Ernest M. WillcherContinue Reading Remember

They say as you get older, you begin to forget birthdays (I know it’s true for me). So I guess it should not be surprising that August 31 passed without fanfare, and only today did I remember that five years ago I uploaded the first posts on this blog.

In law blog years, that’s quite a while.

If you can’t already tell by the nearly 1,500 items posted in the intervening time, I enjoy doing this. Even even though it can be a lot of work, it’s rewarding. Mostly because of the readers, subscribers, and contributors whom this blog has allowed me to meet and get to know. 

Because doing this in a vacuum would not be worthwhile, I’d like to recognize my fellow-travelers — those other law bloggers who, like me, make the time to share thoughts about the legal issues of the day. Although you’re not…

Continue Reading Entering Our Sixth Year

Osgoode Hall, home of the Ontario Court of Appeal
and the Law Society of Upper Canada

When we’re away from the home office, we actually do the tourist thing at court houses. We’ve visited everything from space-age California courthouses to rural county courts in the Mississippi Delta. Yes, we admit it: we’re law nerds.

So when we were in Toronto recently for the ABA Annual Meeting, we had to pay a visit to the storied Osgoode Hall, a downtown courthouse and bar association rolled into a single building. As the name reflects, it also once housed the law school. There’s a free tour sponsored by the law society that starts at 1:15 p.m. Ours was conducted by a delightful local lawyer, who gave us an insider’s look at the building and the inner workings of the court.  For more, visit Osgoode Hall’s website, or better yet, visit in person next time you find yourself in Toronto. It’s well worth the time.

 The historical details.

 This being Canada, the historical details en français.

 
Why we like traditional courthouses: stained glass.

 

Lots of stained glass.

 Appeals Court.

 One thing you won’t see in U.S. courtrooms.

 

“Law Society” beats “bar association” any day.

Their words, not ours. Send your complaints here.

Who could not happily dig into the law books in this library?
Home of the American collection.

Makes you almost want to do some legal research, doesn’t it?

Corinthian columns and flat panel LCDs:
the old and the new blended in the Great Library.

We like any court house with a restaurant
(open September through June; sadly not in August).

They say that these stained glass panels contain symbols of the law.
All we saw was “talk to the hand.”

  

Just so you don’t think it’s all stodgy wood paneling and old leather,
one of the modern courtrooms.

 
One more, from the well-tended grounds.

 

Continue Reading Another Visit To A Temple Of Justice

The speakers (L to R): Kieran Marion, Professor Thomas Mitchell,
David Dietrich, Professor Steven Eagle, and Carolyn Gaines-Varner, 

“Property rights” are sometimes portrayed as belonging only to the rich and powerful, and protecting the politically connected. But a more realistic view was presented by the panel of speakers at a CLE presentation produced by the State & Local Government Law Section at the ABA Annual Meeting in Toronto.

Protecting Heirs Property: Uniform Laws and Social Justice detailed the new Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, a model statute addressing the problem of fractional land ownership by extended families. Here’s a summary of the issue from the ABA Journal:

Heirs’ property results in descendants who inherit real property as tenants in common, with each owner having an undivided interest in the land. For the descendants, heirs’ property also creates a problem—anyone who inherits…

Continue Reading Seminar Report: Heirs Property CLE At ABA Annual Meeting – A Slightly Different Perspective On Property Rights

Update: Civil Beat published a version of this post here.

We know lawyers are easy targets (we enjoy lawyer jokes as much as the next person, i.e., What’s the difference between a good lawyer and a great lawyer? A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer knows the judge.). Still, as we celebrate our independence, we note that author Thomas Jefferson and 23 other of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers, and that the document was crafted and understood fundamentally as a legal pleading, and is the product of careful legal thinking.

So lawyers can’t be all that bad, right?

As convincingly argued by historian Peter Charles Hoffer in his book The Law’s Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America (1990), the structure and style of the Declaration follows a form familiar to most modern lawyers: a complaint initiating a lawsuit. There’s the introduction…

Continue Reading The Verified Complaint In Equity: The Declaration Of Independence

Most courthouses look like court houses. Government Issue Bland. Others can be  interesting, even though they are imposing (Tennessee Supreme Court), traditional (Ninth Circuit, San Francisco), historic (Rhode Island Superior Court, Providence), unique (Hawaii Supreme Court, the only courthouse in the U.S. which was also the supreme court for another country), plain but hip (Coahoma County, Mississippi, “in the land of the Delta Blues”), mildly sinister, could be haunted (Ninth Circuit, Portland), cliché (Ninth Circuit, Pasadena, which looks like it could be the “Hotel California” of Eagles fame), or rockin’ (no wait, that’s Graceland).

But how many courthouses do you know could serve (and have served) as the set of a sci-fi film? For that matter, how many courthouses were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright? Welcome to the Marin County Civic Center and Courthouse in San Rafael, California, which is by our estimation the Coolest Courthouse…

Continue Reading A Brief Visit To What May Be The Coolest Courthouse In America

If you are wondering why the doors to most state, county, and city offices are locked today, remember that it isn’t another “furlough Friday,” or the day HGEA is voting on its new contract. No, today is the day that Hawaii celebrates Good Friday.

If you ask how “a religious holiday observed primarily by Christians commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary” squares with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, let us explain O Unenlighted One. Here’s our annual recounting of the how’s and the why’s.

Good Friday is a legal holiday in the State of Hawaii pursuant to Haw. Rev. Stat. § 8-1. The day of the crucifixion was originally made a holiday in 1941 by the Territorial Legislature. The statute was recodified upon statehood in 1959, and the holiday has been confirmed via Haw. Rev. Stat. § 89-1, …

Continue Reading Hawaii’s Good Friday Holiday – What’s Up With That?

We hesitated to post this opinion since it is way off-topic for the usual subjects of this blog, and the subject matter is something that has a tendency to flush out the extreme elements. But what the heck — it’s an interesting case, whichever side of this you might be on.

Besides, it’s a great case name.

In Justice v. Fuddy, No. 30176 (Apr. 7, 2011), the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals concluded that Hawaii’s Uniform Information Practices Act (Haw. Rev. Stat. ch. 92), the law which requires the government to make its documents available to the public in certain circumstances, does not compel the State Department of Health to give up President Obama’s original birth certificate to someone who isn’t President Obama.

Read the opinion below if you want to find out why. Suffice it to say that it’s not enough that POTUS is the leader of the…

Continue Reading HAWICA: No “Compelling Circumstances” Compelling Release Of Obama Birth Certificate