Editor's Corner, 0120 ALBJ, 81 The Alabama Lawyer 14 (2020)

PositionVol. 81 1 Pg. 14

EDITOR'S CORNER

Vol. 81 No. 1 Pg. 14

Alabama Bar Lawyer

January, 2020

Welcome to the appellate edition.

Appeals are-we lawyers like to describe in Latin-sui generis: a genus unto itself. Nothing is quite like them. Let's tease that out a little bit.

When a new case comes into a law office office-civil or criminal-the case generally arrives as an unformed mess and someone wants your help. The lawyer's job is to take those messy facts and attempt to mold them into a shape that he thinks gives his client the best chance to get the result they want.

An appeal has little in common with this.

So, what is an appeal?1

An appeal happens when one side (we call them the appellant) is dissatisfied with what a trial judge or jury decided, so they look for someone with authority to give them a do-over. They ask for a document showing what happened (the transcript) and the documents used (the record on appeal).They have to follow imposed draconian rules of both procedure and form, and within those rules they have to draft a specialized document (called a brief) and send it to a group of people elected or appointed to read them and make a decision (appellate judges). And the brief h as to cite to prior appeals and prior rulings by the appellate courts. Alabama's appellate courts don't usually want the people who sent them the briefs to come and talk to them (quaintly called oral argument), so the briefs are either mailed in or filed online (or both). The lawyers who filed the briefs don't have to talk to each other, and all that is exchanged is paper and electrons. After a while the appellate court judges write something and send it out (we call that an opinion). The opinion either ends things, or we start a new round at another appellate court.

Ain't nothing like it.

The Alabama Lawyer decided to dedicate an issue to this whole process.

Our problem wasn't finding things to write about, it was deciding when to stop. An enormous body of law surrounds just the issue of the process of appeals, much less the substantive law they address. And if you have any question about the breadth of appellate court opinions, go to a law library and take a good look at a printed copy of the Alabama Digest (which is just a formal short-form summary of opinions). I took my father's wooden folding ruler to my copy, and it measured about 80 inches-more than six feet. If you've never spent time looking through a paper copy of our digest, spend some time...

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