Notice & Comment

Author: Aaron L. Nielson

Notice & Comment

An Open Letter to 1Ls

Dear 1Ls, Last fall I wrote a letter to your 2L colleagues. Now I’m going to write to you. Here’s the bottom line: If you want to clerk, the next few months are important. Many judges are waiting until applicants have their third or even fourth semester of grades. (Indeed, some judges prefer to interview […]

Notice & Comment

Zeitgeists: The Federal Reserve in its Evolving Regulatory Context

Readers are hard to please. It is bad enough that we criticize books that we could not even begin to write. But even worse, when an author has penned something that we like, all too often our response is not “thank you” but rather “more please”—and sometimes we don’t say “please.” I confess that after […]

Notice & Comment

D.C. Circuit Review – Reviewed: “An extraordinary number of people, institutions, and inanimate objects have wronged Tyrone Hurt ….”

I remember well the indignation I felt when I first learned about unpublished decisions. The idea that an appellate court in a common-law system can issue a decision that “carries no precedential force“—an opinion good for one case only—struck me as scandalous. The rule of law, I felt, depended on precedential effect. But then I […]

Notice & Comment

No One Should be Waiting in Lines … Again

Kimberly Robinson has posted an interesting story about how early you have to get up to get a ticket to a Supreme Court argument. The answer: sometimes very early. This reminded me of my post from last October: “No One Should Be Waiting in Lines.” The Supreme Court, like the Washington Monument, should make at […]

Notice & Comment

D.C. Circuit Review – Reviewed: Culture Rot … Or “The Dusty SCOTUS Pop-Culture References of Yore”

Last week, I praised Justice Elena Kagan for her sharp questions at oral argument. This week, however, her dissent in Lockhart v. United States prompts a friendly concern: Should there be pop culture references in Supreme Court opinions? Although such references are fun today, I fear they will confuse lawyers tomorrow. Indeed, just as the […]