BULLETIN OF THE ASSOCIA

Transcription

1 The Catchline BULLETIN OF THE ASSOCIATION OF REPORTERS OF JUDICIAL DECISIONS June 2016 Volume XXXV No. 1

2 CONTENTS President s Message... 3 Executive Board Meeting Spring Education Committee Report...6 Nebraska Is Going Digital...7 Richard Ross Retirement...8 2

3 President s Message Hello, ARJD members! Spring has sprung and I hope you re enjoying warmer weather, blooming flowers, and planning your summer and that those summer plans include attending ARJD s annual meeting in Columbus. I m happy to report that your executive board had a productive meeting at the United States Supreme Court in April. Many thanks to Chris Fallon, who, as always, was a gracious host. One member attended by telephone, and it was helpful (and fun!) to have one more voice at the table. I encourage you to consider attending future board meetings by phone if you cannot attend in person. (We also discussed arranging for virtual board meetings in the future, an idea I m sure ARJD will continue to explore.) The upcoming annual meeting in Columbus is shaping up to be another good one. As you can see later in this newsletter, Leah Walker and the Education Committee have done their usual fabulous job of arranging a group of speakers who promise to be interesting and relevant. I m especially looking forward to a presentation on legal writing by former judge Mark Painter, whom I was able to see give a CLE on a similar topic he is an engaging speaker with spot-on advice. Another highlight will be a tour of the gorgeous Ohio Supreme Court building and the Ohio Statehouse. Additionally, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis have continued their tradition of generously arranging wonderful events in the evenings. Thomson Reuters has planned for us an experience at the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, which has both indoor and outdoor gardens (including more than 400 plant species) and artwork, including a collection of works by glass artist Dale Chihuly. There will also be a jazz band, excellent food and drink, and a butterfly-release experience. And LexisNexis has arranged an adventure at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, of which Jack Hanna is the director. In addition to enjoying dinner and drinks in a room with a view and an outside deck overlooking the giraffe exhibit, the group will have its own private giraffe encounter and a meet and greet with other animals! Alas, I do not think Nora the polar bear cub, born just last November, will be part of the meet and greet, but we will be able to go to the zoo a bit early and get a look around, so perhaps you can catch a glimpse of the adorable Nora then. As most of you know, Wolters Kluwer has changed the focus of its business and, as of now, will not be sponsoring an event at this year s meeting (and we ve had no luck so far in finding other vendors 3

4 interested in participating in ARJD meetings). However, it just so happens that Columbus will be having its monthly Gallery Hop in the Short North arts district while we are in town, and plans are underway to schedule a group outing to this lively event (including a dinner similar to our welcome dinner). During the Gallery Hop, dozens of galleries and other venues showcase the work of established and emerging artists from all over the world. There are also street performers and interesting stores and vendors selling handmade designs. This is all a short, free bus ride from our hotel. Watch for annual meeting registration materials in early June. If you would like to reserve your room right away, feel free to do so. Our block of rooms is at the DoubleTree Suites (50 S Front St., Columbus, Ohio, 43215), directly across the street from the Ohio Supreme Court (where the meeting itself will be held). You can make reservations by calling (group name: ARJD Annual Meeting, group code: AAM) or online. The negotiated rate of $129 per night will be available three days before and three days after the meeting (which will be August 4 through 7). Finally, as you ll see later in this edition, ARJD charter member Richard Ross is retiring in June, and he is the last charter member to retire. The news is, of course, bittersweet while the Kansas courts are losing a treasure, we are thrilled to congratulate Richard on his retirement (and luckily for us, ARJD keeps its retirees)! Richard will be at the annual meeting this year, so you can congratulate him in person and be sure to bring your good Richard stories and pictures to share with the group. I ll see you in Columbus! Brandee Mooneyhan ARJD President 4 Executive Board Meeting Spring 2016 The spring 2016 Executive Board Meeting was held on April 8, 2016, at the United States Supreme Court, in Washington, D.C. In attendance were Brandee Mooneyhan (President), Brian Redmond (Vice President), Mary Joe Beck (Secretary), Leah Walker (Education Committee), Christine Fallon and Sherry Smith (U.S. Supreme Court), and John Juroszek (Michigan Supreme Court) (by telephone). Committee Reports Communications Committee The Catchline was distributed in December, and a revised edition of the Directory of Reporters of Judicial Decisions was distributed in March. Discussion ensued about The Catchline, including the possibility of using Google Groups to allow each person to post information, such as minutes or the President s report, without having to publish an actual newsletter. The Board proposed to discuss, during the business meeting portion of the next annual meeting, revamping The Catchline or folding the Communications and External Outreach committees together. Updating the website was also discussed. Annual Meeting Committee The Doubletree in Columbus will have a website for reservations. There will be a lunch at the Ohio Supreme Court, and both LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters have evening events set up. Education Committee The majority of the schedule for Columbus is in place. Andrew Welsh-Higgins, an AP legal report-

