Judge Michele Hotten Appointed to Court of Appeals
Today Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced that he is elevating Judge Michele Denise Hotten, currently of the Court of Special Appeals, to fill the vacancy on the Court of Appeals created when Judge Glenn Harrell Jr. reached mandatory retirement age this past June.
2015 Developments in Combating “Link Rot”
By Michael Wein
One of the consequences of the greater availability and ubiquity of legal opinions online is that authors can directly hyperlink to sources, including other online decisions, and thus provide immediate access to the source material. This has led to the unintended consequence of “link rot” in appellate decisions — that is, the inclusion of links that are no longer valid. As noted in a 2013 New York Times article, at that time, 49 percent of links in online U.S. Supreme Court decisions were inoperative.
Book Review: Jay Wexler’s “Tuttle in the Balance”
For the second straight year, the American Bar Association’s Ankerwyke imprint is releasing an entertaining novel for the U.S. Supreme Court enthusiast on your holiday shopping list. Last year’s release was David Lat’s Supreme Ambitions, a tale of intrigue among elite federal appellate law clerks competing for Supreme Court clerkships. This year’s treat is Jay Wexler’s Tuttle in the Balance, the story of a Supreme Court justice experiencing a delayed midlife crisis at age 62. Lat’s novel had an irreverent tone but did not play for laughs; in Tuttle in the Balance, however, the laughs come early and often.
COSA: Court of Substantial Agreement
Update (11/11/2015): I figured my “crude, imperfect manual count” would miss something, and, sure enough, I failed to catch a dissent in an unusual per curiam unreported opinion in Spencer v. State, Sept. Term 2014, No. 0493 (Oct. 2, 2015) (Nazarian, J., dissenting). That brings the totals to nine dissents in the 726 cases — which is still a rate of about 1 percent — and six of the 15 judges who wrote a dissent between May and October.
Between May 1, when unreported Court of Special Appeals opinions began being posted online, and the close of October, a half-year of complete decisions of the intermediate appellate court were, for the first time, made available to Maryland court-watchers. That’s a sufficient sample size to do a crude, imperfect manual count and generate some data about the rate of reporting. It’s also useful for a few observations about the infrequency of disagreement among the three-judge panels.
Public Defender Responds to Cell-Site Info Petition for Rehearing
Back in August, Jonathan Biran posted on this blog regarding the Fourth Circuit’s split decision in United States v. Graham on warrantless requests for cell-site location information. The Government proceeded to petition for en banc rehearing (petition available here) last month, and the Fourth Circuit ordered a response. Read More…
Maryland Court of Appeals Aims To Take Fewer Cases, But Petitioners’ Success Rates Stay the Same
The Daily Record recently reported Chief Judge Barbera’s plans to reduce the number of cases that the Maryland Court of Appeals hears each term. According to the article, the Court will hear an average of 88 cases per year, a significant reduction from the Court of Appeals’ historic average of more than 100 cases per year. For example, in its 2011-13 terms, the Court docketed 133, 105, and 119 appeals, respectively. Table CA-3 of Maryland Judiciary Annual Statistical Abstract Fiscal Year 2014 (“2014 Abstract”).
Get Ready for a Busy Six Weeks in the Court of Appeals
The Court of Appeals of Maryland has six weeks (minus a day) until its self-imposed deadline of August 31 to issue opinions in all cases heard from September 2014 through June 2015. We count 23 such cases awaiting opinions: 11 criminal appeals, 8 civil appeals, and 4 attorney discipline cases. Those numbers include three cases (1 civil, 2 attorney discipline) where the Court issued a per curiam order immediately after argument and indicated that an opinion was forthcoming. If this year shakes down like last year, we should expect most of those opinions to come down in the days following the Court’s July 23 conference, with the remaining handful of opinions coming down in August. If you want a preview of what’s coming, the Court’s Pending Cases list provides a handy guide.
Link Roundup: June 2015
A sea change in Fourth Circuit employment law! Upheaval of Maryland income taxes courtesy of the Supreme Court! The potential mandate of a newspaper font for all state appellate legal writing! Three monumental developments in May, two of which people other than me cared enough to write about. The links after the jump. Read More…
March/April 2015 Link Round-Up
Blog editor Michael Wein has been all over the new and proposed Maryland Rules regarding unpublished opinions. As noted by Daily Record blogger N. Tucker Meneely, unpublished Court of Special Appeals are already being officially posted online, but the prospects that Maryland courts will actually let you rely on them as trustworthy statements of law is pretty low. Earlier in the month, Tucker also expressed his appreciation for Judge Harrell’s use of “humorous quips and pop culture references” in his opinions. Other links of note from March and April appear after the jump. Read More…
Update on Consideration of Proposed Unreported Opinion Rule
By Michael Wein
A lot of lively discussion ensued on this Blog and others on the proposed revisions to Md. Rule 1-104. There was a general positive reaction to the news that, for the first time, unreported opinions from the Court of Special Appeals (about 90 percent of the appellate opinions in the state) would by end of this year be made available online on the Judiciary website. Most commentary, however, focused on the proposed revisions to 1-104 that would expand the prohibition on citation of Maryland unreported opinions to include all “non-precedential,” “unreported,” and “unpublished” opinions, thereby broadly sweeping away an enormous number of previously citable decisions from across the nation, including all state and federal trial and appellate courts.
Maryland Appellate Blog 