Source: https://cbaclelegalconnection.com/tag/briefs/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 22:57:57+00:00

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Taste . . . Less Filling!” but effective all the same).
Legal Writing Pro: Are “Indemnify” and “Hold Harmless” the Same?
The Colorado Supreme Court has adopted the proposed public domain citation format, creating a new way for parties and legal practitioners to refer to its and the Colorado Court of Appeals’ published opinions in legal briefs and other documents.
The public domain citation format will expand open access to Colorado case law by allowing practitioners and parties to cite directly to new opinions from the moment they are announced. The new format also will allow pinpoint citations by incorporating paragraph numbers. The new format became effective January 1, 2012.
Sixteen other states, including New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, already have adopted the same format, which was recommended by the American Association of Law Librarians in the mid-1990s and is endorsed by the American Bar Association.
The courts already provide online access to published opinions free of charge on the Judicial Branch web site. Before implementation of the public domain citation format, opinions issued by Colorado’s two appellate courts were “slip opinions” which lacked a formal citation format until they were published in print in the Pacific Reporter.
“The purpose of the public domain citation format is to make it easier for practitioners and self-represented parties who lack the resources to access an electronic research database or the printed volumes of the Pacific Reporter to locate Colorado case law and to cite to that case law in all levels of Colorado’s justice system, whether in the trial or appellate courts,” Chief Justice Michael L. Bender said.
The Supreme Court adopted the new citation format after receiving public comment. The new format is implemented by the new Chief Justice Directive 12-01.
Practitioners and parties will be permitted to use the public domain citation format or to cite to the Pacific Reporter, and they will not have to provide parallel citations in either format.
The new citation format is part of a broader effort by the Colorado Supreme Court to improve access to justice by integrating court resources and electronic technology.
Smith v. Jones, 45 P.3d 1237, 1254 (Colo. 2012).
Smith v. Jones, 2012 CO 22, ¶¶ 44-45.
Jones v. Smith, 2012 COA 35, ¶¶ 44-45.
“CO” means Supreme Court and “COA” means Court of Appeals. The “22” in the first example and the “35” in the second example mean those opinions are, respectively, the 22nd and the 35thissued by each court in 2012. Both citations point to the opinion’s 44th and 45th paragraphs.
The public domain citation system will be overseen by Christopher T. Ryan, Clerk of Court for both the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. Upon announcement, each opinion selected for publication will be assigned a public domain citation and internal paragraph numbers.
Opinions that are not designated for official publication pursuant to C.A.R. 35(f) will remain unpublished and will not be assigned a public domain citation.
Click here to read the announcement from State Judicial.
Click here to read Chief Justice Directive 12-01 and more examples of proper Bluebook citation.
The Magistrate’s egregious errors in its failure to utilize or apply the law constitute extraordinary circumstances, justifying vacateur of the assignment to Magistrate. Specifically, the Magistrate applied improper legal standards in deciding the Title IX elements of loss of educational opportunities and deliberate indifference, ignoring precedent. Further, the Court failed to consider Sanches’ Section 1983 claims and summarily dismissed them without analysis or review. Because a magistrate is not an Article III judge, his incompetence in applying general principals of law are extraordinary.
The Colorado Supreme Court is requesting written public comments by any interested person on a Proposal to Adopt a Public Domain Citation Format For Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals Published Opinions.
Given the increasing amount of legal research being conducted via the internet and other electronic resources and the desire to promote equal access to Colorado’s system of justice, the Colorado Supreme Court and the Colorado Court of Appeals are proposing to adopt a public domain citation format that will support the use of Colorado case law in both book and electronic formats.
Followed by a consecutive Arabic numeral, beginning in each new calendar year with the number “1”; for example: “2012 CO 1” for the first opinion announced by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2012, and “2012 CO App. 1” for the first published opinion announced by the Colorado Court of Appeals in 2012.
This public domain citation shall appear on the title page of each published opinion announced by the Court and by the Court of Appeals. All publishers of Colorado Supreme Court and Colorado Court of Appeals materials are requested to include this public domain citation within the heading of each opinion they publish.
Opinions that are not designated for official publication by the Court of Appeals will not be assigned a public domain citation.
Smith v. Jones, 2012 CO 22, 989 P.3d 1312.
Smith v. Jones, 2012 CO 22, ¶¶ 13–14, 989 P.3d 1312, 1314.
Smith, ¶¶ 13–14, 989 P.3d at 1314.
Jones v. Smith, 2012 CO App. 35, 634 P.3d 125.
Jones v. Smith, 2012 CO App. 35, ¶¶ 44–45, 634 P.3d 125, 128.
Jones, ¶¶44–45, 634 P.3d at 128.
