How Appealing



Friday, September 4, 2015

“Former Bucks teacher fired after blog posts can’t sue”: Chris Palmer of The Philadelphia Inquirer has a news update that begins, “A former Bucks County high school teacher who was fired after profanely blogging about her ‘utterly loathsome’ and ‘frightfully dim’ students cannot sue the Central Bucks School District for violating her right to free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.”

And Jonathan Stempel of Reuters has an article headlined “Pennsylvania teacher fired after blog posts cannot sue: U.S. court.”

You can access today’s ruling of a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit at this link.

This case may have a better than usual chance at en banc review as the two-judge majority consisted of a Senior Third Circuit judge and a visiting judge from the U.S. Court of International Trade. Thus, neither judge in the panel majority is entitled to vote on whether rehearing en banc should be granted.

Posted at 3:10 PM by Howard Bashman



Get Shorty but don’t lock him up for 216 years: The Altoona (Pa.) Mirror, whose articles are essentially inaccessible online to non-subscribers, today contains a front page article (access in PDF format today only via the Newseum) headlined “Court Vacates Lengthy Sentence; Appellate panel says mandatory prison terms can’t be used for dealer.”

You can access Tuesday’s published opinion of a unanimous three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in Commonwealth v. Carter at this link.

Posted at 10:44 AM by Howard Bashman



NextGen CM/ECF doesn’t require Java for federal appellate electronic filing: That’s the good news, but that system of federal appellate e-filing has yet to be implemented across much of the nation. Thus far, only the Second and Ninth Circuits have implemented it.

My related post from last night — titled “Is the current method of federal appellate electronic filing becoming technologically obsolete?” — can be accessed here.

Posted at 7:44 AM by Howard Bashman