Beware This All-Too-Common Pitfall of the Appellate Brief

• Author: William Ernest Havemann
• Pages: 17-18

Appellate Practice American Bar Association Litigation Section Spring 2024, Vol. 43 No. 2 PRACTICE POINTS Beware This All-Too-Common Pitfall of the Appellate Brief William Ernest Havemann Feb 10, 2024 One of the most common pitfalls of the appellate brief is the acrimonious adjective, or, worse yet, adverb. Readers may be familiar with filings that refer to an adversary’s position as “preposterous,” “fallacious,” or “asinine.” Readers may have even encountered filings that accuse an adversary of making an argument “ridiculously” or “absurdly.” Rhetoric like this is usually grammatically unsound and substantively damaging. Acrimonious language may strike a judge as ad hominem. A judge may suspect that a party’s resort to bluster...