While most of the legal community has focused on the substance of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Foster v. Chatman, 578 U.S. ___ (May 23, 2016) (No. 14-8349) (something to do with cluttering up attorney files with notes on jury selection), the Cockle Blog is all over the Court’s procedural focus in that [...]
Pending at the U.S. Supreme Court is a “never-before-raised procedural issue,” raised at the Court’s own prompting in “a truly rare move,” that relates to a requirement that everyone filing a petition for certiorari must address every time on the cover. Every petition cover must insert a lower court’s name in the blank in the [...]
One of the services most valued by attorneys is proofreading. Because our goal is for all briefs to be as clean as possible when finished, at Cockle Legal Briefs, your documents are proofread, word-for-word, by two professionally-trained legal proofreaders. Our legal proofreaders are trained to read documents for misspellings, grammatical errors, improper sentence structure, and [...]
The first four parts of this series covered the Supreme Court appendix contents that are either required or that are too lengthy to leave in the brief. This final installment addresses a provision that allows pretty much anything, but that should be used with caution. Other Material Believed Essential. Rule 14.1(i)(vi) is the tempting catchall [...]
Rehearing Denial. The last required appendix document may or may not exist, but if it does, it goes at the end of the required category. This would be an order denying rehearing by the court that issued the final judgment you are directly challenging. Rule 14.1(i)(iii). Or the last document may be something else, depending [...]
So far this series has covered the critical opening document of an appendix for a U.S. Supreme Court petition for certiorari. Now we move down the list in Sup. Ct. R. 14.1(i) to other must-have documents. Other Relevant Decisions. After the decision you actually want the Supreme Court to review comes a required category of [...]
When you are putting together a U.S. Supreme Court petition’s “appendix,” forget what you know about collections of documents going by the same name under lower federal court and state court appellate rules. Just read Supreme Court Rule 14.1(i). The rule’s limited categories of required documents reflect the high court’s unique role and the narrow [...]
A challenging concept for new Supreme Court filers is determining the due date for the petition-stage reply brief. Here is the answer: there is no due date for the petition-stage reply brief. Petitions have set due dates, determined by the concluding date of lower court considerations. Likewise, respondents and amici have clear deadlines, counting from [...]
As has often been noted—in numerous posts on this blog, and by just about any other Supreme Court watcher—that the single most important element of any Supreme Court petition is the questions presented page. This axiom is plain from a reading of Rule 14.1(a), requiring that the questions presented appear on the very first page [...]
Amicus Curiae, or “Friend of the Court,” Briefs are submitted by non-parties to the case as a way of introducing information and concerns to the Court, often demonstrating that a case’s outcome may have wider effects beyond the immediate parties to the suit. Amicus Curiae Briefs can provide valuable assistance to the Court in its [...]