When is the Court the Law Court, and when is it the Supreme Judicial Court? Why is it the Supreme Judicial Court and not the Supreme Court — isn’t “Supreme Judicial” redundant? For the answ…

At long last, briefs need no longer be filed in wordperfect:  Download 1st_circuit_w1038072.PDF While the rule is ambiguous, my understanding is that it does not apply to the appendix -…

I lunched today with Professor Wanderer of the University of Maine School of Law, who informed me, among other things, that she will be spending the summer revising the Uniform Maine Citatio…

On Thursday I attended, along with about 90 other lawyers, the MSBA appellate seminar.  Each Justice except Justice Mead (off in Abu Dabi) presented, along with two of the law clerks.  It wa…

Here’s some succinct appellate standard of review language from a recent First Circuit decision (Moulton v. Shell Oil Products LLC, Docket No. 05-2771 (April 18, 2008)): We review the deni…

David Lourie responds to the April 17, 2008 Toomey post as follows: Your ruminations over the procedural due process argument may be overblown. I think that the Law Court relegated the iss…

Before discussing the Camp decision, here’s a general Rule 80B factoid. Matt Pollack, the new, very friendly and helpful clerk at the SJC, showed me a few statistics as a sneak preview to th…

Two recent decisions from the Law Court are of interest, going to the interface between an administrative appeal of a town body’s adjudicatory decision under Rule 80B and other independent c…

What an auspicious day to launch an appellate blog – tax day!  As a former resident of Chicago, I vividly recollect our Mayor and fellow Northwestern alum, Harold Washington, getting into a…

The Supreme Court issued a new decision in the takings area, and, consistent with this general line of jurisprudence it is, in a world, confused.  Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc. v Florida…