Scope of Appellate Fact Review Widened: Federal Courts. Procedure. Appellate Court Reverses Finding of Fact in Nonjury Action

1950 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 784
Author(s):  
Nicholas Ravotti

The practice of law requires not only an understanding of the law itself (i.e., what the law “says”), but also the ability to conduct proper legal research to formulate cogent legal arguments in support of one's case. For attorneys practicing before state and federal courts in the United States, this is accomplished through the use of legal research databases that catalog and archive nearly all state and federal trial court and appellate court opinions. For attorneys who practice before the 573 federally-recognized Indian tribal courts, this task is far more complex. This chapter discusses the need for a culturally-appropriate legal research database to bridge the digital divide in tribal courts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205316801984893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Rice ◽  
Jesse H. Rhodes ◽  
Tatishe Nteta

Although racial bias in the law is widely recognized, it remains unclear how these biases are in entrenched in the language of the law, judicial opinions. In this article, we build on recent research introducing an approach to measuring the presence of implicit racial bias in large-scale corpora. Utilizing an original dataset of more than one million appellate court opinions from US state and federal courts, we estimate word embeddings for the more than 400,000 most common words found in legal opinions. In a series of analyses, we find strong and consistent evidence of implicit racial bias, as African-American names are more frequently associated with unpleasant or negative concepts, whereas European-American names are more frequently associated with pleasant or positive concepts. The results have stark implications for work on the neutrality of the legal system as well as for our understanding of the entrenchment of bias through the law.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-205
Author(s):  
choeffel Amy

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld, in Presbyterian Medical Center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System v. Shalala, 170 F.3d 1146 (D.C. Cir. 1999), a federal district court ruling granting summary judgment to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in a case in which Presbyterian Medical Center (PMC) challenged Medicare's requirement of contemporaneous documentation of $828,000 in graduate medical education (GME) expenses prior to increasing reimbursement amounts. DHHS Secretary Donna Shalala denied PMC's request for reimbursement for increased GME costs. The appellants then brought suit in federal court challenging the legality of an interpretative rule that requires requested increases in reimbursement to be supported by contemporaneous documentation. PMC also alleged that an error was made in the administrative proceedings to prejudice its claims because Aetna, the hospital's fiscal intermediary, failed to provide the hospital with a written report explaining why it was denied the GME reimbursement.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. King ◽  
Michael Heise

Scholarly and public debates about criminal appeals have largely taken place in an empirical vacuum. This study builds on our prior empirical work exploring defense-initiated criminal appeals and focuses on criminal appeals by state and federal prosecutors. Exploiting data drawn from a recently released national sample of appeals by state prosecutors decided in 2010, as well as data from all appeals by federal prosecutors to the United States Court of Appeals terminated in the years 2011 through 2016, we provide a detailed snapshot of non-capital, direct appeals by prosecutors, including extensive information on crime type, claims raised, type of defense representation, oral argument and opinion type, as well judicial selection, merits review, and relief. Findings include a rate of success for state prosecutor appeals about four times greater than that for defense appeals (roughly 40% of appeals filed compared to 10%). The likelihood of success for state prosecutor-appellants appeared unrelated to the type of crime, claim, or defense counsel, whether review was mandatory or discretionary, or whether the appellate bench was selected by election rather than appointment. State high courts, unlike intermediate courts, did not decide these appeals under conditions of drastic asymmetry. Of discretionary criminal appeals reviewed on the merits by state high courts, 41% were prosecutor appeals. In federal courts, prosecutors voluntarily dismissed more than half the appeals they filed, but were significantly less likely to withdraw appeals from judgments of acquittal and new trial orders after the verdict than to withdraw appeals challenging other orders. Among appeals decided on the merits, federal prosecutors were significantly more likely to lose when facing a federal defender as an adversary compared to a CJA panel attorney.


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