The 3d District has also posted openings for an Appellate Court Attorney and Senior Appellate Court Attorney. For a complete job announcement and application, go to http://www.courts.ca.gov/careers.htm, or call 916-653-8038. Filing deadline is 12:00 PM, March 23, 2026.
On February 10, noon to 1, the SDCBA Appellate Practice Section presents An Appealing Life: Are State-Appointed Appeals for You?
Today's SDCBA APS zoom meeting was a discussion with appellate blawgers Prof. Shaun Martin of the California Appellate Report blog and Ben Shatz of SCAN.
And California Appellate Defense Counsel (CADC) has a conference coming on Friday, March 20, and Saturday, March 21, at the South San Francisco Conference Center. The keynote speaker is California Supreme Court Justice Kelli M. Evans. MCLEs focus on criminal defense and dependency appeals, and are intended to provide court-appointed attorneys with education relevant to their work on the statewide panels. (For this reason, CADC membership and conference attendance are not open to those affiliated with prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies). More info here.
Law360 has Supreme Court Caseload Hits 160-Year Low, which begins:
Not since the Civil War has the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in as few cases as it will this term — the latest milestone for the court's shrinking docket, and one attorneys say might have more to do with the high court's culture than its expanding emergency appeals caseload.
- As of Monday, the justices have agreed to hear oral arguments in 64 individual cases this October term.
- This term's caseload is well below the average 75 cases per term the Supreme Court has been reviewing since Chief Justice John Roberts took the helm in 2005, and nine fewer individual cases than last term's docket. It is the smallest set of cases the high court has reviewed in a single term since the October term in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, according to data from Washington University School of Law's Supreme Court Database.
- The Supreme Court has steadily granted review in fewer and fewer cases since the October 1988 term, when Congress passed the Supreme Court Case Selections Act and eliminated the right to appeal state court judgments to the nation's highest court. Since then, the number of individual cases reviewed each term has been up to the discretion of the justices and has dropped from 168 during the 1988 term to 64 this term.
UVA School of Law reports Prominent Appellate Attorney Cate Stetson ’94 Joins Faculty
The latest issue of LA Lawyer (Jan/Feb 2026:1) has Gary Wax's Practice Tips: On The Record: How to Safeguard Cases for Appeal
The BHBA Appellate Law section presents How to Avoid Sinking Your Civil Appeal Before It Sets Sail, a Zoom webinar presented by certified appellate specialist Brendan Begley of Weintraub Tobin, on Feb. 4 at 12:30 to 1:30.
Speaking of SCOTUS, don't miss this Term's big appellate practice opinion in Coney Island, in which J. Sotomayor filed a concurring opinion. Law360 has Justices Set Time Limit To Ax Judgments, Ending 11-1 Split
Law360 also had John Roberts Welcomes John Roberts To Supreme Court
Law360 has 7th Circ. Cautions Pro Se Litigants To Avoid AI-Induced Errors
These following judicial officer is assigned to temporarily fill a judicial vacancy at the First District: Judge Ann Moorman of the Mendocino County Superior Court will be sitting pro tempore in Division Four until February 28, 2026.
Dan Barer points out that yesterday 4/3 published this opinion imposing $25,000 in sanctions for a frivolous writ petition upon counsel for accusing the trial court of bias and misconduct without evidentiary support. In the introduction, the court writes:
“We publish this opinion as a
cautionary tale: Lawyers may not make assertions in court that lack factual
support, regardless of how much the lawyer or the client ‘earnestly believes’
them. Lawyers may not impugn the integrity of the very system of justice in
which they serve without a solid basis in both fact and law. Dissatisfaction
with a ruling, however deeply felt, is not itself evidence of judicial
misconduct.”
“Most lawyers show remarkable skill in helping clients understand our professional obligations yet too many mistake the need for zealous advocacy with a ‘the customer is always right’ policy. We remind them that the legal profession runs on facts, law, and justice. The law cannot tolerate unsupported assertions fueled only by desires, especially baseless accusations against our hardworking trial judges.”
So sayeth Justice Nathan R. Scott
For Prof. Martin's take, see here.
Law.com/NLJ has 'The Technology Is There': Supreme Court Practitioners Quietly Embracing AI
In interviews with the National Law Journal, prominent Supreme Court advocates reported using generative AI tools in their day-to-day legal practice, including everything from basic legal research to drafting portions of briefs, such as introductions, argument summaries and even questions presented. ....
