write documents. We have just weeks. Or days. Or even…
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Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, January 20, 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…
Continue Reading Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, January 20, 2023
Imitation as progress–learning to write
Oscar Wilde once said that imitation “is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Quite the backhanded compliment to the imitator. Or maybe he was trying to comfort those who had to endure cheap imitations of…
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