Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup August 25 2017

After a brief summer hiatus, the Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup returns and 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 atDReal@Creighton.edu or a message on Twitter (@Daniel_L_Real).

History:

This past week included an important date in the history of appellate practice.  August 24, 1965, was the date that Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American to hold the office of Solicitor General.  Hat-tip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library on Twitter (@LBJLibrary).

Practice Tips and Legal Writing:

We have featured #PracticeTuesdays from #AppellateTwitter on our Weekly Roundup on more than one prior occasion.  Well, over the summer the folks who run that discussion on Twitter every week decided to think a little bigger and started up the #PracticeTuesday Blog, because sometimes “140 characters just aren’t enough.”.  Check it out for all kinds of great discussions and pointers to improve your practice.  This week, the discussion on the blog focused on “paying your dues.”  Sean Marotta noted that he is “a supporter of dues.  And here is why:  No matter how much raw talent you may have as a new lawyer, what you don’t have is wisdom.”  And “[d]ues are how lawyers provide value despite having only a very formal knowledge of the law.”

Over at Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Practice Skills Program blog, Legal Writing Matters, there was a post this week featuring some best practices for legal-writing classes, according to Wayne Schiess— but those best practices can easily be applied to your writing in practice, too.

Lawyerist.com  featured an article this week by Jason Steed with tips for writing briefs for tablets.  More and more judges are reading briefs on tablets, and it’s important to spend some time thinking about how to make your brief more readable on that electronic platform.

Justice Gorsuch at the Trump Hotel:

Justice Gorsuch is scheduled to appear next month at the Trump International Hotel to address a conservative group, The Fund for American Studies, in a luncheon.  That scheduled appearance has generated some debate.  

In a Washington Post article, Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center has argued that Gorsuch’s appearance betrays statements during his confirmation hearing that he takes serious impartiality and the independence and integrity of the judiciary because the appearance could be taken to suggest that Gorsuch is appearing “to help a conservative organization put money into the pockets of the president who nominated him” and might suggest that Gorsuch has “prejudged these critical issues” regarding the several pending lawsuits asserting that President Trump is in violation of the Emoluments Clause.

In another Washington Post article, however, Jonathan Adler responded and has argued that Gorsuch’s speech does not raise any serious ethical issues.  Adler noted that the sponsor of the event is not a party to any litigation likely to reach the court, and the actual event itself was not likely to be implicated in any litigation.  The mere location of the event, according to Adler, should not raise ethical concerns.

In a New York Times article, Adam Liptak wrote that the scheduled appearance received mixed opinions from experts in legal ethics, with some concluding that the appearance was problematic and others concluding that it was not.

See, also, Money & Politics Report Editor Ken Doyle on Bloomberg Radio discussing the topic on SoundCloud.

Education:

Civics education is vitally important.  If you are a teacher or have the opportunity to get involved in civics education of today’s youth and tomorrow’s members of adult society, you might want to take a look at some of the resources available on the official website of the United States Courts, USCourts.gov, which has all kinds of great materials to help spread the word about the U.S. Courts and how they impact our daily lives.