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Saturday, December 03, 2011
Courts - Advice on building an appellate practice
Last month Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog invited comments to appellate practitioners: "on building an appellate practice, including a Supreme Court practice. What are the challenges facing a lawyer or law student trying to break into the field? What kind of experience is necessary or at least useful? Where are the realistic opportunities?" He received a lot of good responses, take a look. I found this one, although not precisely on-point, particularly intriguing:
I wish I could give this message to myself c. 1990: Develop a system, indexed in some way that works intuitively with my own brain, to keep track of aspects of reported cases that will be useful someday.If I had done that, and had kept it up while reading the advance sheets over the years, then I would have a list of things like “case saying that waiver arguments are among the things that can be waived” or “case holding that dictionary definitions of words aren’t the be-all and end-all of statutory interpretation” or “case holding that ‘any’ doesn’t really mean ‘any’” or that sort of thing. This would be extremely useful for an appellate or other brief-writing lawyer.
And you could share it with other lawyers, and then they would think of you as the go-to person.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 3, 2011 10:25 AM
Posted to Courts in general