5th Cir. parties on!

Too much?

Law.com covers a punny opinion from the 5th Circuit in ‘Party On.’ Judges Side With Brewer in Pun-Filled Ruling On To-Go Beer Sales -- “This is a case about beer. It turns on the meaning of the word ‘owned,’ a pint-sized word with stout implications for craft brewers in Texas,” Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote.

It’s not the first time a judge has injected humor or unconventional legal writing into an opinion. Ross Guberman, author of judicial writing book Point Taken, said the debate over judges having fun in their opinions started 50 years ago, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun used baseball trivia in the baseball antitrust case Flood v. Kuhn.
Guberman doesn’t believe Wilson’s beer puns will trip up readers, and while some may worry that comedy in opinions disrespects litigants, that’s not the case here.
“The losing party was a bureaucracy, not a criminal defendant. The substance is clearly distilled, and the rest of the opinion is sober,” said Guberman, the opinion-writing trainer for new district court and appeals court judges. “Haughty, convoluted opinions disrespect parties more than corny wordplay does.”

Today's DJ has Jon Eisenberg in Appellate delay: the Judicial Council moves forward

This idea of annually equalizing appellate court workloads is not new. It was first proposed in the Report of the Appellate Process Task Force – the Strankman Commission – in 2000. Its time has come – indeed, is past due.

Throughout the course of my 16-month effort to expose and remedy the 3rd District’s delay crisis, I did what I felt had to be done to get something meaningful accomplished. I believed from the outset, and still believe, that anything short of a full public airing would not have gotten the job done. I took my cue from Louis Brandeis’s 1913 aphorism on publicity – that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”