Legal News and Appellate Tips

Here are some legal trends and trivia from this week:

🏛U.S. Supreme Court: Liberal justices' 'dissent rate' lowest since Roberts joined in 2005.

👩But women are underrepresented at oral argument at the Supreme Court: just 20 women—19% of the 103 total advocates— argued before the justices.

⏳Cal. Supreme Court is taking longer to decide its cases.

👍But the Cal. Supreme Court ranks high in diversity, says the Brennan Center for Justice.

🤔Cal. Supreme Court bars treble damages against a public entity for child sex abuse coverup because government can’t be liable for punitive damages. The holding overrules three of the Court’s prior cases.

💲But trial court was justified in imposing evidentiary sanctions on a school district for negligently erasing a videotape of a sexual assault on a student.

🎵Check your break room jukebox: The Ninth Circuit, reversing a trial court's dismissal, holds that it might well constitute sexual harassment for a business to play "sexually derogatory" or "misogynistic" music in the workplace.

📕Who likes legalese? No one—not even lawyers. So researchers drilled down to the cause: the “copy-and-paste hypothesis”: lawyers imitate what previous lawyers have done because the legalese can be incorporated routinely into contracts drafted for clients.

😶Look out, UC Berkeley: The “Berkeley Library” naming has been canceled by Ireland’s premier university, Trinity College. A NY Times piece on the change noted that the library’s namesake “owned slaves in colonial Rhode Island and wrote pamphlets supportive of slavery.” Unless you are prepared to yield everything, yield nothing.