Prof. Geoff Stone argues that conservative Supreme Court justices are more ideologically inflexible and less meritocratic than their liberal counterparts. His evidence for this is that Of the 20 law clerks appointed this Term by the five conservative Justices — Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, 18 of the 20 — or an astonishing 90 […]
Archive | Apppellate Procedure
Supermajority Rules for Court Opinions, and “Physical Precedent”
Reading through a recent Georgia case, I ran across a term I hadn’t heard of before — “physical precedent.” And in the course of looking into this, I learned that Georgia courts, unlike most courts, have a form of supermajority rule for when a decision becomes binding precedent. Historically, “physical precedent” seems to have been […]
7th Circuit to Conrad Black: No Reply Brief for You!
Last Term, the Supreme Court vacated former executive Conrad Black’s conviction on the ground that the “honest services” fraud instructions given in his case were invalid under Skilling v. United States, and remanded for a determination whether the error was harmless. On remand, the Seventh Circuit (Posner, Kanne, and Sykes–under circuit procedure, the same panel […]