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 The vast majority of those opinions are unpublished; the court is issuing about 7 unpublished opinions for every published opinion.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)
Every Tuesday, the Court of Appeals hands down its published and unpublished opinions. And every Tuesday, those unpublished opinions seem to include a least a case or two where the court summarily affirms because the appellant has failed to ensure that the record includes a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
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
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
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
Deborah Laufer, the plaintiff in this civil action on appeal from the District of
Maryland, is a self-professed “tester”
Here’s a question that has come up often enough that I suppose it merits its own post: What happens if the Clerk of the Court of Appeals does not properly notify the appellant of the filing of the transcript?
(Disclaimer: The Clerk’s office does a wonderful job! They are great to deal with! They probably
The Washington Post has a piece about Judge Luttig, opening with a lovely anecdote involving Justice Scalia. (But are we sure that Judge Luttig “clerked for [Scalia] at the federal district court in Washington?”) [Update: He did not! The Post has corrected this in its story. Also, autocorrect got me the first time around
Let’s start with the punchline from Hawkins v. Town of South Hill: Merely stating an objection above your endorsement to an order is not enough to preserve the objection for appeal. You must object with reasonable certainty, giving the court a chance to rule intelligently on your issue, and the court must in fact