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Friday, November 2, 2018
Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup Friday, November 2
Each week, the Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup presents a few tidbits of news and Twitter posts from the past week concerning appellate advocacy. As always, if you see something during the week that you think we should be sure to include, feel free to send Dan a quick email firstname.lastname@example.com or a message on Twitter (@Daniel_L_Real).
Supreme Court Opinions and News:
The Supreme Court has proposed a number of revisions to the Court's Rules and has invited public comment. Among the highlights are proposals to lower the maximum word count on merit briefs and tighten filing deadlines. See more HERE.
This week the Court denied entry to court to a tribal leader wearing a headdress, making headlines. Read the story HERE. The tribal leader, Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman JoDe Goudy, was attempting to enter court to hear arguments involving a treaty between his tribe and the federal government, and he insisted on wearing his tribal regalia. Representatives of the Court indicated that Goudy had been notified ahead of time that head coverings are only permitted in the courtroom for religious or medical reasons.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's announcement that she is withdrawing from public life in the wake of early onset dementia continues to ripple through the legal community; her impact on the American legal landscape really can't be overstated. The Washington Post had this opinion piece.
State Appellate Court Opinions and News:
On Thursday this week, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard oral argument in a case involving the Keystone XL Pipeline. A link to video stream is available HERE.
State courts involved in impeachment battles may mark a worrying new trend to challenge judicial independence and legitimacy: Story HERE.
November 2, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Federal Appeals Courts, State Appeals Courts, United States Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Understanding the Value of Voices Briefs in Appellate Practice
Margaret Hannon, guest blogger, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Supreme Court decisions on deeply personal constitutional issues affect far more than the parties themselves. For example, consider the far-reaching effects of the Court's decision on marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, or on reproductive rights in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. Voices briefs—a form of amicus brief—give non-parties an opportunity to be heard by telling the stories of individuals who are strangers to the case but "whose lives will be profoundly shaped by the Court's decisions."
Amicus filings have increased by "an astounding 800%" in the last fifty years. And the filing of voices briefs has also dramatically increased, especially over the last three years. In Professor Linda Edwards's article, Telling Stories in the Supreme Court: Voices Briefs and the Role of Democracy in Constitutional Deliberation, she considers the legitimacy and value of voices briefs and concludes that "there is little to lose and much to gain when amicus filers tell their stories."
To date, voices briefs have been used almost exclusively in abortion rights and marriage equality cases. In these cases, "(1) the outcome will have a direct personal impact on the intimate lives of those affected; and (2) the storytellers' experience is likely outside the Justices' experience." Professor Edwards imagines other types of cases with similar characteristics in which advocates might use nonparty stories to help the Court understand the experiences of others. For example, voices briefs could be useful in cases involving immigration, capital defendants, convicted felons, police shootings, and issues of race, class, or power disparity.
Professor Edwards explains that voices briefs serve at least three important roles. First, they allow nonparties who will be intimately affected by the Court's decision an opportunity to be heard. Second, even if voices briefs don't succeed in changing the outcome of the case, they may succeed in encouraging the Court to write an opinion that both recognizes and respects opposing views. And, third, voices briefs may encourage the Court to write opinions that model "better public discourse in today's polarized public square." As a result, the Court's opinions may "provide a modicum of healing because readers who lose at least will feel heard, and readers who win may come away with a greater understanding of those on the other side of the issue."
Professor Edwards analyzes the persuasive potential of voices briefs using cognitive science research focusing on "schemas." Schemas are "preexisting cognitive patterns providing interpretive frameworks through which we perceive and judge the world." The perceptions that result from these schemas seem to be natural and objectively true," as "[t]he schema both highlights information that seems consistent with the schema, and hides inconsistent information." So, the question is not whether Justices "see the situation through a lens, but which lens focuses [their] view." And because schemas are unconscious, Justices may "remain unconsciously captive to a set of unexamined assumptions based on preexisting narrative schema."
Voices briefs seek to challenge the Justices' preexisting cultural narratives by highlighting voices and stories that don't fit neatly into their schemas. In our increasingly polarized country, the human tendency to "associate primarily with and listen primarily to those we perceive to be like us" has become amplified. Justices are not immune from this tendency. Indeed, as Professor Edwards notes, Justices have always relied on extra-judicial factual sources and their own preexisting cultural knowledge and personal experiences to inform their decision-making.
Voices briefs thus serve an important role—they help counteract the Justices' preexisting cultural narratives by exposing them to diverse perspectives that "help to fill the inevitable gap between a Justice's personal experience and the realities of other lives and perspectives." Studies have shown that anecdotal messages like the ones communicated in voices briefs may actually be more effective at countering negative preexisting bias than the logical arguments in merits briefs. Professor Edwards concludes that, instead of adding bias to a neutral process, "voices briefs may be the only way to counter the preexisting values bias that accompanies human deliberation."
Professor Edwards discusses concerns about reliability, relevance, and the risk that non-party stories will be used impermissibly as adjudicative facts, rather than as permissible legislative facts. Professor Edwards concludes that "preserving a role for voices briefs is preferable to limiting their use in ways that ignore modern cognitive science and ancient rhetorical principles, that silence the voices of the governed, or that secretly smuggle in the adoption of a limiting jurisprudential view."
I encourage appellate practitioners to read Professor Edwards's article and to think about ways in which you might incorporate voices briefs into your appellate practice when faced with deeply personal constitutional issues that may be out of the realm of the Justices' own personal experiences.
Special thanks to Alison Doyle for her help with this blog post.
October 25, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Court Reform, Appellate Practice, Appellate Procedure, Federal Appeals Courts, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Rhetoric, Sports, State Appeals Courts, United States Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Using Screenwriting Techniques to Tell More Compelling Stories
Margaret Hannon, guest blogger, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Storytelling is an integral part of a lawyer's work, particularly for appellate lawyers. One critical aspect of effective storytelling is structure—and when it comes to structuring an effective story, lawyers can learn a little something from screenwriters.
In Teresa Bruce's forthcoming article in the Journal of Legal Writing Institute, The Architecture of Drama: How Lawyers Can Use Screenwriting Techniques to Tell More Compelling Stories, Professor Bruce proposes that "lawyers build their stories in the same way Hollywood writers do." Just as screenwriters follow a formula, lawyers should do the same: as IRAC is to argument sections, SCOR is to fact sections.
Professor Bruce's article builds on existing storytelling literature, which approaches narrative theory from several different perspectives. The structural perspective uses a pragmatic or pedagogical approach, arguing that "[a] large part of telling an effective story is the order in which the reader presents information."[i] Scholars in this area argue that an effective story structure helps judges and juries understand and remember information, and the story that flows most logically will be the story that seems most probable. As a result, good story structure can increase a client's chance of winning.
Professor Bruce's article takes the structural approach to narrative theory a step further by introducing the SCOR structure. Many lawyers will be familiar with the writing stages identified by Professor Betty Flowers: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge. The Architect stage is where writers focus on "large, organizational, paragraph-level thinking." The SCOR template gives writers a "flexible, generally applicable template they can use each time they tackle a new case." This enables "lawyers to skip the Architecture stage entirely when writing a facts section (as IRAC enables them to do when writing an argument section)." Ultimately, Professor Bruce's hope is that using SCOR will make it easier for lawyers to write their clients' stories more coherently, which will result in clearer, more compelling, and more convincing stories.
So, what is SCOR? To explain SCOR, Professor Bruce begins with the classic three-act story structure, "the basis of Western storytelling." Act I, the Setup, establishes the protagonist's "status quo." Act II, the Confrontation, breaks the status quo and takes the protagonist on a journey to a point of climax. Act III, the Resolution, introduces the protagonist's "new normal" and resolves any unanswered questions. Taking this basic story structure a step further, advanced story structure builds additional milestones into each act to create an overarching "story arc" that provides "rising tension throughout the first and second acts and falling tension during the third." Professor Bruce illustrates both the basic and advanced story structure through a classic movie, The Wizard of Oz.
Professor Bruce then translates this traditional formula into legal writing: Setup, Confrontation, Outcome, Resolution, or SCOR. As in advanced screenwriting, within each act, additional milestones help to give the story added structure and keep audience members engaged.
First, the Setup, Act I, humanizes the client by establishing the client's life and status quo before the "bad event" of the litigation. Second, the Confrontation, Act II, is the "meat" of the story—it introduces the client's antagonist and sets out the pivotal (i.e. outcome-determinative) facts. While the opposing party will often be the antagonist, for some clients, the antagonist will be subtler. For example, for less-sympathetic clients, the antagonist might be "mental-health problems, addiction, childhood trauma, or poverty."
The third and fourth components of the story are the Outcome and the Resolution, Act III. The Outcome is "the end of the protagonist's quest," while the Resolution is "where the audience gets closure." This is the most difficult section for legal writers because a "lawyer cannot simply resolve her client's story . . . the way a screenwriter can." Instead, the lawyer may invite closure by inviting "the judge or the jury to resolve the storyline in a way that favors the client."
