Ethics
Continuing my summary of the last AAAL meeting, as appellate nerds know, Texas is the one appellate jurisdiction that has a separate and additional set of ethical rules applicable to appellate bar practice. The folks who instigated this development gave an interesting talk on how this happened.
First, here’s a link to those Texas’ appellate rules of ethics, promulgated by the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the latter being the highest Court in Texas for criminal appeals) in 1999. (Standards for Appellate Conduct, The Supreme Court of Texas)
As you peruse, you’ll note there is nothing radical or unsurprising. To sum up: “Play nice.” The rule about manipulating margins is now obsolete, because those courts, like most now, use a word count.
Note that these rules apply to the appellate judges, too, not just the bar.
Basically, the reason the rules came about was because some of