Legal minds on legal matters and whatever else strikes our fancy.
Yesterday, a friend of mine handed me an article from the Bluffs News. After I read it, I immediately thought of law professors and prospective law school students. Dear Professor Millington, Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to [...]
I will be writing a series of posts (entitled “Matters of Practice”) on the most frequently asked questions I receive about filing briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the first post in the series. At Cockle Printing, I am often asked what citation style the Supreme Court prefers and whether the [...]
Opinions Erica P. John Fund, Inc. v. Halliburton Co., 09-1403, June 6, 2011 In this securities fraud case, the district court denied the Petitioner’s application for class action certification, finding that it must be able to prove that the misrepresentation caused the claimed economic loss in order to be certified. The Fifth [...]
If we release prisoners to relieve overcrowding, then prisoners will rape, rob and murder our citizens. That is frightening; therefore we shouldn’t release prisoners, even though the State cannot afford to humanely incarcerate them. This argument was at the heart of Justices Scalia and Alito’s dissenting opinions last week in the California prison [...]
Ann E. Tenbrunsel and Max H. Bazerman in Freakonomics, Wednesday, June 01, 2011, Launching Into Unethical Behavior: Lessons from the Challenger Disaster Tenbrunsel and Bazerman evaluate the decision processes that led to the 1986 Challenger explosion “through a modern day ‘behavioral ethics’ lens.” The piece ties the ethical fallacies apparent in the [...]
...because NPR said so.
The Supreme Court released their case distribution schedule for the October 2011 Term. The schedule lists the Court's distribution dates for both both in forma pauperis and paid cases, as well as the corresponding conference dates. The distribution dates are important for determining the due date of cert stage reply brief. To view the 2011 Term [...]
Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the U.S. Sentencing Commission about whether the new reductions for crack cocaine offenders should be applied retroactively--that is, to those sentenced before the new reductions occurred. Although the Department of Justice agreed that the crack cocaine sentence reductions should be applied retroactively, DOJ also contended that the Commission [...]
Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 10-98, May 31, 2011 In 2003, FBI agents arrested the Respondent under a material witness warrant. The Respondent sued then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, claiming that in the aftermath of September 11th, the government undertook a program to detain terrorism suspects through pretextual material witness claims. The Court held (J. Scalia wrote the [...]
The discussion about the Supreme Court's landmark decision last week in Brown v. Plata continues unabated. There are basically two sides of the debate. Those predicting that a release of prisoners will create a crime wave in California, and therefore, the Supreme Court should not have upheld the release order. You can find these views [...]