News & Updates

According to a new analysis, justices on Wisconsin's high court tend to favor parties whose attorneys contributed to their election campaigns. With respect to campaign donations made prior to rulings, justices included in the study ruled in favor of donors 59 percent at the time. This does not establish that campaign support actually influenced decisions, but fair courts advocates worry that the public perceives this to be the case.

The editor of the National Jurist looks back at themes that emerged at the annual Association of American Law Schools meeting and observes: The level of experimentation and innovation is at its highest level since I began covering the market 20 years…

We at IAALS are among the many saddened by the untimely passing last week of Mark Cady, Iowa's Chief Justice. He had served as a judge for some 33 years, during which time he defended the importance of judicial independence and civic education as well as worked tirelessly to improve our nation's state family courts. 

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently published an article about proposed legislation to change the Pennsylvania judicial selection process. IAALS Executive Director Rebecca Love Kourlis was interviewed in the article about the proposed legislation and the benefits of merit selection. She noted that the Pennsylvania proposal contains the front-end nominating commission process endorsed by IAALS as the O'Connor Judicial Selection Plan.

Governor Gregoire encouraged trial court applicants and candidates for reelection to submit themselves to being rated by minority bar associations. In making judicial appointments, the governor consults minority bar ratings as well as traditional bar ratings.

On Thursday, March 12, the State Bar of California Trustees voted to postpone passing the motion to explore the development of a regulatory sandbox to May. In my eyes, every day, hour, or minute of delay leads to bad legal outcomes for Californians. Our legal system is in crisis. Now, as a community, we have to turn our kinetic access-to-justice energy into focused action.

For those who have been awaiting empirical analysis from the pilot project and rules reform experimentation that has been going on around the country, there are two new significant reports from the earliest of the projects—from New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Both reports provide helpful insights into state pilot project efforts to address the increasing burden and cost of civil pretrial discovery.

Thanks to a federal court ruling, abortion has become a major issue in the Democratic supreme court primary contest. The court ruled that pro-choice Personal PAC has a First Amendment right to create super PACs. In the wake of the decision, Personal PAC sent out mailers depicting one candidate as “Not Pro-Choice” and listing another candidate’s endorsements by pro-choice organizations. Four candidates are vying for the nomination.

Courts are faced with the task of balancing the public’s need for an efficient justice system with everyone’s health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online dispute resolution, along with a host of other approaches, will likely play a role in tackling the post-pandemic demand for legal services.

Four of the seven seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court are on the ballot in November. The current ideological balance on the court is 4-3, with a Republican majority, and three of the four seats up for election are currently held by Democrats. Commentators anticipate millions of dollars in special interest spending in the coming months.

The court of appeals ruled that Clear the Bench Colorado is a political committee, rather than an issue committee, and thus is subject to contribution limits of $525 per contributor per election cycle. The group formed in 2009 to challenge the retention of four supreme court justices. 

On September 25, IAALS hosted a virtual donor appreciation reception. Our organization wouldn’t be what it is without the generosity and support of our extraordinary, visionary donors, and we’re grateful to everyone as we work toward justice we can believe in.

At its meeting last week, the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure approved the proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as recommended by the Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure. The approved amendments will be reviewed by the Judicial Conference of the United States and, if approved, will move to the U.S. Supreme Court for a review and vote before May 1, 2015.

By a 5-4 vote, the state judicial nominating commission voted to bar its members from contributing to or actively participating in any judicial race in the state, including the retention elections of three supreme court justices. Those who voted in favor of the policy want to avoid the appearance of impropriety, while those who voted against it believe that public disclosure of support for a candidate would be sufficient.

IAALS has released new initial discovery protocols to help both businesses and insurers alike reach a quick resolution to the rapid increase in court cases involving business interruption insurance property damage claims due to COVID-19.

In a recent opinion issuing discovery sanctions, a federal district court judge in the Northern District of Iowa denounced modern discovery practice in the United States. Judge Mark W. Bennett began the opinion with a reference to Hamlet, and then went on to discuss the current state of discovery, how it is too often “mired in obstructionism,” and how such inappropriate conduct is “born of a warped view of zealous advocacy.”

The University of California Hastings College announced that it will reduce enrollment by 20% over the next three years. "The critics of legal education are right," Dean Frank Wu said in a telephone interview on April 30. "There are too many law…

At Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell, we’ve been fortunate to have a front-row seat to the outcomes and transformation that IAALS has achieved through Foundations for Practice. We collaborated with IAALS to survey our partners on the characteristics that they viewed as most essential for new associates to be successful at WTO, and the outcomes for retention and diversity have been exciting and encouraging.

New research out of the United Kingdom suggests that instead of facing the family court system without legal counsel, families are choosing to forgo the courts altogether. This problem is not novel to the UK, and self-represented litigants are on the rise in the United States as well. Our Cases Without Counsel project is conducting first-of-its-kind national research in the hopes of better understanding how the legal system can meet the needs of these families.

A federal judge struck down an aspect of the public financing program for appellate judges that provides rescue funds to judicial candidates who are outspent by privately funded candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a similar provision in Arizona’s public financing program in 2011, on the grounds that it infringed upon freedom of speech.