Some high court advocates say there is still something of a "stigma" about using AI, largely driven by headlines of attorneys submitting court filings with AI-hallucinated case citations. Indeed, one researcher, Damien Charlotin, has put together a running database documenting more than 800 instances of AI hallucinations in court proceedings around the world.
And don't miss Bloomberg Law's Tennessee Man Pleads Guilty to Hacking Supreme Court System:
Moore admitted that he accessed the Supreme Court’s online filing system on 25 days in a roughly two-month span, from August to October 2023, by using the stolen credentials of an authorized user ....
The charges follow separate attacks on the judiciary’s electronic filing system. The federal judiciary revealed last year that the federal courts’ case management system, which is separate from the Supreme Court’s, had suffered a cyberattack.
The attack exploited vulnerabilities targeted in an earlier breach in 2020. Russian government hackers lurked for years in the judiciary’s records system.
The breach prompted federal trial courts to take new measures to restrict electronic access to sealed documents.
Former AUSA Erik Silber joins Dykema's Los Angeles office. He is now a Senior Counsel in Dykema's Commercial Litigation Practice Group, the firm’s White Collar and Government Investigations group, and its Appellate and Critical Motions Practice.
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"He has supervised, edited, and filed hundreds of other appellate briefs and participated in hundreds of moot courts to prepare colleagues for argument. Erik has also tried six federal cases as a lead or solo counsel and directly supervised more than 40 federal trials as a supervisor of new AUSAs (Acting Chief and Deputy Chief of the General Crimes Section), providing insight and guidance on all aspects of the trial, including potential appellate issues. He served as an adjunct professor of criminal procedure at USC Gould School of Law and as a guest lecturer for white collar crime and appellate advocacy at Loyola Law School."
Last year the 3d District had put out an RFP for "the services of a person or entity with expertise in training mediators to conduct fundamental appellate mediation training sessions for no more than 24 applicants to the Court’s mediation panel." Well, the winner is ... JAMS Pathways.
The Wall St. Journal has Help Federal Judges Protect Themselves, by Judge Elizabeth Branch (11th Cir.) and Robert Wilkins (D.C. Cir.), in which they write:
we support the Protect Our Prosecutors and Judges Act, introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The bill would allow federal judges and prosecutors who have completed law-enforcement firearms training in their home jurisdiction to carry concealed guns across state lines.
Yes, you may miss the tabs, but you won't miss updating the pages into the binders. And the paperbacks take up less shelf space (in height and width).
Scuttlebutt is that all the other Rutter guides had already gone to paperback and that the appellate one was the last to make this conversion.
Bloomberg Law has Tom Goldstein’s Defense Hinges on Giving the Jury Good Guy Vibes - Tom Goldstein—the former US Supreme Court advocate and blogger with a years-long ultra high-stakes gambling habit—heads to trial Monday in a case that may turn on whether the jury thinks he’s “a good guy or a bad guy.” ... The government has listed more than 60 potential witnesses and more than 1,000 exhibits, some of which are hundreds of pages in length. The trial is expected to last about a month.
Law360 has Gov't Can't Use NYT Article As Evidence In Goldstein Trial -- A Maryland federal judge on Friday barred prosecutors from pre-admitting Thomas Goldstein's statements in a New York Times article as evidence in the SCOTUSblog co-founder's tax fraud trial, but she left open the possibility for the government to call either Jeffrey Toobin, the article's author, or a Times fact-checker, as a witness. Jury selection for the trial is scheduled to begin Monday and opening arguments on Wednesday.
The bill [The Judicial Reorganization Act], which is currently under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would split the Ninth Circuit into two new circuits: a new Ninth Circuit covering California, Guam and Hawaii; and a Twelfth Circuit with jurisdiction over Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. The legislation would also increase the total number of judges in the two circuits. In October, another bill advancing these efforts, the Judicial Efficiency Improvement Act, was introduced in the Senate.
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The DJ is launching new newsletters, one of which is John Roemer's The Doghouse Report, which will be:
A weekly insider look at developments at the California Supreme Court, examining the cases before the Court, the dynamics among the justices, and the interplay between the high court, the lower courts, and the federal judiciary. Published on Fridays
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