To illustrate how this structure works and why it is effective, Professor Bruce uses the statement of facts in the Petition for Certiorari in Miranda v. Arizona. This statement of facts helps illustrate the SCOR structure, but also shows how the structure "can work even for a largely unsympathetic defendant, one who has been convicted of a violent crime." In addition, Professor Bruce points out that other landmark briefs use a similar story structure.
I encourage practitioners, legal writing professors, and law students to read Professor Bruce's article. In the article, she provides a more in-depth discussion of advanced storytelling structure, including the milestones within each act. SCOR provides a practical, accessible, and memorable way to help lawyers incorporate storytelling into their legal writing. And if lawyers can make their clients' stories more accessible to their audiences, those stories will hopefully also be clearer, more compelling, and more convincing.
Special thanks to Alison Doyle for her help with this blog post.
[i] Brian J. Foley & Ruth Anne Robbins, Fiction 101: A Primer for Lawyers on How to Use Fiction Writing Techniques to Write Persuasive Fact Sections, 32 Rutgers L.J. 459, 475 (2001).
September 27, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Federal Appeals Courts, Film, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Oral Argument, State Appeals Courts, Television, United States Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Making Citations Stylish
Margaret Hannon, guest blogger, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Professor Alexa Chew's forthcoming article, Stylish Legal Citation, asks whether legal citations can be stylish. Spoiler alert: The answer is yes.
What is a "stylish" citation? It is a citation that is "fully integrated with the prose to convey information in a readable way to a legal audience." For law-trained readers, well-written citations communicate substantive information about the authorities that support the assertions in the text and the degree of support that the authorities provide. And when citations are well-written, they can "enhance the writer's experience in the way that well-written prose can." On the other hand, poorly written citations make it difficult for legal readers to understand the prose. As a result, readers will either skip over the citations or "slow to a painful crawl."
What makes a citation "unstylish"? Professor Chew groups poorly written citations into two categories: "bumpy" citations and "presumptuous" citations. Bumpy citations interrupt the prose rather than working with it, while presumptuous citations communicate information that the reader expects to see not in the citation but in the prose. Bumpy and presumptuous citations are problematic in and of themselves, but identifying them can also help readers identify other writing problems.
In spite of the communicative role that citations play in legal writing, there is very little guidance about how to cite stylishly. Most legal writing texts don't treat citation as a facet of legal writing style at all; as a result, they provide little to no advice about how to incorporate citations well. Similarly, many legal writers treat citations as an afterthought—a "separate, inferior part of the writing process, a perfunctory task that satisfies a convention but isn't worth the attention that stylish writers spend on the 'real' words in their documents."
So, how can you make your citations more stylish? Professor Chew describes a three-part system that any legal writer can follow, focusing on: (1) choosing what to cite; (2) writing the citation; and (3) revising to tie together prose and citations.
Professor Chew begins by providing advice on choosing what authority to cite and how many authorities to cite. She then provides guidance on writing the citation itself—choosing the citation placement, signal, and parenthetical content. As Professor Chew explains, these decisions should not be based on the Bluebook (or any other citation guide). Instead, they "should be driven by your understanding of the prose and its substantive relationship to the cited authority." Finally, she provides advice on how to tie together the prose and the citations, i.e. how to identify the bumpy or presumptuous citations (which might also be signs of other writing problems) so that you can fix them.
There is one legal writing style expert who does provide guidance about citations—Bryan Garner. But the guidance that he provides isn't about how to make in-line citations stylish because he views citations as "impediments to stylish legal writing." Instead, Garner argues that writers should use footnotes instead of in-line citations.
Professor Chew rejects Garner's critique of in-line citations because it is based on "the premise that writers aren't up to the challenge of skillfully incorporating citations into their texts in a way that readers can follow." Using footnotes may avoid some citation problems and may eliminate visual clutter, making it easier for writers to spot poorly written prose. However, it creates other writing problems. Even if citations are moved to footnotes, legal readers can't ignore them because the citations convey necessary information about the authority that supports the assertions in the text. As Justice Scalia, Garner's co-author, noted, moving citations to the footnotes thus "forces the reader's "eyes to bounce repeatedly from text to footnote." And weaving the details from the citations (such as the case name, court, and date) into the text might solve that problem but creates a new one in that it overemphasizes information that often isn't worth emphasizing and makes the prose more awkward.
Instead, Professor Chew encourages legal writers to embrace in-line citations. In-line citations give the reader control over how much attention they pay to the citations by skimming them over or reading them in more detail. In general, readers pay less attention to citations than they do to prose, and this allows citations to be placed "right next to the propositions they support, at the reader's point of need." As a result, "in-line citations can convey information 'almost subliminally' as readers' eyes speed across them."
Professor Chew's article fills an often-overlooked gap in the legal style literature, and it does so in a practical way. I encourage students, professors, and practitioners to read Professor Chew's article for more detail, especially the "how tos" of making citations more stylish. I didn't need much convincing about the importance of citation to legal writing, but Professor Chew's article still made me think more deliberately about the role that citations play in good legal writing. And for those of you who teach legal writing (whether first-year or upper level), her article also makes the case for better integrating citations into the legal writing curriculum. Finally, if, like me, you can't get enough of Professor Chew's writing on citations, don't miss her Citation Literacy article.
August 30, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, State Appeals Courts, United States Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Consider your reader's working-memory limits
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor, Rutgers Law School
Professor Andrew Carter has used a juggling metaphor to caution his students about exceeding a reader's working-memory limitations. A sentence and paragraph need to stay within the boundaries of what a reader can competently hold in her working memory if the writer wants that reader to thoroughly comprehend and maintain the writer's ideas. His article on the topic provides lawyers with useful information why our writing needs revisions for clarity and, yes, brevity.
Working memory is more than pass-through storage for new information. It is also where we interpret that information and use it to complete tasks. A simple arithmetic problem can be solved in our heads thanks to working memory, because it is there that we are both storing information (the numbers) and processing that information (performing the arithmetic function). At some point, Professor Carter points out, arithmetic becomes too difficult if there are too many numbers to store and manipulate. While we might be able to add numbers in the 100's, we may need to turn to writing instruments to solve addition or subtraction problems that involve numbers in the thousands or ten-thousands.
Working memory has three different components to it: the first part stores the new information and the second part rehearses it on a loop to avoid forgetting. Third, the central executive component coordinates the information and controls the processing.
Written text likewise engages working memory. But, a reader can process only a limited number of concepts in a single sentence or paragraph before overwhelming the limited capacity of working memory's ability to store, rehearse, and process information. In the central executive aspect, the reader completes two tasks: discerning the text's meaning and putting the text into context by mediating interactions with information housed in long-term memory. Thus, says Professor Carter, legal writers need to be cautious about how much information they ask the reader to juggle.
Professor Carter thus offers two sage pieces of advice. First, promote automatic processing. That means keeping the information simplified and free from disruptions. Long sentences with extraneous information, ornate syntax or obscure phrases all inhibit the automatic processing of information. So too will stumbling blocks in the way of grammatical, word-choice, or punctuation errors. Second, manage the cognitive load visually by chunking sentences and paragraphs so the interactivity of ideas is obvious rather than difficult to sus out. Causal ideas (if/then) in sentences and paragraphs should be clear to the reader via small-group chunks that are more automatically processed because they contain recognizable flow.
Naturally, legal readers carry a duty to read and digest the legal writing of an attorney. But, it bears repeating that a piece of writing's efficacy will turn in part on its readability. Sometimes, keeping it simple is the strategic choice.
July 5, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: What's in a parenthetical?
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
Parentheticals. We love them, but we don't always understand how to use them. An empirical study and article by Professor Michael Murray compiling the most-often use of these legal-writing creatures, demonstrates that most of the time they are used either incorrectly or inefficiently. Parentheticals are best employed to illustrate the governing rule of law by pointing to key facts from precedential narratives. Or, to embed a pithy quote that likewise illustrates a point.
Parentheticals are typically used when an illustration can be easily reduced to a comprehensible present-participle phrase. Experts also consider relevance in the equation. Sometimes the efficiencies suggest the use of a parenthetical to save space, i.e. when the precedential case isn't important enough to elevate to an in-text explanation. A parenthetical can also be used to make a point about a rule being used in a series of precedential cases. That is, the parentheticals can then form visual support for synthesis such as, "the five cases that analyzed this point all interpreted the term broadly." Five cites with parentheticals would then follow.
However, the substance inside parentheticals are sometimes visually difficult to locate, coming at the end of a citation sentence. If a case is more relevant to the client's outcome, a better choice may be using one or two sentences of in-text explanation in lieu of the parenthetical.
Michael Smith, at Wyoming College of Law is *the* expert on this topic, and his Advanced Legal Writing textbook's Chapter 3 has been termed by 15 years of upper-division law students as "mandatory reading for any to-be lawyer or lawyer."[1] In the chapter he categorizes types of narration one might do in a parenthetical:
- Illustrate for elucidation (using a parenthetical to illustrate how a rule operated in a precedential case).
