Reply #7: Not to mention the self-appointed "experts" [View All]

[gratuitous]

And there are a couple running around even here at DU, highly concerned about Judge Taylor's "sloppy" writing (thankfully their analyses are uniformly example free) and how that's going to doom this decision to being overturned. In reading the opinion, I found the framing of the questions before the court was rather "sloppy," which makes the decision all that harder to write.

Whether the writer is a judge or an appellate attorney, it's difficult to write an effective opinion or brief when dealing with a poor set of pleadings or brief in the first place. A lot of your writing (and attorneys are under strict page limits on their briefs) is spent on "Respondent said blah, blah, blah, which doesn't address the issues at hand in this case." Then comes three pages of why your adversary is off base. Then a page spent saying what your adversary more properly should have said. Then comes the rebuttal, and you've already spent four or five pages of a 20-page limit just getting one issue properly framed. When there are multiple issues, as there were in this case, it's very difficult to be brief in the brief, if you catch my meaning.

Likewise, a judge has to explain why a party's lame argument is lame, restate the argument as it should have been made in the first place, then explain why it's still no good. While judges don't labor under the same page restrictions that attorneys do, it's still difficult to sound coherent when the substantive portion of an opinion comes only after eight pages of getting the table properly set for the centerpiece.