A divided Michigan Supreme Court released its 32-page decision in People v Samuels (164050) on Friday. I deleted the Syllabus pages and put Claude.ai (a next-generation AI assistant) to work on the majority and dissenting opinions. First, I asked Claudi.ai to outline the decision using this complex prompt: Draft an opinion outline of the attached…
The 12th Edition of Black’s Law Dictionary was released early last month. Chief Editor Bryan A. Garner and publisher Thomson Reuters highlight that 2,500 new terms have been added to the more than 70,000 law-related words and phrases. Thousands of Latin maxims also make their debut. Plus, every page has been supplemented and revised. Price:…
Michigan Court Rule 2.003 concerns the disqualification of a judicial officer and applies to Michigan Supreme Court Justices. Subparagraph(C) outlines the grounds for when a judicial officer may not be able to preside over a matter. (C) Grounds. (1) Disqualification of a judge is warranted for reasons that include, but are not limited to, the following: (a) The…
Today, the Michigan Supreme Court issued a split opinion in People v Prude (Docket 165664)—a case that was decided without oral argument. Because users can now attach files with their “prompts” when using the free versions of the generative AI tools Claude.ai and ChatGPT, I decided to take each for a spin to outline the…
July 31 ends the Michigan Supreme Court’s 2023-2024 term. Legal beagles are looking forward to how the Court will resolve the remaining 39 matters. Below are summary snapshots of what remains in play.
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…