- Illustrate for elimination (using a parenthetical to eliminate possible misinterpretations of general rules).
- Illustrate for affiliation (using a parenthetical to tie a rule to something in the everyday knowledge of the reader—a reference to a cultural icon, publication, or phenomenon).
- Illustrate for accentuation (using a parenthetical to demonstrate how one word in the rule that might otherwise be overlooked is actually the key to solving ambiguities).
In my own textbook, written with Steve Johansen and with Professor Smith's colleague Ken Chestek, we expand slightly on Professor Smith's categories, by talking about one-word or one-phrase uses of parentheticals.[2] That is used in situations where a single word or phrase can conjure a story-scene for the reader and make the elucidation point. By way of quick example, "New Jersey considers the smallest of offensive touches 'bodily injury' in its criminal caselaw. [case cite] (slap); [case cite] (shove); [case cite] (kick); [case cite] (pinch)." We also talk about times when you can use quotations effectively in parentheticals: when it's unique language that succinctly illustrates the rule. "wall of separation" is a good example of this.
Professor Smith also includes cautions for the use of parentheticals, and it is here that the numbers crunched by Professor Murray in his article make clear what is going wrong in the majority of appellate briefs. The number one and number two issues that Professor Smith sees in the drafting of parenthetical substance? Exactly what Professor Murray sees the most in his data. The error of placing the rule in the parenthetical. Or, the error of restating the rule in the parenthetical. That is, quoting the rule the attorney just synthesized into a client-oriented rule statement—or should have just synthesized that way. Restating the rule is simply a crutch for the writer—as if to say, "I really did read the case!" Restating the rule also ruins the cause-to-effect narrative flow of the rule illustration/rule explanation part of legal analysis.
Other common errors include being too overbroad in the factual illustration or being too specific. The right height to look down on the case and describe facts for parenthetical purposes is something like 30 feet from the ground. What can you see of a precedent's story from that height? Not every blade of grass, but maybe a person's front yard.
What is the takeaway? Parentheticals are an important tool in the lawyer's kit, when used to promote persuasion and efficiency. They can, however, be cluttering and in some cases can add bulk if they are merely repetitive. Use them well—and use them wisely.
[1] You can preview part of Professor Smith's Chapter 3 via Google Books. Search string: "Michael R. Smith" & parentheticals
[2] Do not pay the list price for a new book. The second edition is coming out this fall and will make this first edition a heck of a lot cheaper.
May 24, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (2)
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Two-spacers, please stop being so selfish
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
The big news this week in field of law and typography[1] was a Washington Post story about a study that purports to settle the one versus two-space controversy that rages on appellate-minded websites, listservs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts. Even on this Appellate Advocacy Blog, editor Tessa Dysart chimed in earlier this week. For those of you who are two-space fanatics, I am going to do more than repeat what you may have already heard, i.e. that the study is deeply flawed (although I will quickly review it). Mostly, I am going to suggest that you reflect on your dry, compassionate-less soul and then put down your personal preferences to instead be a citizen of the world.
But before I continue along these lines, I want to reiterate the scientific flaws in the study that have been ably and articulately pointed out by the best typographer and design expert in law—Matthew Butterick. I have had the pleasure of presenting with LWI Golden Pen recipient Matthew Butterick, and I know that when he writes something, he's carefully researched and analyzed it first. Right away, Butterick calls attention to the central flaw of the study. It was done using the monospaced (typewriter-like) typeface of Courier, which is still required by the upper courts of New Jersey. To try and shake loose the New Jersey committee overseeing court rule changes, I researched the educational and cognitive science of readability and in 2004 published Painting with Print: Incorporating Concepts and Layout Design into the Text of Legal Writing Documents. The New Jersey officials were not persuaded but other courts were, and the article appeared by invitation on the 7th Circuit's website for twelve years.
Because it is a monospaced typeface, two spaces must appear at the end of each sentence. Otherwise it is too difficult to determine whether there has actually been a break in the prose. But people don't use typewriter fonts when they have the choice to use a proportionally spaced one such as the one you are reading right now. And there's a reason for that. Courier, and typefaces like it, are 4.7% more difficult to read than proportionally spaced type. That equals a slowdown of fifteen words per minute, which Dr. Miles Tinker, the lead psychologist who studied the issue deemed "significant." In his studies, readers consistently ranked proportionally spaced typefaces ahead of monospaced ones.[2] In other words, the new study is flawed both in using a typeface that people don't normally choose, and in using a typeface that essentially requires two spaces to be able to discern the difference between the end of a sentence or not. The people conducting the study put the cart before the horse. That's just poor science.
Now, I promised you a lambasting, and here it is. Two spaces after periods take up more space and for lawyers who find themselves up against a page limit, or who wonder why paper is so expensive, think about whether you can save yourself some space and money by switching over to one space instead.[3] You can also cut down on use of one of the most noxious and wasteful products we use: paper. In this country, paper is the largest source of municipal waste, and paper creation is the fourth worst industry for the environment. I wrote about this too, in a follow-up article, Conserving the Canvas: Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Legal Briefs by Re-imagining Court Rules and Document Design Strategies. Two spaces after periods actually contribute to the polluting of the environment. Yes, that extra space really does cost something to use.
And, if you are in the Seventh Circuit, you don't even have a choice. The judges care a great deal about typography and instruct lawyers to use only one space after periods.
So, there you have it, two-spacers. An inconvenient truth. There's logos, pathos, and ethos to using only one space. Your preference harms the Earth, eats into your page limits, and costs you and your clients more money to use. The so-called study is junk science. Are there really any justifiable reasons left to continue your inconsiderate punctuation practices?
[1] Sure, that's a thing, per Derek Kiernan-Johnson
[2] Miles A. Tinker, Legibility of Print 47–48 (Iowa State U. Press 1964) (synthesizing several decades of psychological research on typeface and readability).
[3] There are also other ways to save yourself some money and ecological ruin. When rules don't require double-spacing: don't. It's harder to read anyway. And when courts allow you to use double-sided printing, do so.
May 10, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Court Reform, Appellate Practice, Appellate Procedure, Federal Appeals Courts, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts, United States Supreme Court, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: Know your logical fallacies (Part 1)
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
Faulty reasoning undermines the substances of a legal argument as well as the credibility of the advocate. After a quick search of the online briefs available on Westlaw and Lexis, I can safely tell you that several thousand appellate briefs reference logical fallacies—typically as a precursor to a direct refutation of an opposing party's argument. How many of us these days know our logical fallacies as well as we should?
Beyond calling out opposing counsel for these errors, the wise attorney also tests their own writing to see if they have relied on fallacious thinking. In most logical fallacies, something has gone wrong with the legal syllogism. In a sense, the major premise of a syllogism is a rule, while the minor premise is a fact. The conclusion flows from the application of the rule to the fact. Here is a simple example.[1]
Major premise: The speed limit where defendant was arrested is 45 MPH.
Minor Premise: The working-perfectly radar gun clocked defendant at 63 MPH.
Conclusion: Defendant was speeding
In most logical fallacies, some part of the syllogism fails. There are four major categories of logical fallacies in law. Today's blog entry goes through the first two groups of common fallacies: the non-sequitur fallacies and the insufficient evidence fallacies. The next Thinking Thursday blog entry will discuss two other categories: shallow thinking and avoidance fallacies.
1. Non-sequitur fallacies. In a non-sequitur, the major premise is applied incorrectly to the minor premise. You can recognize these when the conclusion does not logically flow from the premise
1.1 The correlation equals causation fallacy commonly appears with statistical analyses. The arguer claims that because A and B appear together A must have caused B. The argument that the MMR vaccine causes babies to develop autism is a classic example of this type of fallacy. This amusing site shows these fallacies taken to the extreme.
1.2 The post hoc fallacy is closely related to the correlation/causation fallacy. The arguer claims that because A occurrence is followed by B occurrence, A's occurrence must have caused B to occur. For example, after I ate an apple, I won an award—ergo, eating the apple caused me to win the award. In law, this sometimes shows up this way: When Pat drinks, Pat becomes violent. Therefore, Pat's violence is caused by alcohol. That is a logical fallacy. Alcohol may lower inhibitions but does not cause violence by itself.
2. Insufficient evidence fallacies contain faulty minor premises—faulty because they are false or based in inadequate material. There are three major types of these.
2.1 The hasty generalization fallacy happens when lawyers draw big and general conclusions from too small a sample size or from unrelated evidence. "Climate change has been solved because this winter New Jersey saw frigid temperatures in late December and early January, and because it saw two nor'easter storms in March." In that example, the weather from one three-month period is being used to argue that a decades-old phenomenon is over or never existed. To show this syllogistically:
Major premise: Climate change is making things warmer
Minor premise (flawed): weather over a three-month period matters to climate change
Conclusion (faulty): Climate change is over or solved.