5 er and an author of novels, will talk about his experience as a consumer of reported opinions. Donald Melhorn, Jr. will talk about the history of reporting decisions in Ohio. Scott Mote from the Ohio Lawyers Assistance Program will talk about burnout. Mark Painter will speak about legal writing and editing. Adam Ziegler will talk about Free the Law, digitizing Harvard s law library. Lexum will send a speaker to talk about Decisia, a tool for publishing decisions online. Tours of the Statehouse and the Supreme Court will occur on Friday afternoon, with former Justice Cupp leading the tour at the Statehouse. The business meeting and hot-button forum will be on Saturday morning. Leah remains open for topics but is not actively looking for more speakers. External Outreach Committee A brochure for new members has been prepared. Brandee noted that there seems to be a disconnect about new members the committee has never been notified when a new member joins. Mary Joe suggested that a process should be set up for when new members join what information should be sent to the committee and how the committee should reach out to the new members. Leah used to send a brochure, a copy of the by-laws, the latest Catchline, and a copy of the directory to new members. LexisNexis will be extending an invitation for members who come to Columbus early for the Annual meeting to come and visit the facility on Wednesday. Annual Meeting Site Selection Brandee asked for ideas for where to hold future annual meetings, after Toronto. A discussion ensued about possible sites. Brian noted that the number of members attending the annual meeting seems to be decreasing. Do more attend when the site is in the middle of the country? Do cities that have interests for family members draw more attendance. The idea of a survey was brought up to see what members consider when deciding to come to the annual meeting. Is it location (accessibility, attractions), funding, the speakers? Columbus Update Vendor events will be at the zoo and at the Conservatory. The Board discussed having an organized dinner on Saturday. A catered dinner at the hotel was suggested for Saturday night. Brandee says that the hospitality suite is a meeting space that could be used for a dinner. Mary Joe suggested looking at a restaurant in the Short North area, which will be on a Gallery Hop night. The Short North area is accessible by the free CBUS and by foot from the hotel. German Village would be another area to investigate for a dinner. The meeting on Sunday morning will be at the hotel. Brian has made a reservation at Milestone 229, which is on the river, for the Wednesday welcome dinner. Reservations are taken only for the inside. Preset menus are available, or there is the option to order off the full menu. A decision was made to allow members to order from the menu, and thus each member would be responsible for their own bill. Lake Tahoe Update 5 A contract has been signed with Harvey s Tahoe Resort for The Nevada Supreme Court will be providing AV. Some education topics are being discussed, including information about Nevada s new Court of Appeals and a presentation on training law clerks. Brandee also noted that there are several law schools in the area and that the National Judicial College is in Reno. Going to Carson City on Friday to tour the court and the state capitol might be a possibility. Other Business Richard Ross s Retirement Richard will be retiring on June 3. He is the last original member of the Association. Leah indicated that the Columbus meeting will be the 35th annual meeting. Opinion-modification Project Survey John Juroszek discussed his committee s project, which will survey how each state deals with modifications made to opinions after they have been published, including changes pertaining to style, punctuation, or text. After listening to the Board s comments, John suggested that the design of the survey be brought up at the annual meeting and that the membership have the chance to discuss its confidentiality. John will put together a presentation for the membership. Google Groups Brandee asked if the Board could take the step of instituting Google Groups as a means of communication for the ARJD. Google groups functions as an distribution list. The members can update their directory information directly within the group. s can include attachments. Google Drive can be used in conjunction with the group to share files, such as photos and documents. Brian also suggested that a vendor

