How Appealing



Sunday, December 28, 2014

“Federal Antidrug Law Goes Up in Smoke: Irate about harmful spillover from Colorado’s marijuana legalization, two neighboring states sue to overturn it.” David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley will have this op-ed in Monday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.

You can freely access the full text of the op-ed via Google.

Posted at 10:37 PM by Howard Bashman



“Ex-trooper’s case could come back to Amarillo”: The Amarillo Globe-News has this report on a revised ruling that a two-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued earlier this month.

The third judge who was originally a part of the three-judge panel in this case — Senior Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King — appears either to have been dismissed from the panel by the other two judges or to have quit the panel in protest. When the panel issued its original decision in the case back on August 28, 2013, Judge King issued a dissent. When the panel issued a revised opinion earlier this month, a footnote to the decision stated that the opinion was being issued by a two-judge quorum.

Lest anyone fear that Judge King became ill, unavailable, or otherwise indisposed, on the same day that the panel issued its revised decision, the Fifth Circuit issued an unpublished order denying rehearing en banc. Although Judge King, as a senior circuit judge, does not get to vote for rehearing en banc, Judge King is noted as joining the dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc, and she also issued her own separate opinion joining that dissent.

If any of this blog’s readers have seen anything similar to this happen before on a federal appellate court — where a judge who disagrees with the outcome of a case is either dismissed from a three-judge panel or quits the panel in protest — I would be interested in hearing the details via email.

Posted at 10:24 PM by Howard Bashman



“Gay marriage dynamic in U.S. shifted dramatically in 2014”: The Los Angeles Times has an article that begins, “For the first time, a majority of Americans are living in a state that allows gay marriage. After a year of cascading court opinions tossing out many remaining restrictions, the dynamic in 2014 changed from how many states allow same-sex marriage to how many states don’t.”

Posted at 11:50 AM by Howard Bashman