First Steps Toward Electronic Filing in Wisconsin State Appellate Courts

Last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously approved two petitions, one by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals (08-15) and one by the Clerk of the Wisconsin Supreme Court (08-18), to require filing of an electronic copy of briefs and petitions for review.  The State Bar reports that the court rejected a portion of the proposed rule that would have barred the public from accessing the electronic filings.  Instead, the court determined that electronic copies of filed documents should be made accessible to the public as soon as possible.  The only exception will be for appendices; filing of electronic copies of appendices will be optional, not mandatory, and the scanned appendices will not be made accessible to the public.  The Bar further reports, “Although both petitions seek an effective date of July 1, 2009, for the proposed rules, it is expected that the system will be up and running before then, and the petitioners hope lawyers will begin using the system on a voluntary basis early in 2009.”

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Should Non-Precedential Opinions Be “Precedential But Overrulable” Opinions?

A post at Legal Theory Blog alerted me to Amy E. Sloan‘s new article, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em:  A Pragmatic Approach to Nonprecedential Opinions in the Federal Appellate Courts, 86 Neb. L. Rev. 895 (2008), available on SSRN.  Amy Sloan is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Legal Skills program at University of Baltimore School of Law.  She is well known to legal writing professors, and to many law students, as the author of a popular legal research textbook, Basic Legal Research: Tools and Strategies.

Sloan makes an interesting argument, advocating that Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 be amended to assign non-precedential opinions a sort of “mixed” precedential value, specifically, that “non-precedential opinions [would be] binding unless overruled by a later panel’s precedential opinion.”  She contends that giving non-precedential cases this “‘overrulable’ status” would ensure that the opinions’ precedential weight would “correspond[] to their position within the traditional hierarchy of federal decisional law.”  

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Harvard Program Waiving Third-Year Tuition for Students Committing to Five-Year Public Interest Careers

From Clinicians with Not Enough to Do, this post discusses a new program at Harvard Law School, reported in the Harvard Crimson.  The graduating class of 2011 will be eligible for the program, and over 100 students expressed initial interest.  Students who commit to working for five years in the public interest would be eligible for tuition waivers for the last year of law school.  In addition, forty-eight third-year students signed commitments to five-year public interest careers, and they will receive in exchange $5,000 towards their current tuition.  

The average student graduating from Harvard leaves with $109,000 of educational debt, the Crimson article reports, so the waiver seems like a real help for students who want to take a lower-paying public interest job but otherwise could not afford to do so because of their debt burdens.  

The idea is interesting, reducing the debt load at the outset for those committed to public interest work, rather than providing assistance with loan repayments to those students after graduation.  Loan Repayment Assistance Programs are in place at many law schools; Marquette, for instance, has had one for several years. I have never heard of a program like the Harvard tuition waiver, though, and I would be interested to hear what students think about the idea.

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