Associate's Mind

  I recently got around to reading a whopper of an old law review article that I had been wanting to read for awhile entitled, “Inside the Judicial Mind.” From the introduction: …we conducted an empirical study to determine whether five common cognitive illusions would influence decision making of a sample of 167 federal magistrate [...]

While researching something completely unrelated, I came upon a brief article by Justice Maria Rivera (First District Court of Appeal, Div. 4, CA) regarding writing briefs for appeals entitled: The Ten Commandments of Brief Writing. Before delving into the “Ten Commandments”, Justice Rivera leads off with the following quote from Mortimer Levitan from the article, [...]

The Honorable Randy Wilson, a District Judge out of Texas recently had an article in the Advocate juxtaposing two Motions to Compel. The Bad: In this motion, the movant gives a background of the dispute and then lists the specific Document categories sought. There are a total of 24 document requests at issue. The movant dutifully lists [...]

Via Internet Cases: “In Purvis v. Commissioner of Social Sec., 2011 WL 741234 (D.N.J., Feb. 23, 2011), the question before federal judge Susan Davis Wigenton was whether the plaintiff had been wrongfully denied Social Security benefits. Ultimately the judge determined that the question of whether plaintiff’s asthma made her disabled needed to go back to [...]

From Reuters/ MSNBC: Over a three-week period in November and December, Reuters Legal monitored Twitter, reading tweets that were returned when “jury duty” was typed into the site’s search engine. Tweets from people describing themselves as prospective or sitting jurors popped up at the astounding rate of one nearly every three minutes. Many appeared to [...]

For the unaware, the ABA has numerous divisions focusing on a variety of topics. Rainmakers, Young Lawyers, Women Lawyers, etc. Each division provides its own variety of services. Of particular note is the Litigation division that publishes a brief podcast titled “Sound Advice” on a semi-regular basis. The most recent edition features the Honorable Lee [...]