Christmas is always a super-stressful time of year for me, but not for any of the normal reasons that plague sane people. My problem is that the people who know and love me tend to get me books–which makes sense, because books and bicycles are basically the twin obsessions of my sad life. The trouble
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Motions to Reconsider and the Creeping Misreadings of Wal-Mart Stores East, LP
An anonymous reader asks if Virginia’s appellate courts are ratcheting down on the use of motions to reconsider to preserve error.
Here’s the background: Traditionally, appellate counsel have used motions to reconsider to clean up the record and preserve new arguments for appeal. It was fairly normal for an appellate lawyer to be hired after…
Links and Stuff
- Hyemin Han’s play-by-play of the D.C. Circuit argument in the Trump gag order case. Credit to longtime De Novo favorite Judge Millett for this hypo: ““Okay. But he can’t say that that person is an ‘un-truth speaker’?”
- Jeannie Suk Gersen’s take
Implications of Holding Conferences After Oral Argument
A friend recently pointed out something that should have been obvious, but wasn’t. Like many other appellate courts, the Court of Appeals of Virginia holds its decision conference immediately after oral argument.
I knew this, but I don’t think I appreciated what it meant until we started taking about it. Obviously, appellate judges are well-prepared.
Unpublished Orders from the CAV
Over the last two months, the Court of Appeals has issued almost 160 opinions. The vast majority of those opinions are unpublished; the court is issuing about 7 unpublished opinions for every published opinion. So the default rule seems to not to publish opinions.
This is interesting for several reasons. First, Code § 17.1-413(A)…
The Rule 5A:8(b)(4)(ii) Deathtrap
Every Tuesday, the Court of Appeals hands down its published and unpublished opinions. And every Tuesday, those unpublished opinions seem to include a least a case or two where the court summarily affirms because the appellant has failed to ensure that the record includes a transcript or written statement of facts.
Now, some of these…
Checking in with the CAV
- In 2022, the CAV heard 553 civil appeals
- Through the first six months of 2023, the CAV heard 392 civil appeals
- In 2022, SCOVA
Good Ideas That I Stole From Smart People: Law and the Moral Worth of a Society
…Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will
Ross Guberman and Robert Scavone on How Lawyers Can Use ChatGPT
Here’s 33 minutes of video of Ross Guberman and Robert Scavone playing around with ChatGPT in a lawyerly way. This will give you a good sense of where the software stands as a legal-writing tool at the moment–which is not where it was 3 months ago, and not where it will be 3 months from…
CA3 Forcibly Improves Lawyer Work-Life Balance Over Lawyer Protests
Reuters reports that the Third Circuit changed its local rules to require most briefs and court documents to be filed by 5:00 pm on the day they are due. The story explains that the proposal “comes after the court’s chief judge Michael Chagares pushed for years for the whole judiciary to rollback deadlines to improve…