Legal minds on legal matters and whatever else strikes our fancy.
Cockle Legal Briefs is on the verge of launching Looking Glass™, a new application which will transform legal brief filing. With its collection of powerful formatting tools and guidance features, Looking Glass will provide Supreme Court filers with a seamless drafting experience. Over the next few weeks we'll slowly let folks into our Beta to try [...]
“I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.” – Bill James, baseball historian There may be no more daunting task in all Supreme Court practice than distilling a 9,000-word cert. petition down to one or two questions presented. This level of difficulty should come as no surprise—only the [...]
OMAHA, NE This blog post was removed/edited on July 19th, 2021, in light of the Supreme Court's order on said date. The Court has rescinded its previous orders of March 19, 2020 and April 15, 2020, which had previously allowed filers to prepare unformatted, single copies of Supreme Court filings. Starting September 1, 2021, Rule [...]
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, courts around the world began closing their doors, only to open new modes of communication online and over the telephone. Technology became an operational lifeline. The virus has unearthed the potential of underutilized tools long resisted by judges and court administrative staff. "Remote court" -- from telephonic hearings to video [...]
Though the Supreme Court cancelled its March argument session and extended deadlines for many cases, paper copy filing continues unencumbered here at Cockle. As Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson of Bloomberg Law reported yesterday, "It seems unlikely that the pandemic will spur a shift [at One First Street]. 'Paper filings are still required,' said Patricia McCabe, [...]
Over 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States. This makes our prisons a virtual petri dish for the spread of viral illness. In an effort to slow the onset of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. prison system, many prisons have been forced to quickly change their daily operations. Prisons in Arizona and [...]
The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States has transformed from a looming risk to an outright pandemic. The CDC has emphasized the need to engage in “social distancing” and avoid group settings in order to combat the spread of the virus. The government-announced public and private restrictions become seemingly more stringent with each [...]
An Omaha man who killed multiple people to honor an ancient Egyptian god has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his death sentence. Nikko Jenkins, a 33-year-old diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, is one of 12 men on Nebraska's death row. He blamed the State for letting him out of prison six years [...]
Though Supreme Court Justices are a bright bunch they are not renowned for their technological savvy. In fact, the Court itself has been openly technophobic at times. In his 2014 year-end report on the judiciary, Chief Justice Roberts explained that “[t]he courts will always be prudent whenever it comes to embracing the ‘next big [...]
Chief Justice John Roberts issued his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary December 31st. He capped 2019 by decrying the corrosive effects of “rumor and false information” on American democracy, particularly in this online age. And though the report outwardly praised civics education, its subtext pointed directly towards President Donald Trump. The Chief Justice will, [...]