6th Circuit

A Reader’s Guide to Above the Law

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above the law logo.jpgA new website, like Above the Law, can take some getting used to. And we’re still working out various glitches and kinks. Please bear with us, and please give us your feedback about any problems you encounter; it’s very helpful. (And yes, we are considering a font overhaul. If you have views on that subject, pro or con, post ‘em in the comments.)
This is just a quick, admittedly pedantic post, to help familiarize you with the features of this site. Think of it as a little “user’s manual” for maximizing your enjoyment of ATL:

1. “After the jump” = Click on the little “Continue reading” link at the end of the post excerpt on the main page.

2. You can also read a post in its entirety, or generate a link to it, by clicking on either (a) the title of the post, or (b) the “Permalink” icon (that little paper-clip icon in the lower right-hand corner of each post).

3. You can email a post to a friend or colleague by clicking on the little envelope icon in the corner.

4. The most emailed articles appear in the column on the left-hand side of the page. We monitor this closely because it shows us what you, our readership, find most interesting. Then we can pander to you even more shamelessly.

5. You can append a comment to a post by clicking on the little bubble icon. Cute!

6. At the end of each post, after the words “Posted in:”, you’ll see what are called “Tags.” These are specific subjects discussed at Above the Law. If you click on the Tag in question, you’ll be taken to a page that collects all the posts about that topic. This allows you to see our coverage of a subject over time, or how a story unfolded.

Before we bore experienced readers to tears, here are two more novel things worth checking out:

1. The Forum. It’s in the left-hand column. If there’s not enough to do in the comments section, you can now start your own discussions completely independent of our ten or twelve chunks of commentary, news, and pining after litigatrices like Mary Kay Vyskocil and Rosemary Alito (that’s coming next month).

Registration can be anonymous. Why review that redline of the merger agreement when you can argue over whether HLS Dean Elena Kagan could destroy Columbia Dean David Schizer in a steel cage match? (See here.) Or speculate on who will be the next great “feeder judge” to the Supreme Court? (See here. And yes, we agree with “Mac”: judicial hottie Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.) is already funneling his kids to Nino. One this Term, one next Term).

To register for the Forum, click HERE. We reserve the right to indulge our god complexes and delete your posts (or ban users) for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to: we thought the post was off-topic, the post was promoting Internet Viagra, or we were bored and deleting users is MU-HA-HA… fun. That said, we’re extremely lazy totalitarians and aren’t inclined to delete anything unless extremely provoked. Or bored.

2. The Archives. Also accessible through the left-hand column. If you click on the word “Archive” — no, we don’t think you’re retarded, we’re just really anal — you’ll be taken to the ATL archives, where past posts are collected and organized by topic and by date. We’ve actually been secretly “testblogging” here since July — think of it as our answer to the Katie Couric “shadow show” — so there’s a lot of stuff to check out, even though we only went “live” this week.

That’s enough administrative crap for now. Back to matters of, er, “substance”!

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Every Unhappy Appellate Court Is Unhappy In Its Own Way

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Among federal appeals courts, the Sixth Circuit is legendary for the lack of collegiality — nay, outright dischord — among its members. In this respect, it is perhaps rivaled only by the Ninth Circuit.
And the Sixth Circuit’s fine tradition of internal strife and judicial cattiness continues. In an opinion issued today, the fairly liberal Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey — mentioned back in 2000 as a possible Al Gore Supreme Court pick — delivered this bench-slap to her staunchly conservative colleague, Chief Judge Danny J. Boggs:

I write separately in order to express my dismay at Judge Boggs’s unjustified attack directly on both the capital defense bar and indirectly on the members of this court. For the chief judge of a federal appellate court to state that it is “virtually inevitable” that “any mildly-sentient defense attorney” would consider playing the equivalent of Russian roulette with the life of a client is truly disturbing. Such a comment is an affront to the dedication of the women and men who struggle tirelessly to uphold their ethical duty to investigate fully and present professionally all viable defenses available to their clients. It also silently accuses the judges on this court of complicity in the alleged fraud by countenancing the tactics outlined.

MEOW! Somebody pass the Fancy Feast — Martha’s getting hungry…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — still not one happy family? [How Appealing]
Poindexter v. Mitchell [U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (pdf)]

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