A recent blog post advocating using Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) to “automate” criminal appeals instead raises the concern that common flaws in contemporary judicial decision-making will only get worse if we cede legal...more
A 1971 Supreme Court Decision of Doubtful Vitality Thwarts § 1983 Liability for Mistaken-Identity Arrests and Stifles Development of Clear Constitutional Rules -
Kafka would love qualified immunity.1 Not only does current...more
Together, the Supreme Court’s decisions in Loper-Bright and Corner Post open a path to attack federal regulations issued by agencies (and upheld by courts) many years ago. As Justice Jackson put it in her Corner Post dissent:...more
At Tuesday’s oral argument in Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Justice Kagan asked the government’s counsel whether there is “any interaction” between the statute of limitations question...more
On September 7 the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reached an important issue about the D.C. Anti-SLAPP Act that it had reserved a few months earlier. In Banks v. Hoffman, the Court held “the discovery-limiting aspects...more
On Thursday, May 11, 2023 the Supreme Court will consider several petitions, presenting questions about whether and how federal judges can consider criminal conduct of which the defendant was acquitted in imposing sentence on...more
On April 13, 2023, the en banc District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued its decision in response to a certified question from the Second Circuit. Rather than weighing in directly on whether former President Trump’s...more
The Justice Department’s invited amicus curiae brief in Blassingame v. Trump1 exposes another anomaly in treating the President’s scope of employment as a question of state tort law for purposes of the Westfall Act. In...more
What’s in a name? If it’s in a warrant and you’re in the Eleventh Circuit, enough to arrest and jail you for three days even if you don’t match the description of the wanted person, the warrant was issued 26 years earlier...more
On January 11, the full complement of active judges of the District of Columbia’s highest court spent more than two and a half hours hearing oral argument about the District’s respondeat superior liability standard in Trump...more
The firm petitioned the Supreme Court for review, asserting a three-way split between the Ninth Circuit (which it described as applying a primary purpose standard), the D.C. Circuit (described as applying its preferred...more