2.2 The anecdotal evidence fallacy is related to the hasty generalization fallacy. The anecdotal evidence fallacy occurs when there is simply inadequate evidence to support the minor premise.
Major premise: Some cities offer Segway tours of tourist areas.
Minor premise (flawed): I have never seen people on a Segway tour of Philadelphia.
Conclusion (faulty): Philadelphia does not have Segway tours.
2.3 Finally, shallow legal research can lead to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. As a classic example, a person shoots an arrow at a barn wall, and then draws a bullseye around the arrow in the wall. That's a logical fallacy and happens in the minor premise—i.e. "this is a target with a bullseye." A Texas sharpshooter fallacy happens when someone builds legal analysis and argumentation around incomplete legal research. Think of this fallacy as related to a confirmation bias—when the legal researcher stops researching when they find a result that demonstrates the governing rule that they want for their client, versus what the rule might actually be.
It is easy enough these days to practice spotting logical fallacies simply by watching television. Many advertisements use fallacious reasoning in the marketing. Politicians will sometimes fall into the logical fallacy trap as well—watching the news for a week or two should net you a few examples. But, most importantly, review your own advocacy for these common errors.
] Thank you to Professor Ken Chestek (Wyoming) and Professor Steve Johansen (Lewis & Clark) for these examples. They come from the upcoming second edition of our co-authored textbook, Your Client's Story: Persuasive Legal Writing (2d ed. Wolters Kluwer, expected publication date of later this year).
March 15, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Appellate Procedure, Federal Appeals Courts, Law School, Legal Ethics, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Oral Argument, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Thinking Thursday: Lincoln would have owned Twitter
Presidents' Weekend is upon us. Ten score and nine years ago, one of our most eloquent American writers was born. Per Professor Julie Oseid, it's hard to pin down President Lincoln's prowess to just one attribute. He was adept at many skills, "including alliteration, rhyme, contrast, balance, and metaphor." (From her new book, Communicators-in-Chief) In her chapter on Lincoln, however, Oseid focuses on his ability to express a great deal in an economy of words. He developed that style during his 25 years as a trial attorney riding circuit. Collecting his legal writing became a quest for historians, and as a result Lincoln is now the most documented lawyer that we may ever have. You can see some of the work of The Lincoln Legal Papers project online. Oseid summarizes Lincoln's strategy as not to waste arguments or words, but to use "just the necessary number of those words for essential matters."
So many of our presidents are known for their rhetorical style that Oseid is able to build a body of work about the takeaways that we, as legal writers, can learn from our bygone leaders. Essays have appeared in Volumes 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD. Her new book brings together the rhetorical lessons from these five presidents and does so in a way that is very readable in the gestalt.
Lincoln worked hard for his brevity, pondering and editing mercilessly. He was driven by a need for universal comprehension—something every trial lawyer learns to do. His famous second inaugural address was delivered in six minutes. In 701 words he developed a timeless message of reconciliation—and 505 of the words he used were only one syllable long. His notes of his speech showed emphasis on five words, all verbs.
I asked Professor Oseid, and she agreed that Lincoln would have used Twitter masterfully and eloquently. It is interesting to pause for a few minutes and wonder how he would have used the medium. From what we know of his other writings, I strongly believe that he would have lifted it up, and us up in the process. Lincoln keenly understood that intelligent and powerful communications do not depend on vocabulary, but on conveying a theme with precision and organization.
As I celebrate my favorite presidents this weekend, I will be thinking about those legal writing lessons I can learn from them.
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
February 15, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Books, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Oral Argument, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Thinking Thursday: St Brigid's Day and our writing process
Today is St. Brigid's Day, celebrating propagation and creativity (primarily of women, but let's interpret this broadly). As professional writers whose jobs entail creativity in problem-solving, it is a good day to stop and audit our own methods of propagating our acts of creativity, namely those of writing. The more we understand how we work as writers, the better we will write.
Professor Pam Jenoff—a Rutgers colleague as well as a New York Times Bestseller author—offers practitioners a way to do this in her short and quite readable article in Legal Communication & Rhetoric's volume 10, The Self-Assessed Writer. In the article she imports tried-and-true methods from fiction-writing, re-imagined to help the legal writer. To improve our writing and our willingness to write, Professor Jenoff recommends we take a little time to express our work styles, optimized environments, and preferred tasks. Her suggestions for doing this exercise are simple to digest and complete. A few pages into the article she offers us a questionnaire that asks us to think about our most productive writing atmosphere. She also asks us to be honest about our task-preferences in the form of writing challenges and strengths.
I have taken this assessment and asked my students to do the same. In doing so, I have come to terms with the actual what and when of my writing successes, which are somewhat different than what I wish I could report are the what and when. I am great at the re-organizing and revising stages of the writing process and will happily work on that for hours on end with only a few breaks. A lengthy first draft will exhaust me, and to get through, I need to work on it in smaller chunks than I do a revising project. When I take mid-session breaks I know that I need to walk to process the information in my head, and I know that I need a notebook in hand or a voice recorder app at the ready, because I will forget every productive thought I had if I don't preserve it during the walk. I also know that I need two screens and therefore a desktop setup for the first-draft process. Research on one side, draft on the other. I need the same as I reorganize because I find it easier to cut and paste into a new document. If I am in later revising stages, a one-screen laptop works fine. This blog entry was written using the two-screen method. If I wrote it on my laptop you would be reading it as Thinking Saturday.
The point Professor Jenoff makes isn't that we can always have what we want in our writing milieu. Instead, it's to understand what is optimal. The further we move from the optimal, the harder our writing process becomes. Conversely, our productivity and the quality of our product increases as we pay ourselves first with an optimized writing process.
Happy St. Brigid's Day.
Ruth Anne Robbins, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
February 1, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: The idea of "opportune moments" in advocacy.
Appellate attorneys must choose not only the right arguments, but also the right moment for the argument. By that, I mean the right time in the world, and the right time in the brief. The idea of opportune moments draws upon a less-taught rhetorical concept, that of kairos.[1]
In Greek myth, two spirits represented different aspects of time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos, often depicted as an aged man, was the spirit representing the sequential and linear passage of time. Kairos, the spirit of opportune moments—of possibilities—is shown as a young man, floating on air in a circuitous path. [2] His wings and the long hair growing only out of his face and not on the top or back of his head, symbolizes the need for people to seize him as he approaches, but not after he passed by. In his whirling travel patterns, Kairos—unlike Chronos—may come around again. Thus, the concept of kairos in rhetoric centers on the "opportune moment." It is the difference between "being in the right time and place" versus the idea that people cannot go backwards in time.
The "opportune moment" concept of kairos has been part of rhetoric since the time of Aristotle, who took the view that the moment in time in which an argument was delivered dictated the type of rhetorical devices that would be most effective. The sophists took a different view: Kairos is something to be manipulated by the presenter as part of adapting the audience's interpretation of the current situation. Kairos assists in molding the persuasive message the speaker is communicating. Modern rhetoricians hold a middle view—that a presenter must be inventive and fluid because there can never be more than a contingent management of a present opportunity.
The Greek word kairos and its translation "opportune moment" embody two distinct concepts communicated through metaphors. The first concept, the derivation of the "right moment" half of the definition, is temporal. Greek mythology concentrated the spirit on the temporal. That is, the right time in the history of the world. For lawyers, that is important to know when making a policy argument. Is this the right moment in the trajectory of chronological time to make a particular policy argument. Will it persuade? Appellate attorneys who write civil rights and other impact-topic briefs will immediately understand what I am talking about. There is a right moment in history to make an argument. Some of the most important cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court depended on the timing of the case—the kairos.
In an article about creating kairos at the Supreme Court, and published in the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, Professor Linda Berger has written about the idea of kairos and suggests that temporal metaphors are still useful, because they help explain why today's dissent in an opinion may become tomorrow's majority decision. In her analysis, she demonstrates that what may look like a missed or lost opportunity to persuade may still have an impact. A snagged thread in the fabric of the law, which, at an opportune later time, can be pulled to unravel the existing fabric of the legal sky when the opportune moment comes around again.
But, the second half of the kairos definition—the opportunity—deals with the spatial. To seize the opportunity at the right time requires one to communicate in the right place and under the right circumstances. Rhetoricians commonly use visualizations of the penetrable openings needed for both the successful passage of the arrows of archery through loopholes in solid walls, and the productive shuttles of weaving through the warp yarns in fabric, as a way to describe the spatial aspect of kairos. Modern rhetoric takes these metaphors and elaborates, defining kairos as "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved."The idea is one of force and power.
For appellate attorneys, this represents the "where" an argument is placed in the internal whole of the document. The kairos of the legal writing. That depends, of course, on the overall narrative structure of the argument, the positions of emphasis in the beginnings and closings of sections and paragraphs, and the lasting imagery the writer wants the readers to walk away remembering. It is, as Professor Scott Fraley has noted in his Primer on Essential Classical Rhetoric for Practicing Attorneys, the idea that the writer understands the right moments "at which particular facts or arguments are inserted into the argument or presentation of the case." He calls kairos, "the art of knowing when . . . to make the winning argument." In other words, the strategic advocate spends time thinking about the persuasion of time.
