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Some Thoughts On Reply Briefs, Brian Wolfman
Some Thoughts On Reply Briefs, Brian Wolfman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay provides suggestions for writing reply briefs. It begins with a quick review of the well-understood ways in which an appellate advocate should acquire and review the information needed to write a comprehensive and powerful reply brief.
The essay then turns to the more difficult challenges of crafting the brief, making three key points:
First, don't just go tit-for-tat in responding to one point after another advanced by the appellee. That can be boring and ponderous and often requires you to argue the case on your opponent's terms. Rather, re-frame the case on your client's terms, taking the case …
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Judicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even …
Disrupting Data Cartels By Editing Wikipedia, Eun Hee Han, Amanda Levendowski, Jonah Perlin
Disrupting Data Cartels By Editing Wikipedia, Eun Hee Han, Amanda Levendowski, Jonah Perlin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Legal discourse in the digital public square is driven by memoranda, motions, briefs, contracts, legislation, testimony, and judicial opinions. And as lawyers are taught from their first day of law school, the strength of these genres of legal communication is built on authority. But finding that authority often depends on a duopoly of for-profit legal research resources: Westlaw and Lexis. Although contemporary legal practice relies on these databases, they are far from ethically neutral. Not only are these “data cartels” expensive-- creating significant access to justice challenges--they also are controlled by parent companies that profit by providing information to Immigration …