Tuesday, July 13, 2021

"Endlessly Interesting"

Today's DJ profile is The Appeal of Appeals: Justice Marla J. Miller views each case as a present:

"The opportunity to really delve into an issue, to think, to write, to come to conclusions with other people, that really appealed to me" 










When it comes to thorny questions of criminal law, Miller is a go-to source, said Justice Therese M. Stewart, Miller's colleague in the court's Division 2 in San Francisco. ... "She has a sense of those things." That sense comes from Miller's experience in prosecutorial roles and nearly 10 years on the San Francisco County Superior Court. Before becoming a judge, Miller worked at Howard Rice, as a prosecutor in the general crimes division in the Northern District of California U.S. attorney's office, briefly in the San Francisco County district attorney's office, and at Morrison & Foerster.
Miller, who was appointed to the appellate court by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014, said she knew she had an interest in becoming an appellate judge when she clerked for 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Charles M. Merrill in her first job after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1980.
Off the bench, Miller serves on three influential committees: the Advisory Committee on the Code of Judicial Ethics, the California Supreme Court Committee on Judicial Ethics Opinions and the Advisory Committee on Civil Jury Instructions.

Also of note in todays' DJ: Dean Chemerinsky's Don't underestimate the conservatism of the Roberts court: The U.S. Supreme Court's October 2020 term which ended on July 2 should be seen as a reminder of the basic reality: It is a very conservative court and will be for a long time to come.

And Judge Karnow explores properly pleading on "information and belief" and pleading affirmative defenses in Pleading Treasure, which itself is a treasure of an article. Don't miss this one!

And see fn. 2 here for a cute way to introduce abbreviations: “Welcome to—and apologies for—the acronymic world of federal legislation.”