[1] Some of this entry relies on language I wrote in an article on a different topic. Ruth Anne Robbins, Three 3Ls, Kairos, and the Civil Right to Counsel in Domestic Violence Cases, 2015 Mich. L. Rev. 1359 (2015). For the background on Kairos and kairos, I rely on these works: Carolyn R. Miller, Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science, in A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy 310, 312–13 (Stephen P. Witte, Neil Nakadate & Roger D. Cherry eds., 1992); James Kinneavy & Catherine Eskin, Kairos in Aristotle's Rhetoric, 17 Written Comm. 432, 436–38 (2000); and Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: on the Will-to-Invent 13–15 (1987).
[2] Francesco Salviati, Kairos (1552-1554) (fresco); picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFrancesco_Salviati_005-contrast-detail.jpg
January 18, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Oral Argument, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Thinking Thursdays: New Science on the Ability of Facts to Debunk Myths
Extra! Extra! In a Post-Facts World, Facts Still Matter!
Yesterday, Slate published an important cover story written by Daniel Engber, LOL, Something Matters, in which he assures readers that facts still have power. In it, he outlines and reviews some of the scientific studies, old and new, that have analyzed the effects of presenting facts to counter false beliefs. There's good news in the most recent studies. Facts do have an effect on debunking false information or myths.
The new science supporting the importance of factual persuasion, ironically has its own factual persuading to do. People who know a little bit about the science of managing adverse material typically rely on a small sample-size study conducted by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.[1] Two years prior to its actualy publication, the study was written up in mass-consumption media as part of the 2008 election fever. The stories tended to make dire predictions that fact-checking news stories would end up rallying people to become more firmly entrenched in their beliefs in the falsehoods. This phenomenon was termed the "backfire" or "boomerang" effect. Oxford Dictionaries selected "post-facts" as the 2016 word of the year, based in part on these studies.
Graduate students at different universities became interested in the Nyhan-Riefler paper, and attempted to replicate them, to no avail. The new studies were 103 times larger than the studies done by Nyhan and Riefler. One set of graduate students used over 10,000 test-subjects and another graduate student group used almost 4,000. The data tended to show the opposite: none of the conditions resulted in any evidence that people adhered to their views when presented with facts that showed the opposite was true. Rather, the studies showed that the test-subjects were more likely to adapt their views to better fit the facts.
Rather than challenge the new science, essentially debunking theirs, the original scientists, Nyhan and Riefler collaborated with one of the other sets of researchers to conduct new studies. The foursome posted a 60-page article in the summer of 2017, The Effect of Information on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability, [2] concluding that people are willing to update factual beliefs when presented with "counter-attitudinal informaton." However, they further concluded that updated factual beliefs might have only minimal effects on attitudes towards a political candidate. The very creators of the backfire/boomerang effect have questioned—some might say debunked—their own previous work. And the Slate article has set out to help publicize the new studies. Facts still matter.
So, what does the appellate lawyer take from all of this? Well, two things. First: the new studies give credence to the idea that the better way to manage adverse material is to disclose and refute it, rather than ignore it. Kathy Stanchi, a Professor of Law at Temple University has advised this in her germinal article, Playing With Fire: The Science of Confronting Adverse Material in Legal Advocacy.[3] As cited in Professor Stanchi's article, other scientists have suggested ways to confront adverse material—to immediately refute it when mentioned.[4]
Second, the wise appellate lawyer, turns to one of the resources that Daniel Engber cited in the Slate article, John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, The Debunking Handbook, available for free download (7 pages). The handbook offers an "Anatomy of an effective debunking" on page 6. The last of the advisory elements is to present information graphically, so I will end this blog post with a chart.
Elements, per handbook
Explanation in handbook
Blog Analysis
Core facts
Refute by emphasizing the key facts. This will create a gap in the knowledge of the audience—a hole where the falsities used to take up space
This isn't said in the text of the handbook, but the examples do mention a need for the key facts to present as a cohesive, alternative narrative.
Explicit warnings
Before mentioning the myth or falsehood, provide textual or visual cues that upcoming information is false
In legal writing-ese, this advice suggests that the writer mention the myth only after presenting the true facts. That gives the truth the position of emphasis in a subsection or paragraph.
Alternative Explanation
Any gaps left by the debunking needs to be filled. Achieve this by providing an alternative causal explanation for why the myth is wrong (and perhaps why the falsities spread).
This isn't said in the text of the handbook, but the examples do mention a need for alternative explanation to present as a cohesive, alternative narrative. In other words, story persuades. Stories are organizational scaffolds that present information as cause à effect
Core facts should be displayed graphically, if possible.
For lawyers, the legal reasoning may also be presented with infographics. But, not all infographics are useful infographics--some are merely decorative and others might be off-point. The writer must always balance the usefulness with the impact on persuasion. For more on this, see Steve Johansen and Ruth Anne Robbins, Art-icuating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning, 20 Legal Writing 57 (2015).
[1] 32 Political Behavior, 303 (2010). The study used 130 undergraduate students at a Catholic university. These students were split among four different modules. Id. at 312.
[2] Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Porter, Jason Reifler, and Thomas Wood, Taking Corrections Literally but not Seriously? The Effect of Information on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability (June 29, 2017), available on SSRN at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2995128 (last accessed January 3, 2018).
[3] 60 Rutgers L. Rev. 381 (2008).
[4] Id. at 390–92.
January 4, 2018 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Current Affairs, Law School, Legal Ethics, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Thinking Thursdays: Negativity, Empiricism, and Legal Advocacy
Professor Ken Chestek at the University of Wyoming College of Law has created two different empirical studies about persuasion and narrative, using judges as the test subject. For that rarity alone, his scholarship stands out as important for lawyers to read. In his most recent article, Fear and Loathing in Persuasive Writing,[1] he asked the question of whether the "negativity bias," known to psychologists, works with judges as well as it works with voters. The answer is the standard one you would expect from a lawyer, "it depends." That the answer isn't a definitive "no way," should give us pause as advocates. Our intuitive answer that we naturally graviate towards the positive turns out to be the opposite of how our brains work. Rather, as Chestek writes, "we have a natural inclination to attend to and process negative stimuli." Scientists posit that we retain negative information longer because the brain processes it more thoroughly—perhaps as a necessary adaption in evolution to keeping ourselves alive. He reviews the science of negativity and implications for lawyers in greater detail in another recent article, Of Reptiles and Velcro: The brain's "negativity bias" and Persuasion
In his eighteen-month empirical study with 163 judicial readers, Chestek used a series of nine appellate brief preliminary statements to test the power of positive versus negative themes in a simulated case file. Four were positive, four were negative, and one was neutral.[2] By themes, Chestek references George Lakoff's formuation of "deep frames," an idea Chestek wrote about in his other empirical study about judges and the persuasive power of story (You can read a snippet of George Lakoff's framing concepts here).
Ultimately, Chestek's concludes that the results don't provide bright-line answers, but instead point towards complexity. Positive themes seem to focus the judges' attention on the state of the governing law whereas negative themes focus their attention more on the nuances of the facts. He also found that negative themes work better for a David facing Goliath rather than vice versa.
This phenomenon has significant implications for written legal advoacy, starting with theme selection. That strategy should factor in the strength of the legal position or the facts. Second, the negativity bias might lead an advocate to phrase policy arguments in terms of avoiding bad outcomes instead of promoting good outcomes, since the judge may process the negative statement more thoroughly. And, finally, the negativity bias suggests that it is critically important to understand the negative facts of your client's case and the ways they can or cannot be managed.[3]
[1] Published as the lead article in Volume 14 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JAWLD
[2] For more on the persuasiveness of Preliminary Statements, see Steve Johansen's article, Coming Attractions: An Essay on Movie Trailers and Preliminary Statements, and Maureen Johnson's article, You Had Me at Hello: Examining the Impact of Powerful Introductory Emotional Hooks Set Forth in Appellate Briefs Filed in Recent Hotly Contested U.S. Supreme Court Decisions.
[3] Base photograph by Kenneth D. Chestek—photography is one of his hobbies.
December 7, 2017 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Thinking Thursdays: Visual Impact Moments
What is the narrative climax in the Little Red Riding Hood fable? When the wolf eats Little Red. But what is the visual impact moment? The image you think about when you recall the story? That's
probably different. It's either an image of a little girl in a red cape, walking through the woods or it's the moment when Little Red first sees the wolf in Granny's bed, wearing Granny's nightclothes. The visual impact moment can be different from the story's climax.