Click here for further information about the new citation style, including how to cite modified opinions and withdrawn opinions.
An original plus eight copies of written comments concerning this proposal should be submitted to the Clerk of the Colorado Supreme Court, Christopher T. Ryan, 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 800, Denver, Colorado 80202, no later than Monday, December 12, 2011, by 5:00 pm.
Ross Guberman: Can Computers Help You Write Better?
Editor’s Note: In Microsoft Word 2007, go to Home > Find.
Editor’s Note: In Microsoft Word 2007, go to Review > Word Count.
In finding for Wal-Mart in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, Justice Scalia argued that a class action needs “glue” to hold together. So does a great brief. Use these six techniques from the winning Wal-Mart brief to help make your own arguments stick.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision allowing this class action to proceed contradicts Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, departs from this Court’s precedent, and endorses an approach that would abrogate the substantive and procedural rights of both Wal-Mart and absent class members.
The certification order is harmful to the rights of everyone involved. It distorts basic principles of class-action and anti-discrimination law, eviscerates fundamental procedural protections for class-action defendants, and allows three class representatives to extinguish the rights of millions of absent class members without even telling them about it.
Note how the homespun phrase “without even telling them about it” aims to align Wal-Mart with the little guy.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision eviscerates intellectual property rights. It frustrates those who have invested substantial resources in creating an original work, only to see the fruits of their labors snatched away. It rewards those, like Respondents, who unjustly profit by designing tools to enable the theft of private property. And it stifles innovation by depriving citizens of the incentive to create works of art or music or literature that can be enjoyed by people ages hence.
As shown below, the evidence, at most, indicates that Wal-Mart’s pay and promotion system could possibly result in individual disparities—not that it was designed to do so, was intended to do so, or would inevitably do so with respect to every single female employee around the country.
One suggestion: Shun the oddly beloved phrase “with respect to.” Long and fuzzy, it also ruins the rhythm of the sequence here. “For every single female employee” would have worked just fine.
Class-action doctrines are dry and abstract, so they need some zesty language to come to life. “Distorts” and “eviscerates” aren’t the only catchy words in Wal-Mart’s winning brief.
Try picturing a “broad array of diverse claims” or an “amalgam of unrelated claims.” Not much comes to mind, right?
This kaleidoscope of claims, defenses, issues, locales, events, and individuals makes it impossible for the named plaintiffs to be adequate representatives of the absent class members.
Two quick thoughts: A disagreement isn’t “regarding” something, it’s “over” something. In fact, I would avoid both “regarding” and “concerning” as much as possible. And how about affixing “erroneously” to “opine”? Even if a court can “erroneously opine,” “sidestepped” already makes it clear that the Ninth Circuit erred. Once is enough.
Plaintiffs seek billions of dollars in individual monetary relief, yet seek to evade the additional procedures required for fair adjudication of monetary claims, including notice and opt-out rights for absent class members.
And they take no issue with the “consensus among the circuits,” holding that courts are not only authorized but obligated to resolve such disputes at the certification stage relating to Rule 23 factors.
But because this case, properly analyzed, does not meet the prerequisites imposed by Rule 23(a), a trial on the merits would be completely unmanageable and unfair.
Here’s a trick from the Wal-Mart brief that will help you add speed to your prose: Move words like “thus” and “therefore” closer to the verb so they don’t weigh down the start of your sentences.
Plaintiffs’ bid for affirmance of the class certification order thus rests on a fundamental—and quite radical—remaking of Title VII law.
Plaintiffs thus failed to establish that a crucial element of their prima facie case could be proved on a classwide basis.
Title VII codifies certain defenses.
Yet plaintiffs could find no such practices.
That should have ended the inquiry.
In almost all great nonfiction writing, you’ll find thoughtful uses of the dash, colon, hyphen, and semicolon—four punctuation marks that give many lawyers heartburn.
The class members—potentially millions of women supervised by tens of thousands of different managers and employed in thousands of different stores throughout the country—assert highly individualized, fact-intensive claims for monetary relief that are subject to individualized statutory defenses.
This is a failure of proof at the most basic level: Plaintiffs challenge decisions by individual store managers, but failed to adduce any statistical evidence of discrimination (or even disparities) at the store level.
But, regardless of the strength of Wal-Mart’s statistics, it is plaintiffs’ burden to produce “significant proof” of a company-wide discriminatory policy; plaintiffs failed to meet that burden by failing to offer any proof of gender-based disparities at the store level.
Plaintiffs’ disparate-impact claim requires them to prove “a particular employment practice that causes a disparate impact” on a prohibited basis.
Those are six of the techniques that glue this great brief together.

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