From the National Center for State Courts 2023 State of the State Courts annual public survey, we learned that a growing percentage of Americans—even older ones—would definitely or probably use video to appear for a case before the court. The published 2021 findings, best practices, and recommendations from Michigan Trial Courts: Lessons Learned from the…
Progress. As the Michigan Supreme Court considered its administrative file (in 2023) to amend a court rule that would allow parties and attorneys to include any preferred personal pronoun in the caption section of court filings and would require courts to use those pronouns (unless doing so would result in an unclear record), I submitted…
Chief Justice Clement and her colleagues had a heavy oral argument-opinion docket in the 2023-24 term. They really did a solid positioning the Court to be more current with matters scheduled for oral argument. A “keep the trains running” era like we last saw when Bob Young was CJ is within sight. How so? Let’s…
“A court speaks through its written orders and decrees” and not its oral pronouncements is a legal principle that dates back to at least 1866 in Michigan. Newbould v Stweart, 15 Mich 155 (1866) (“The court below had announced its decision, but no decree had been actually drawn up or filed. It was held that…
What do SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Alito, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Barrett have in common from the 2023 term that ended on July 1, 2024? They revised one or more authored “slip opinion” after its first release. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute attributes the term “slip” to an earlier time when originally…
Legal-decision readers are familiar with quotation parentheticals like (emphasis added/omitted/changed), (alteration in original), (quotation marks and citation omitted), or (cleaned up). A new kid shows up every once in a great while: (emojis omitted). I noticed (emojis omitted) in the August 29, 2024 memorandum decision from the Indiana Court of Appeals Shannon v Indiana, 23A-CR-2744…
The question might be relevant in ongoing proceedings before Michigan’s Judicial Tenure Commission. In the Disciplinary Counsel’s August 6, 2024 objection to the Master’s recommendation to dismiss the complaint in FC 106, they note that three expert witnesses who “are certified deaf interpreters who can read Judge Brue’s lips from the video, as they would…
A federal district court judge in New York’s Southern District recently used her discretion to warn a self-represented litigant about submitting false and nonexistent legal authority to the Court. Sanctions may be imposed for submitting false and nonexistent legal authority to the Court. See, e.g., Park v. Kim, 91 F.4th 610, 613-16 (2d Cir. 2024)…
SCOTUSblog recently posted a piece about a recent SCOTUS order appointing an attorney to brief and argue a case in defense of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit because the federal government declined to do so (Justices appoint former clerk to argue First Step Act cases). Procedurally, this reminded…
A “focus order” is an order from the court to the parties directing them to focus their upcoming briefing and argument on specified issues. The Michigan Supreme Court routinely includes “focus” instructions in its argument orders. For years, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers has found the focus order tool to be positive and productive…