Jason Eyster writes about visual impact moments in one of my all-time favorite articles in the Applied Legal Storytelling canon. His article, The Lawyer as Artist, in Vol. 14 of the Journal of Legal Writing, explores the use of scene and setting as a persuasive tool for legal writers. This article is creative, and always fresh. It is one that I re-read and think about at least once or twice a year. The idea of the setting isn't often discussed in the persuasion literature, but, as Eyster argues, can create lingering impressions. The legal writer who takes time during a description to linger on choice details will make the scene "pop" for the reader those visual images will provoke a natural, emotional response. The visual impact scene need not be the climax, but should connect to the case theme. If you can connect it to the theory of the case, all the better.
So, how do you do it? Eyster offers one idea: the obtuse object. That is something unexpected or incongruous with a scene that draws in the reader through a natural curiosity. In one of his examples, an asylum case, the legal writer zeroes in the description of his client, sitting in her former home and eating a pomegranate just before hearing a sinister knock on her door—one that results in her being dragged away by militia in her country. The simple mention of the pomegranate serves to draw the reader into the scene. It evokes the famous Persephone myth of a young woman dragged into hell while her mother tries to have her released. The scene is made all the more emotional for its layers of meaning.
Think about the scene in your client's case that you hope the judicial panel will likewise remember when they put down the brief. Is it the scene you want? If it's the same scene your opponent might choose, think of another one. If it is the scene you want, have you chosen some memorable detail to describe—an action, an object, a character, or the setting itself. Describe it with a name, sensory information, its function, its history, or a metaphor. Things like this put joy and art into the job of legal writing.
October 26, 2017 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Writing, Moot Court, Rhetoric, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Thinking Thursdays: The downsides of maintaining a citation fetish
With the return of autumn and the Supreme Court to session, appellate tweets and listservs turn to . . . did I really see a conversation about citation? Why do attorneys give so much credibility to a book developed and maintained by student law review editors who in the 16th edition accidentally tried to change the substance of precedential value by announcing that every citation needed a signal? (See this article by Dean Darby Dickerson for a discussion about that weird story).
Professor Susie Salmon wants you to know that "perfect citation" isn't really a beautiful unicorn, and that questing for it has expensive downsides. Her article, Shedding the Uniform: Beyond a Uniform System of Citation to a More Efficient Fit, published last year in the Marquette Law Review, looks at the history of the citation fetish (her turn of phrase, not mine!), the rise of the Bluebook dominance, and the lack of uniformity that actually exists in the legal world. She adroitly observes that teaching and living by "perfect Bluebooking" leads to frivolous classroom and billable hours that would be better spent on richer analysis and representation. Instead, she argues, rationality should prevail. Citation, as she reminds us, exists for three purposes: a finding tool for cited authority, a signal about the weight and vintage of the authority, and credit for the author of the authority. These goals can be met with any system that provides these things with accuracy, brevity, and clarity.
Professor Salmon's article takes us on an interesting historical tour of citation, beginning with the Roman Justinian texts, through Middle English books, to that fateful 1926 summer, when a clever Harvard 2L first wrote a handbook for his fellow law review classmates and eventually for elite-school law review editors who signed on. The story turns darker in the country's bicentennial year when the Bluebook editors openly determined to dominate legal citation form. In 1981, the editors finally agreed to acknowledge a difference between law reviews and practitioner documents, but did very little to develop that part of the book until faced with competition by the University of Chicago's Maroonbook and a challenge by practitioners and law professor themselves—the ALWD Citation Manual/Guide.
And, the fetish of uniformity is expensive. Law professors who choose to spend hours on citation teaching and assessing are taking away from time they could spend teaching more client-centered advocacy skills. Practicing attorneys who devote hours to perfecting citation are costing their clients hundreds or thousands of dollars that might not be justifiable. And, relying on the traditional notions of citation also increase the monopoly that West holds on legal materials, to the detriment of an open-access system of legal information.
Ultimately, Professor Salmon raises excellent points. Uniform citation does not exist. Those very smart law review students who knew the Bluebook backwards and forwards while they were 2L and 3L students very well may be referring to wrong parts of the book when citing inside practitioner documents. And, they might be using a superseded Bluebook, that is, an out-of-date model. There are twenty editions, after all, each with changes. Finally, the existence of local rules in many jurisdictions pose other problems, particularly when the local rules are not widely known or widely available, and have their own internal quirks. Things aren't likely to get better, because the Bluebook's continued existence depends on the planned obsolescence of earlier editions. Instead, Professor Salmon recommends what others before her have suggested: public domain citation, development of better apps and programs to check citation form, and flexibility to allow that many formats will satisfy the principles underlying a good citation system.
October 12, 2017 in Appellate Advocacy, Appellate Practice, Law School, Legal Profession, Legal Writing, Moot Court, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, July 17, 2017
Should SCOTUS Justices Have a Mandatory Retirement Age?
According to Law360, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner (age 78), advocated for mandatory judicial retirement ages in a recent interview published by Slate. Judge Posner suggested setting the retirement age at around 80 years old, saying "[t]here are loads of persons capable of distinction as Supreme Court justices; no need for octogenarians." Currently, Justice Kennedy is 80 years old (he turns 81 in just a few days--happy birthday Justice Kennedy), and Justice Ginsburg is 84.
The notion of a mandatory judicial retirement age is not new. In fact, many states have such rules, although most states set the age at 70. The problem with a federal judicial retirement age is that Article III of the Constitution states judges "shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour," which has been read to confer life tenure on federal judges. Article III, however, is not an obstacle for Judge Posner who, according to the article, reads the clause "as simply meaning judges can be fired at any age for bad performance."
Interestingly, there have been efforts to increase state mandatory judicial retirement ages in recent years, due in part to the fact that life expectancies are increasing. These efforts, however, have largely been rejected by voters in the past. In fact, Oregon voters recently rejected an effort to remove the mandatory judicial retirement age of 75. On the other hand, last year Pennsylvania voters, by a rather narrow margin, approved an increase in the mandatory retirement age from 70 to 75.
July 17, 2017 in Appellate Court Reform, Federal Appeals Courts, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, November 14, 2016
2016 Election Recap--State Supreme Courts
Last week I blogged on the impact of the 2016 presidential election on the U.S. Supreme Court. On Friday, once the results were in, Dan linked to several articles discussing the results. Today I want to focus on the impact of the election on the state supreme courts by looking at the 2016 state supreme court elections:
Alabama: In Alabama, Michael F. "Mike" Bolin (Republican), Tom Parker (Republican), and Kelli Wise (Republican) won reelection as an Associate Justice on the state supreme court.
Alaska: Supreme Court Justices Joel Bolger and Peter J. Maassen won retention elections in Alaska. Both men were originally appointed by Republican governors.
Arizona: State Supreme Court Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer won retention election. She was appointed by a Republican governor.
Arkansas: Arkansans elected two Supreme Court Justices in the March 2016 primary. John "Dan" Kemp, a circuit court judge, defeated Associate Justice Courtney Goodson for the chief justice seat. Circuit Court Judge Shawn Womack defeated Clark Mason, a Little Rock attorney, in the other state supreme court election.
Colorado: William W. Hood won a retention election to continue service on the Colorado Supreme Court. He was appointed by a Democratic governor.
Florida: Chief Justice Jorge Labarga, Justice Charles Canady, and Justice Ricky Polston all won retention election. All three were appointed by a then-Republican governor (Charlie Crist).
Georgia: David Nahmias won a retention election to hold his seat on the Georgia Supreme Court in May of this year. Additionally, on November 9, Republican Governor Nathan Deal appointed three justices to the states supreme court—Solicitor General Britt Grant and Court of Appeals Judges Michael Boggs and Nels Peterson.
Idaho: Attorney Robyn Brody defeated Republican State Senator Curt McKenzie for a seat on the Idaho Supreme Court.
Iowa: Chief Justice Mark Cady and Associate Justices Daryl Hecht and Brent Appel won retention election. Chief Justice Cady was appointed by a Republican governor and Justices Hecht and Appel were appointed by a Democratic governor.
Kansas: Chief Justice Lawton Nuss and Justices Marla Luckert, Carol Beier, Daniel Biles, and Caleb Stegall were all retained.
Kentucky: State Appeals Court Judge Larry VanMeter, a registered Republican, defeated another state appellate judge, Glenn Acree, a registered Democrat.
Louisiana: Incumbent Marcus Clark (Republican) won an unopposed election for the Fourth District seat on the state supreme court. Additionally, Republican James Genovese defeated Republican Marilyn Castle for the Third District seat.
Michigan: Incumbent Republicans David Viviano and Joan Larsen survived election challenges to remain on the state supreme court.
Minnesota: Incumbent Natalie Hudson beat attorney Michelle L. MacDonald for a seat on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Justice Hudson was appointed by a Democratic governor.
Mississippi: Three incumbents won reelection to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Incumbent Jim Kitchens beat State Appellate Court Judge Kenneth Griffis. Incumbent Dawn Beam beat Michael Shareef. Incumbent James D. Maxwell won an unopposed election. Additionally, Robert P. Chamberlin won a four-way race for the state supreme court.