6 could be used to hold Board meetings virtually, which would allow more people to attend. Brian said he could introduce these programs at the annual meeting. The Board decided to talk to the members at the annual meeting and to proceed with switching to Google groups. The Catchline Archive The Catchline could be saved electronically in the Google Groups program. Brandee asked if paper copies should be kept once the editions are archived electronically. Save the date 2016 Annual Meeting: August 4-7, Annual Meeting: August 3-6, Annual Meeting: August 2-5, 2018 (tentative). Education Committee The planning for the Columbus meeting is going exceedingly well so far and we have the majority of the speakers already scheduled. I am deeply appreciative to Mary Joe and the rest of the Ohio Reporter s office and the Ohio Supreme Court staff for working with me to make Columbus a memorable meeting, as well as my committee members Brian Redmond and Geri Cepeda! Andrew Welsh-Higgins is a legal affairs reporter for the AP in Columbus and is also the author of a series of detective novels set in Columbus starring a fictional former Ohio State quarterback. He will be providing us with legal writing advice both from his perspective as a novelist and as a consumer of our legal opinions. He will also talk about how court opinions are further reported to the public by the press. Donald F. Melhorn, Jr., will trace the history of the methods of communicating court decisions from the bar and the advent of official reporting in Ohio. He will focus on the relationship between Ohio Supreme Court Chief Judge Calvin Pease and Charles Hammond, the Reporter for the first several numbers of the Ohio Reports and the special importance official reporting had on the workings and effectiveness of the entire legal system as it expanded in frontier conditions in Ohio and further westward. Scott Mote, the Executive Director of the Ohio Lawyers Assistance Program, will speak to us about burnout at work, how we can overcome it and cope with it. He may also bring some of the social workers to the session as well. Former judge Mark Painter will speak to us about legal writing and editing. He is very enthusiastic about speaking to us as he appreciates the improvements the Ohio Reporter s office made to his writing. For a bit more on his background, see Adam Ziegler, who spoke to us in Denver about perma.cc, will be back to talk about a new project out of Harvard s Innovation Lab called Free the Law. They are digitizing Harvard s entire law library and giving it away for free to nonprofits. They are funded by Ravell, which will have the exclusive commercial rights to resell the data for a period of years unless the opinions are digital born. Here s a link to what they re doing: New York Times article. We will also have Daniel Poulin and/or Joseph Khayat speak to us about Lexum s new project Decisia. This program enables courts to publish their decisions online and, theoretically, a court s entire database could be published on a publically accessible website via Decisia, including copyrighted material, with restricted access thereto to those with a password. For more information, see decisia/2/en/index.php?gclid=c- JqO74zWqMcCFUoXHwodEggGhA. Friday afternoon will be tour time! Mary Joe has arranged a tour of the Ohio Supreme Court building and former Justice Robert Cupp of the Ohio Supreme Court, who is now in the Ohio legislature, has arranged tours of the Ohio Statehouse. We are planning to split the ARJD in two so one group will tour the Supreme Court under the guidance of their docents while the other group will tour the Statehouse under the guidance of Justice Cupp and a tour guide, and then the groups will switch. Justice 6

7 Cupp is very excited about the opportunity to meet with us! We are also looking at having a discussion about Ohio s experience releasing their first comprehensive style guide and writing manual in 2011 and its update in We hope this will provide advice and suggestions for those courts who either want to create or update their own style manuals. As always, there will be time for a Hot Button Forum for open discussion. Published Appellate Opinions of the Nebraska Supreme Court and Nebraska Court of Appeals Going Digital Going forward, the opinions of both the Nebraska Supreme Court and the Nebraska Court of Appeals will be published online only. Pursuant to this change, hard-bound volumes will not be printed after volume 274 of the Nebraska Reports and volume 15 of the Nebraska Appellate Reports. The advance sheets will not be printed after the subscription year ends on June 30, Free online access to the official published judicial opinions of the Nebraska Supreme Court and Nebraska Court of Appeals has been available to the public since January 1, 2016 via the Nebraska Appellate Courts Online Library. Text-searchable opinions dating back to 1871 for the Nebraska Supreme Court and the full collection of opinions for the Nebraska Court of Appeals are available on that site. The publication of hard-copy advance sheets and hard-bound printed volumes was no longer feasible because of a decrease in subscriptions, and an increase in publication costs. In order to maintain the quality and control inherent in the publication of paper advance sheets and hard-bound volumes, the Nebraska Supreme Court s Electronic Publications Committee applied the principles found in the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act: public access of legal materials in official electronic records, preservation, and authentication. Thus, the electronically published judicial opinions are permanently available free of charge in the online library; certified opinions are saved in a PDF/A-1a format, the highest archival PDF/A format available for long-term preservation of page-oriented documents; and a time stamp overlay is applied to the PDFs each time a user accesses a PDF file through the online library to provide authentication. For more information or to consult the official opinions, visit the Nebraska Appellate Courts Online Library website at gov/apps-courts-epub/. 7

