Lawyers, and their clients, often want to file longer appellate briefs than the rules allow, or than judges desire. When the length of appellate briefs was governed by page limits, some briefs began to appear with text, which had to ...
Cottillion v. United Refining Co., 781 F.3d 47 (3d Cir. 2015). This opinion by Judge Ambro, issued today, affirmed a summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs and a class in an Employment Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) case. This post, ...
Joseph v. United States, ___ U.S. ___ (2014). Most if not all appellate courts have a rule that issues not raised in an opening brief cannot be raised in subsequent filings. That principle makes sense, as Justice Kagan said in ...
Moran v. Board of Trustees, Police & Firemen’s Retirement System, 438 N.J. Super. 346 (App. Div. 2014). This appeal was by a firefighter who sought an accidental disability retirement pension under N.J.S.A. 43:16A-7. Here is the first paragraph of Judge Reisner’s ...
Rule 2:6-10, which addresses the format of appellate briefs, states (among other things) that Supreme Court of New Jersey and Appellate Division briefs “shall contain no more than 26 double-spaced lines of no more than 65 characters including spaces, each of ...
The Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States has proposed amendments to various sets of federal procedural rules. The entire set of proposals can be viewed here. Of particular interest to appellate ...
A session with this title was conducted today at the Third Circuit Judicial Conference. Judge Greenaway headlined the panel. But the real driver was a Senior Consultant from Aon Risk Solutions, who posed a series of hypothetical scenarios, prowled the ...
Justice Patterson was among the panelists at a seminar on mass torts tonight. In the course of her remarks about preserving issues on appeal, writing effective appellate briefs, and presenting compelling oral arguments, she made a suggestion that I had ...
Most judges dislike briefs that assert that an adversary’s legal argument is “ridiculous,” “absurd,” “preposterous,” or the like. Judges often say that a statement that an opposing position is “without merit” or some other less charged verbiage suffices to convey ...
I just happened on this quotation from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. “When a party comes to us with nine grounds for reversing the district court, that usually means there are none.” Fifth Third Mortg. Co. v. Chicago Title ...