Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Joe Miller loses again.
Here is the order. It rejects everything that Mr. Miller argued in trying to set aside his loss to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. Fans of Bryan Garner will note that all the citations are in footnotes. Presumably Judge Richard Posner will not be happy with this citation style. The Gillette Torvik blog has yet to weigh in on the issue. Probably because arguments over proper citation form are inimical to our duty to make sparks fly.
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For what it's worth, this (citations in footnotes) is one area where I generally disagree with Garner. This is based on my experience as a judicial law clerk. In that role, I found citations and their parenthetical quotations to be the most important parts of a brief. I didn't take the lawyer's word on anything -- but if he or she had a good parenthetical quote, that would catch my eye. So while I understand where Garner is coming from, I disagree that footnotes in citations is the most persuasive way to structure a brief--even if it looks a little tidier.
ReplyDeleteBut I suppose I could be convinced that footnotes in citations are a good idea in judicial opinions, where explanation (rather than persuasion) is the primary rhetorical aim.