Law Prof Seeks Postponement in Federal Rules Amendments
Civil Procedure Prof Blog links to a letter/white paper from Professor Jeff Parker of George Mason University School of Law, in which he asks Congress to delay implementation of the changes to the...
View Article“Opacity and Unaccountability”
Legal Writing Prof Blog links to and posts the abstract of a law review article in which the author contends that the “opacity and unaccountability” resulting from non-publication of district court...
View ArticleNew Book on Federal Standards of Review
West has published a new book on federal standards of appellate review: H. Edwards and L. Elliot, Edwards and Elliott’s Federal Courts – Standards of Review: Appellate Court Review of District Court...
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Arbitration appeals part of new AAA rules
Southern California Appellate News reports that the American Arbitration Association has released optional rules that will allow appellate review within the arbitration process for arbitrations...
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Judgment assignees better be careful
Last month’s decision in Cal-Western Business Services, Inc. v. Corning Capital Group, case no. B241714 (2d Dist., November 6, 2013) makes for some interesting reading and a cautionary tale for those...
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A novelist/academic’s views on persuasive writing
A lawyer in one of my LinkedIn groups alerted the group to an interesting article that gives a non-lawyer’s perspective on persuasive writing. Introducing the article, St. Louis attorney Daniel Schramm...
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Why Some Lawyers and Their Clients are Reluctant to Engage Appellate Counsel,...
For those of you wondering, yes, this is a resumption of a series of posts I wrote years ago on reluctance to engage appellate counsel. (You can read the whole series here.) I was reviewing that series...
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Emotional interest falls short of legal standing to appeal dependency ruling
As a general rule, only a person “aggrieved” by a judgment has standing to appeal from it. Is a mother without reunification services “aggrieved” by a judgment granting her 18-year-old child’s request...
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Know your route of review . . . and when to invoke it
If you don’t know your route of review and when to invoke it, you end up like the plaintiff in Tejon Real Estate, LLC v. City of Los Angeles, B247255 (2d Dist. January 23, 2014). In fact, not only did...
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Make the argument yours, not someone else’s
You represent an appellant in a state court action who claims the action is precluded by a prior federal court action because the plaintiff split his cause of action between the two lawsuits. Your...
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How to write for the “iPad judge”
No brief would look good on my pathetic iPad, which has some of the pieces of its broken screen held on with tape! Are a lot of appellate judges/justices reading briefs on iPads these days? The...
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The law, the story, and the policy
Almost sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? (A law, a story, and a policy walk into a bar . . . ) But I’m not presenting these things as a joke. According to San Diego antitrust attorney...
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Justice Kennard retiring April 5
Justice Joyce Kennard has announced her retirement from the California Supreme Court effective April 5, on which she will mark the 25th anniversary of her appointment. The article at the San Francisco...
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The “outsider’s perspective” theory illustrated in the extreme
I’ve mentioned before that one of the valuable things an appellate lawyer can bring to your case is the “outsider’s perspective” — the ability to give the case an objective look that trial counsel is...
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Thoughts on publication of opinions imposing appellate sanctions for...
This recent Southern California Appellate News post by Ben Shatz led me to a case that got me thinking further about the utility of publishing opinions imposing appellate sanctions. More than six years...
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Collateral estoppel is no day at the beach (a lesson in appealing in a timely...
Occasionally, a party will try to get around the finality of a decision by making a “collateral attack” on its validity in a separate proceeding. That can work if you are attacking the jurisdiction of...
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The consequences of reluctant unanimity in appellate decisions
Through LinkedIn, I ran across an interesting appellate blog, Briefly Writing. In a post yesterday, blogger Michael Skotnicki shared his alarm at learning from the Eleventh Circuit’s chief judge that...
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What happens when standards of review collide?
Sometimes . . . nothing. As in Pielstick v. MidFirst Bank, case no. B247106 (2d Dist. Mar 26, 2014), in which the court was asked to reverse the trial court’s refusal to allow a plaintiff to...
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A substantial evidence argument works on appeal
Substantial evidence challenges don’t succeed very often on appeal, so I sat up and took notice when I saw a successful challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence in today’s decision in Martinez v....
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The Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court as courts of first resort?
Well, this is unusual. We usually refer to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court as “reviewing courts” because they review the decisions of lower courts. But yesterday’s decision in Disenhouse v....
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