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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Courts - Judge Posner and more

Peter Lattman of The WSJ Law Blog picks up a number of items today, several of which the ILB had set aside for writing about, but not yet gotten to.

The first is titled "The Inimitable Judge Posner Strikes Again." It points to the just-published special issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, “Commemorating Twenty-five Years of Judge Richard A. Posner,” available here. The entry also quotes from Judge Posner's opinion yesterday in a reinsurance case, summarized here by the ILB, including the concluding sentence:

The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves.
The second item today from the WSJ Law Blog is a discussion of the SCOTUS opinion yesterday upholding New York's system for selecting trial court judges. See also this article today by Daniel Wise and Joel Stashenko in the New York Law Journal.

Finally, the WSJ Law Blog has an entry that begins:

On Monday, we highlighted a juicy recusal controversy arising out of the mountains of West Virginia. Yesterday, we posted on the Ninth Circuit tossing the fraud conviction and 15-year sentence of a former dot-com executive because it said the trial-court judge should have disqualified himself because of stock holdings in a firm linked to the case. And this morning, let’s take a trip to the California Supreme Court for another wild and wacky recusal case.

A man who says he became ill while working at a Lockheed plant sued for injuries he suffered as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. He appealed the case to California’s high court, which refused to hear it. Why? Because four of the seven justices cited a conflict of interest because they controlled stock in oil companies that provided some of the solvents at issue in the case. “It’s unfair and I am very disgusted with the courts,” said Braxton Berkley, the plaintiff.

Chief Justice Ron George said the remaining justices decided to dismiss the case because they were concerned that a Supreme Court ruling made with a majority of temporary justices wouldn’t hold the same weight as an opinion of the permanent court. Said George: “This is a very unusual situation and I hope it doesn’t recur.”

Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 17, 2008 10:52 AM
Posted to Courts in general