Appellate Advocacy Blog Weekly Roundup, Friday, August 6

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 a quick note to either (1) Dan Real at DReal@Creighton.edu or on Twitter (@Daniel_L_Real) or (2) Catharine Du Bois at DuBoisLegalWriting@gmail.com or on Twitter @CLDLegalWriting.

Appellate mentorship opportunity for law students from The Appellate Project:

The Appellate Project is an organization striving to increase diversity in the appellate bar with programming “designed to empower law students of color, particularly those most underrepresented, to become the next generation of lawyers and judges in our highest courts.” According to The Appellate Project’s website, over thirty percent of students enrolling in law school are students of color, but very few end up in appellate practice.  The Appellate Project Mentorship Program is a national effort focused on empowering law students of color to pursue appellate work by pairing law students of color interested in appellate practice with mentors in the appellate field.  Applications are now open for the 2021-2022 Mentorship Program.  More information and the application are available on the website.  The deadline for applying is September 6, 2021. There are also opportunities to volunteer if you are an appellate attorney, current or recent law clerk, or judge.

Supreme Court News:

A recent poll released by Marquette University School of Law indicates that the Supreme Court’s standing in the eyes of the public has dipped over the past year.  The poll indicated that 60% of Americans approve of the job being done by the Court, which is down approximately 6 points from a similar survey in September 2020 shortly before the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  More information is available from Politico.

Federal Appellate Court Opinions and News:

This week, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in a case with an interesting jurisdictional discussion.  In Kohlbeck v. Wyndham Vacation Resorts, Inc., plaintiffs sought to appeal an order of the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri to the 8th Circuit.  Unfortunately, the notice of appeal “inexplicably appealed to and from two nonexistent courts” when it indicated the appeal was from the “United States District Court for the Southern District of Missouri” and was to the “United States Court of Appeals for the Southern District of Missouri.” In another recent case the 8th Circuit found a similar notice of appeal entirely deficient and ineffective for conferring appellate jurisdiction. See Newcomb v. Wyndham Vacation Ownership, Inc., 999 F.3d 1134 (8th Cir. 2021). In the current case, the court found that it had jurisdiction, distinguishing from the prior case on the basis of the notice of appeal more clearly identifying a specific order that was actually entered and providing defendants notice of what was actually being appealed.

Appellate Practice Tips and Tricks:

Did you know that if you run a word count on a document using Google and then run the same word count using Microsoft you are likely to receive different results?  In the day of word counts replacing page limits, that’s potentially significant.  See this article for more information about the matter.