Law Commons^™

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

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 …

Shakespeare In The Courts, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article continues the theme of recent “Writing It Right” articles in the Journal of the Missouri Bar. These articles describe how federal and state judges today frequently accent their opinions’ substantive or procedural rulings with references to cultural markers that can resonate with the advocates, parties, and judges who comprise the opinions’ readership. The courts’ broad array of cultural references demonstrates versatility. Some of my early articles in the Journal profiled judicial opinions that referenced terminologies, rules, and traditions of baseball, football, and other sports. Together these sports’ mass audiences help define American culture.

Later my Journal articles profiled …

The Inside Scoop: What Federal Judges Really Think About The Way Lawyers Write, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A recent survey indicates that what troubles federal judges most is not what lawyers say but what they fail to say when writing briefs. Although lawyers do a good job articulating legal issues and citing controlling, relevant legal authority, they are not doing enough with the law itself. Only fifty-six percent of the judges surveyed said that lawyers “always” or “usually” make their client’s best arguments. Fifty-eight percent of the judges rated the quality of the legal analysis as just “good,” as opposed to “excellent” or “very good.” The problem seems to be that briefs lack rigorous analysis, and the …