I'm honored to have been asked to blog for the Wisconsin Law Journal, Wisconsin's weekly -- and now daily, on line -- legal newspaper. I was a little unsure how I would expand my blogging focus to local topics, but it turned out the timing was perfect: the Wisconsin Court of Appeals last week wrote a decision that jury watchers anywhere would want to read. Here's the first paragraph of my first WLJ post:
Read it aloud, and it sounds like any other Court of Appeals opinion: measured, calm, a little dull. But in that quiet tone, District II reached out last week to say that juries' questions about the law ought to be answered, if answers are out there. In State v. Hubbard, authored by Judge Snyder on October 24, the court reversed a conviction, saying that when the jury inquired about a key term for which there is no pattern jury instruction, the trial court should have turned to a twenty-year-old Wisconsin Supreme Court case to give them a definition.
Read the rest here, and meet the other WLJ bloggers on this page.
(Writing about Wisconsin also gives me a chance to show how beautiful it is. Photo by Bitterroot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitterroot/55827421/; license details there.)
