At the VBA’s summer meeting last month, Judges Ortiz and Martin presented their annual review of civil decisions from the Supreme Court of Virginia. Judge Ortiz shared a few eye-opening statistics:
Here’s the last paragraph from Grant Gilmore’s The Ages of American Law:
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 be
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
Today’s Fourth Circuit opinion in Laufer v. Naranda Hotels, LLC, is worth a look. The Court held the plaintiff’s allegation of an informational injury was enough to confer Article III standing. Here is the intro:
Deborah Laufer, the plaintiff in this civil action on appeal from the District of
Maryland, is a self-professed “tester”
The Court of Appeals handed down Theologis v. Weiler today, a fun opinion in a defamation and business-conspiracy case. The whole opinion is highly recommended. Summary below, but here are the points of greatest interest to appellate practitioners:
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
Adam Liptak reports on a new study showing that an undergraduate degree from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale significantly boosts an applicant’s chances of landing a SCOTUS clerkship.
Per Liptak, the study found that during the 40 years leading up to 2020, more than 2/3 of SCOTUS clerks came from just five law schools. (Yes, the
Rule 5A:8(c)’s written statement of facts is one of the absolute nightmares of Virginia appellate practice.
The underlying notion seems simple enough: If an important hearing or trial took place but there’s no transcript, the appellate court needs something to review; otherwise, it’s just going to affirm, because the trial court’s judgment is presumptively correct.
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,