I'm learning what experienced bloggers already know: writing a blog in late August is hard. How Appealing takes the last week of August off, and it's easy to see why. You're still digging out from vacation; you're dealing with back-to-school errands; your clients are refocusing as they dig out from their vacations; and half your readers are still on vacation so there are fewer folks out there to read anything you might happen to write.
To the rescue rides Blawgletter's Barry Barnett, the litigator and possible superhero from Susman Godfrey. While the rest of us struggle through the end-of-summer transition, Blawgletter keeps reading the advance sheets and turning out his "handy-dandy encapsulizations of same."
Late-August federal jury decisions reported in Blawgletter include:
- Chlopek v. Federal Ins. Co., 7th Cir. Aug. 28, 2007, another Seventh Circuit case affirming a judge who wouldn't let the lawyers ask jurors how they felt about tort reform. (Blawgletter's delightful send-up of the last such opinion from the Seventh Circuit is here.) This week's post explains why "plaintiffs lawyers need to do a better job of fashioning the questions that they want the trial judge to ask."
- United States v. DeGennaro, 2d Cir. Aug. 27, 2007, where the court held the trial judge was too quick to declare a mistrial when the jury in a corporate fraud case claimed it was deadlocked -- and thus there would be no retrial for the defendants. "[T]he jury apparently had decided to acquit them anyway," Blawgletter says soothingly.
- Shum v. Intel Corp., Fed. Cir. Aug. 24, 2007, where the court invoked the Seventh Amendment to reaffirm, as Blawgletter summarizes, "that courts may not fence jury trial rights by postponing jury trial until after a bench trial and using the findings in the bench trial to resolve the issues to which the jury trial right attaches."
All this and tons of other posts too, including a great rant against the passive voice. (It "reveals either of three unflattering things about the writer -- cowardice, fuzziness of thinking, or slothful ways.")
Blawgletter. My hero.
(Photo by CFAGELNYC at http://www.flickr.com/photos/27149250@N00/430595810/; license details there.)