Missouri: Justice Richard Teitelman, a Democrat appointee, was retained for his seat on the state supreme court.
Montana: In June, Chief Justice Mike McGrath and Justice Jim Shea both ran unopposed for their seats, which was treated per Montana law as a retention election. Shea had been appointed by a Democratic governor. Additionally, on November 8, Kristen Juras beat Dirk M. Sandefur for the vacancy caused by Justice Patricia O'Brien Cotter's retirement.
Nebraska: Chief Justice Michael Heavican and Justices John Wright and William Cassel all were retained. Chief Justice Heavican and Justice Cassel were appointed by Republican governors, while Justice Wright was appointed by a Democratic governor.
Nevada: Justices James Hardesty and Ron Parraguirre were both retained on the state supreme court.
New Mexico: Justice Barbara J. Vigil, a Democrat, was retained to the state supreme court and Republican incumbent Judith Nakamura, a recent appointee, defeated Democrat Michael Vigil.
North Carolina: Incumbent Justice Bob Edmunds, a Republican, lost to Mike Morgan, a Democrat, in North Carolina's nonpartisan supreme court election. This gives Democrats a majority on the state supreme court, but the state legislature is allegedly considering expanding the size of the court.
North Dakota: Justice Lisa Fair McEvers, an incumbent, ran unopposed for her seat on the state supreme court. Jerod Tufte defeated Robert V. Bolinske, Sr., to replace Justice Dale Sandstrom on the state supreme court.
Ohio: Republican Justice Maureen O'Connor won an unopposed election for the chief justice seat. Republican Pat DeWine defeated Democrat Cynthia Rice for a seat on the Supreme Court. Republican Pat Fischer holds a narrow lead over Democrat John O'Donnell in the other supreme court race.
Oklahoma: Justices James R. Winchester and Douglas L. Combs were both retained to the state supreme court.
Oregon: Justice Lynn Nakamoto won an unopposed election to remain on the state supreme court. In May, Justices Rives Kistler and Jack Landau also won unopposed elections.
Tennessee: Three state supreme court justices were retained in August—Justices Holly Kirby, Jeff Bivins, and Roger A. Page. All three were appointed by a Republican governor.
Texas: Texas has two high courts—the state supreme court and the Court of Criminal Appeals. For the state supreme court, the three Republican incumbents—Debra Lehrmann, Paul Green, and Eva Guzman—defeated their Democratic challengers Mike Westergren, Dori Contreras Garza, and Savannah Robinson. On the Court of Criminal Appeals Democrat incumbent Larry Meyers was defeated by Republican Mary Lou Keel. Incumbent Republican Michael Keasler defeated Democrat Robert Burns. For the open seat, Republican Scott Walker defeated Democrat Betsy Johnson.
Washington: Incumbents Mary Yu, Barbara Madsen, and Charlie Wiggins defeated challengers David DeWolf, Greg Zempel, and Dave Larson to remai on the state supreme court.
West Virginia: In May, incumbent Republican Brent Benjamin faced a five-way race for his seat involving two Republicans and three Democrats. He lost to Republican Beth Walker.
Wisconsin: In April, incumbent Rebecca Bradley defeated JoAnne Kloppenburg to remain on the state supreme court.
Wyoming: Justices Kate M. Fox, William U. Hill, and Keith G. Kautz, all appointed by Republican governors, were retained.
November 14, 2016 in Appellate Advocacy, Current Affairs, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Saturday, October 31, 2015
The Importance of Following the Rules
I am constantly stressing to my appellate advocacy students the importance of not just excellent substance in their briefs, but also the importance of complying with the court's technical rules. There is nothing more frustrating as a legal writing professor than reading a brief that makes great legal arguments, but is so poorly formatted that the substance is lost in the technical errors.
A few days ago one of my students sent me a post by Casey C. Sullivan on FindLaw's Strategist Blog about an attorney in Indiana who requested permission to file a corrected Table of Contents and Table of Authorities in a case before the Court of Appeals of Indiana. The court granted the request, but directed that "[n]o substantive changes . . . be made to the Amended Appellant's Brief."
According to the court's opinion the new Table of Contents represented "at best, an abject failure to understand the most basic requirements of appellate briefing." The attorney expanded the one-page Table of Contents in her first brief to a whopping thirty-seven pages in the amended brief. The Table of Authorities was expanded from four to eleven pages. The court's opinion contains a few snippets from both tables including this gem from the Table of Authorities:
Hirsch v. Merchants Nat'l Bank & Trust Co. of Indiana, 336 N.E.2d 833 (Ind. Ct. App. 1975) (providing eight percent interest in action for breach of lease). When the parties' contract does not provide an interest rate; therefore, the statutory interest rate of eight percent is applicable. (cited in App. 75-76) [appearing on page] 12
Unfortunately for the attorney, not even the page number in this entry was correct, as page 12 of the brief contained no case citations at all and was actually part of the Statement of Facts. According to the court, "the Table of Authorities fail[ed] at its basic and only purpose of informing us of the cases cited in the brief and directing us to where in the brief a particular case is discussed."
The attorney's failure to follow the rules came at a steep price—the court disregarded the entirety of both Tables—proving once again that formatting matters!
October 31, 2015 in Appellate Advocacy, Legal Writing, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Monday, June 22, 2015
Speaking With Some Authority
A reader kindly passed along this interesting link: The Art of Appellate Advocacy: A Conversation With the Supreme Court of Virginia.
The two-hour video, organized by Jeffrey A. Breit, adjunct professor at William & Mary Law School, offers members of the Virginia Supreme Court discussing brief writing, oral advocacy, structuring arguments, and the role of appellate courts. Inspired by the Bryan Garner series, interviewing U.S. Supreme Court Justices, this video may be similarly useful in legal writing and appellate advocacy classrooms. The video can be viewed in its entirety or in shorter, topic-specific segments.
June 22, 2015 in Appellate Advocacy, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Proposed Maryland Rule Heads Wrong Way on Unpublished Opinions
As Michael Wein of the Maryland Appellate Blog reports in some detail, the Maryland Rules Committee has responded to increased media publication of its "unreported decisions" by proposing to: 1) have the court publish the opinions itself and 2) deny the opinions not only precedential authority but also persuasive authority. Further, any attempt to cite an unreported decision may be met with a sanction of striking an entire brief or filing. The rule, as written, would apply also to other jurisdictions' decisions, leading Michael Wein to incisively ask, "So a case can be citable as full precedential or persuasive authority in another state or federal court, yet, when it hits the Maryland border, it suddenly ceases to exist?"
The rule would put Maryland rules at odds with the federal Fourth Circuit practice, which not only permits citation to its unpublished opinions but acknowledges that a such an opinion might have precedential value. The rule would also put Maryland at odds with the trend in state and federal courts toward greater publication, citation, and acceptance of the precedential value of unpublished opinions.
Enacting or maintaining a citation ban that attempts to deny even persuasive value of an appellate opinion ignores the shared experience and reasoning that led to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1, which prospectively permits citation to all opinions, however designated, in the federal circuits. When attorneys in your state are telling you that they want to read these opinions to the extent that someone seeks them out and bears the costs of publication, it should be a signal that these opinions do have value for predicting the outcomes of future litigation and the reasoning that was once persuasive on the court will likely be so again. Unless it thinks members of the Maryland Bar are seeking out these opinions to supplement their leisure reading, the Maryland Rules Committee should recognize that no matter how the court labels them, appellate opinions have have a predictive and persuasive value.
April 14, 2015 in Appellate Court Reform, Appellate Practice, Appellate Procedure, Federal Appeals Courts, State Appeals Courts | Permalink | Comments (0)


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15% discount at Halfords every time you visit for a year via Toyota Owners Club
£15.95Toyota Deals
Found 21st Aug 2014
Saw this in Auto Express last week, all you need to do is sign up to membership of this Toyota Owners Club (even if you don't have a Toyota which I don't) and as part of the pack, they send you a Halfords discount card that gives you 15% off! I've already made the cost of the membership back in 2 trips! They give you some other discounts too but the Halfords card is the best bit!
Community Updates

subset: commoncrawl


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Stop hating! Its a DRAMA.. it's not going to be perfect, life isn't perfect. I can see why Michiru doesn't go to the cops; theres no real evidence of her being beaten, and no witnesses... Plus Sosuke Works for the Child Welfare Dept. he protects children from violence ; chances are that not many people would believe Michiru. And, she LOVES him. She hates the beatings, but shes weak, and loves him. I guess she just can't stop going back to him because of her love. Like she said to Takeru, she can't just stop loving him, as much as she wants to.
Aside from that, Its the best drama I've ever watched! Its surpassed all the american dramas Ive watched also...
listening to Ayu!
