Justice Barrett’s recent dissent in Fischer v. United States captures her statutory-analysis approach. Her conversational writing style—one that can be easily understood by the lay public—may be thought of as common sense. It’s also fair to assume that Justice Kagan contributed to some of its tone since she (and Justice Sotomayor) joined it. Justice Barrett’s…
The Court of Appeals in Ohio recently issued an opinion that nicely describes message exchanges that happened on Facebook Messenger—and the court did it without copying and pasting images. Instead, the opinion uses informational brackets as highlighted below from an excerpt. The risk of using uncaptioned images in opinions is that the images are often…
A Michigan Supreme Court justice recently noted a data-entry error in the trial court’s judgment of sentence. And she reminded how it can be corrected. Indeed, MCR 6.435 allows: Rule 6.435 – Correcting Mistakes (A) Clerical Mistakes. Clerical mistakes in judgments, orders, or other parts of the record and errors arising from oversight or omission may…
In a sign of the AI times, the federal court in the Southern District of New York recently entered a protective order that includes an AI-restriction paragraph:
The Michigan Supreme Court decided Marion v Grand Trunk Western Railroad Company (Docket No. 164298) on June 5, 2024. The .pdf that was first released was created at 2:29 p.m. Just like with lawyers and paralegals, sometimes an oversight is recognized after the file is submitted. And that happened here. An updated .pdf file was…
It happens to everyone: jurists, lawyers, paralegals, and the self-represented. A letter is sent. A brief is filed. An opinion or order is issued. And only later a typo, innocent misstatement, omission, or new information is learned that requires correction. The correction is made and sent out, but the corrected version doesn’t identify what was…
Appellate geeks often track which justice authored which decision during a sitting. SCOTUSblog posts one form of that data here. As a court’s term gets closer to its end, legal pundits speculate about who could be writing the undecided cases. We will hear and see more of this as the Supreme Court of the United…
Last August, I shared my experience using Claude.ai to outline case briefs (pretty good!). Today, I took the current (free) version of Claude.ai for a spin to outline a recent unanimous Michigan Supreme Court opinion. tl;dr: Claude.ai did a really good job. My only quibble is that it left out the role of one of…
Summary for Pro Se Plaintiff The magistrate judge is recommending that the motion for summary judgment be granted. Your evidence does not show that Nurse Yule, Nurse Practitioner Housley, or Dr. Wong acted in ways that they knew were likely to cause you additional harm or suffering. Such evidence is required to show a violation…
In less than a year after the ChatGPT usage in Mata v Avianca, Inc., SD NY (Docket No. 1:22-cv-01461) captured headlines, we’re starting to see a pattern and lessons for how adverse parties and courts are handling suspected fake-case court filings. The pattern often follows the routine of other claims when reliability may be questioned…