HokiePokie wrote:
Sousuke: parents gave him no love, he doesn't know how to love, his girlfriend hates him, his girlfriend's crew of friends make him feel bad. Basically he's a really sad character if you focus closely, you'd really wish he'd be saved from his ways. Creators decided to just kill him off... The creator's could've done so much with Sousuke's character, but they decided to use the last half of the episodes on Ruka's lame lesbian sob story. :-/
Eh, I disagree. It'd be too unbelievable to saved a psycho like this. There's only two places for him. Hell or the Insane asylum.
lilah-mie wrote:
i haven't watched this.. but I didn't really like Masami's character in Prodai either.. she seems to always be playing the characters that don't know when to give up on something and then act stupid about it.. oh well..
erm..i dun lyke her in Prodai n Last friend...maybe i dun lyke her....
omg!! it's been so long since the last i log in!! how's everyone???
MinakoSmiles wrote:
DID ANYONE CATCH THE FACT THAT even before she moved in with him he openly admitted to going into her apartment that she lived in with her mom and stealing the yearbook. Yet, even though he stole the yearbook probably months before, he beat the crap out of her for not finding it? I mean that scared the crap out of me...that was a whole new level of psycho...steal something then a few months later have the dumb girl look for it and then beat the snot out of her for not finding it and then start crying. And a few days later tells her that he had it the whole time! He even knew who ruka was when she told him that ruka was a girl, but he acted like he didn't.
She has that stockholm syndrome thing where they fall in love with the people that's hurting them. There were plenty of oppurtunies she could have showed Sousuke that she was tired of his crap...like when he tried to make her cut off his ear because he didn't want her to cut men's hair. She should have just did it...I bet he would have acted like he had some sense then! I don't blame Sousuke reasoning for beating her sometimes I mean if you want to beat someone and they are stupid enough to let you do it then why not?
Albeit this was a pretty good drama...although certain parts didn't quite make sense to me.
hehehe that made me laugh
LOVe the drama my fair lady!! finally dong chan and hye na are together WOOO!
The drama was absolutely perfect! Unlike any drama today. I really wasn't expecting a drama as good as that. It just came out of nowhere! I really hope they make a second season...I just miss the drama soooo much! It was so good!
I miss Michael Jackson :( Forever Sweet Angel
I just finish watching this last night. and I have to say overall it was a good show. like everyone has been saying, I really didn't like Michiru character that much cuz she kept going back to Sousuke after he has literally beat the crap out of her. and not to mention she told him that she'll stay with him after he raped her kinda bug me. but it was sad when she went into the living room & found Sousuke dead on the couch. yeah Sousuke did a lot of messed up things to Michiru & her friends, but that didn't mean he had to kill himself. if he knows that she is happier with them, then he should've just pack his things and move out of the area. away from Michiru. cuz with him commiting suicide, it didn't make the situation easier. but in the end Michiru gets to move on with Takeru, Ruka, and her daughter.
michiru was seriously stupid, but the rest was fine
it is drama, and fiction after all
oh come on.. it's drama n its fiction, i think it's ok with all that weird character and story.. arent they so many others drama that also had weird story ??? n maybe last friends one of that bunches.. i think its ok just to watch n to entertain us
i'll watch again and review.....though i like this series so much...may be i have overlooked on things--so i'll check out what's wrong with the drama (if there's just any)
i hate to love him, but i do!!!!!!!!!!
I understand it's a drama and it's fiction, but that doesn't mean it can't be realistic. Please look past the fact I don't like your show, and at least look at the points I bring out. Most of you disagreeing with me can't come up with anything but "it's fiction" or "it's a drama".
My name is Hokiepokie.
japanfreak15 wrote:
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but i believe the writer tried to make the script as real as it could get. The reason why things got annoying or dragged is because thats how people are. People do dumb things without really thinking. When too many things are going on personally no one deals with it perfectly. No drama will ever be perfect. And this one came pretty close. All the interactions and awkward feelings from each character were very well played. So as this forum is about the negative points I come with the positive.
I agree! I really like this kind of dramas... I want to write this kind of doramas XD
Walking on the street of the future.
Haha Yea kinda started ranting there...lol.
Well I don't think is overdone...see, you might think it is because you only see yourself, but if you thin about it, the story shows US everything that happens in the privacy of a life, WE hear what they thought throughout the series. I might know how someone acts with his/her couple, but I will not know what really happens, when no one is watching, unless he/her tells me.
This wolrd is fill with situations like that, maybe not in one circle of friends, but 2 or 3 people apart, i don't want to pesimist but it is true!!
For example...I have been in the same situation as Ruka, falling for one of my best friends and I still love her, and she doesn't know...is hard to tell that to someone you really care about and sees you different than you do....and my cousin has been raped, it was a long time ago, but it happend......my best friend (guy) haves a friend from the university who's boyfriend treats her very rude, and we are not sure if he hits her.
see!! that stuff happens, you just don't realize it...until you are told of you see it.
It is a good series, filled with reality, great direction, and above all.....which is the part that I like....friendship...that's the message, no matter what you feel or have been through, friendship will always prevail!!
In my opinion,I enjoyed watching this drama..though this jdrama is to harsh..it tackles about the reality of life..there are certain parts that we disagree on bcoz we want a happy ending..but if we will look clearly or if we're going to compare the happenings in this drama in reality,it does really happen..like the lesbian thing about ruka..that she fell in love with her bestfriend..and what's a drama called for if it has no twist in it right??
in a DAZE-------------
Does anyone know where i can watch the drama .... they removed it before i could finish watching it ?? Thanks


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I was flexing my pattern muscles. The sketchbook is my favorite place where I love to relax. This leaf doodle was done using sketch pens.
So much fun!
I might want to try this out in a bigger platform soon. :)
Doodling on a sketchbook is one excellent way to explore different patterns, try out different colour combinations and the best part is, you feel good after finishing a pretty page.
I currently keep three sketchbooks, one is a small sized one on which is one was sketched. We have another living room sketchbook were I sketch, and the boy sketches too :) There is also a big sketchbook which I haven't started sharing with the boy...
A lot of my previous doodling happened on exam question papers, class note books, the note pads I had in my previous corporate offices and so on. I lost some of them somewhere and I feel bad. I will be documenting my sketchbooks and journals too in this space from now on.
Watch this space for more doodles and sketches :)


text:
Next Episode of Jeopardy! is
Season 2018 / Episode 221 and airs on 18 December 2018 00:30
Jeopardy! is a classic game show -- with a twist. The answers are given first, and the contestants supply the questions. Three contestants, including the previous show's champion, compete in six categories and in three rounds (with each round's "answers" being worth more prize money).Contestant images from 2015 onwards are provided courtesy of Fikkle Fame.
Mort Kamins vs. David Mann vs. Lenore Muller
Mort Kamins vs. David Mann vs. Lenore Muller
David Franklin vs. Regina Sutton vs. Brad Rutter
Brad Rutter vs. Annette Wilkinson vs. Mike Dugan
Brad Rutter vs. Ann Marchand vs. Eric Moore
Brad Rutter vs. Tracey Marcus vs. Ron Labuguen
Brad Rutter vs. Jim Holton vs. Laurence Levy
Alex Trebek(Host)
Johnny Gilbert(Announcer)
Looks like something went completely wrong!
But don't worry - it can happen to the best of us,
- and it just happened to you.
Please try again later or contact us.


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Donic Formula F4 is the perfect introduction for ambitious youngsters and players who want to change to rubbers with inbuilt speed glue effect. For those who seek clever placement and variation in their play and not just brute force, Donic is the right choice. Our rubber provides an introduction to the fascination of Formula Donic for the improving ambitious player.
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Answered By: [Unclaimed] Last Updated: Jun 23, 2015 Views: 11
Internet2 is a leading-edge networking infrastructure that supports high-performance applications utilized by more than 200 universities nationwide. It is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. By bringing research and academia together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community, Internet2 promotes collaboration and innovation that has a fundamental impact on the future of the Internet.
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2013-2014 JSU Elite Honors Scholarship Recipients Announced
2013-2014 JSU Elite Honors Scholarship Recipients Announced
The JSU Honors Program announces recipients of the Elite Honors Scholarship for 2013-14. The Elite Honors Scholarship is JSU's top academic scholarship. The first group of Elite Honors Scholarship recipients graduated this past academic year. The fifth group of Scholars begins this Fall term. Listed with their high schools and hometowns, they are:
- Ms. Alyssa Cunningham, Meek High, Arley;
- Mr. Caelan Goss, Piedmont High, Piedmont;
- Ms. Abigail Jaskowski, Jacksonville High, Jacksonville;
- Mr. Dakoda Johnson, Gaylesville High, Rainsville;
- Mr. Christopher Kyser, Corner High, Dora;
- Mr. Alex McFry, White Plains High, Anniston;
- Mr. James Schultz, Sparkman High, Harvest;
- Ms. Erin Whetzel, Lionheart Christian, Harvest.


text: I'm ready to celebrate this equinox with even more enthusiasm than usual. I certainly feel ready to turn the proverbial page and start a new season. I'm coming to think of the summer of 2010 as the one that slipped away from me. I have the odd feeling of somehow being behind in my life. […]Continue reading »