8 Richard Ross, appellate reporter of decisions, to retire June 3 State of Kansas Office of Judicial Administration Kansas Judicial Center 301 SW 10th Topeka, Kansas (785) NEWS RELEASE April 8, 2016 Contact: Lisa Taylor Public Information Director taylorl@kscourts.org TOPEKA After more than 40 years with the Kansas judicial branch, Richard Ross will hang up his editing pencil June 3 and retire from his job as the Supreme Court s official reporter, a position he has had since the court was still located in the Statehouse. Ross says what he will miss most are the people. The judicial branch has been a great place to work, he said. Everyone is professional and works hard. It s also a very friendly environment. Ross was hired as second assistant to the official reporter in 1975, right after he graduated law school. Eighteen months later, in January 1978, he was named the official reporter by then Chief Justice Harold Fatzer. At just 28 years old, Ross is pretty sure he was the youngest reporter ever appointed, although he said he hasn t done the research to prove it. However, when he answered the call from the reporter of decisions for the U.S. Supreme Court to help develop a professional organization for reporters, he said, I was easily the youngest person in the room. He is the last charter member to still belong to the Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions. When he published his first Kansas Reports, a bound volume of Supreme Court decisions, he dedicated it to his predecessor, William A. Dumars, to recognize him for publishing 60 volumes 163 through 222 which Ross deemed a record accomplishment, since no previous Supreme Court Reporter published more than 36 volumes. When Ross retires June 3, he will have published 81 volumes of the Kansas Reports and started volume 82. Volumes bearing Ross name number 223 through 303. He can also take credit for 51 volumes of Kansas Court of Appeals Reports, numbered 2 through 52. Chief Justice Lawton Nuss said that Ross exemplifies what it means to be a constitutional officer, a person who holds a position established by the Kansas Constitution. He has done an outstanding job for more than 40 years making sure the thousands of appellate courts opinions are consistent in legal citation, style and clarity, he said. 8

9 Ross has worked for 57 Supreme Court justices and Court of Appeals judges, including eight chief justices and eight chief judges. He also can say he worked in both the Statehouse and the Kansas Judicial Center, where the appellate courts moved in September Ross was present for the cornerstone ceremony in 1976 and he visited the building site many times during its construction, with a specific interest in watching progress on the Justice statue in the building s atrium. It was being carved from marble harvested from Cararra, Italy, a place he visited on a 10-week backpack trip across Europe before he started law school. His longstanding interest in art led him to form many connections in the art community, especially after he started the Mulvane Art Fair in Topeka in Those connections were helpful when he was approached by Chief Justice Nuss to help make improvements to the conference room where the Supreme Court justices meet to discuss cases and to welcome guests. I was asked to find art by Kansas artists, so I made a few contacts, Ross said. One contact he made was with the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, which has offered paintings on two-year loans at no cost. Other galleries and artists have offered pieces on loan as well. He did a superb job helping us transform our conference room into one we are proud to share with visitors, all at no cost to the taxpayer. Nuss said. We are going to miss Richard, but we wish him the very best. 9

10 Officers President: Brandee Mooneyhan, Nevada Supreme Court and Court of Appeals Vice President: Brian Redmond, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Court Treasurer: Kevin J. Loftus (Ret.), Supreme Court of Connecticut Secretary: Mary Joe Beck, Supreme Court of Ohio Past President: Susan P. Williams, Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals Committee Chairpersons Annual Meeting: Brandee Mooneyhan, Nevada Supreme Court Communications: François Boivin, Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada Education: Leah A. Walker, Colorado Court of Appeals External Outreach: Mary Joe Beck, Supreme Court of Ohio The Catchline Editor: François Boivin, Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada Assistant Editor: Charles Nezan, Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada Newsletter Publisher/Layout & Design: April Patterson, Composition Specialist, Supreme Court of Nevada Distribution: Daniel Spurling, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Appeals Courts Special Thanks To: Dan Anselmo and April Patterson for the use of their photography in this issue. Volume XXXV, No. 1 June 2016 ARJD Web site: ARJD Contact Information The Catchline (suggestions, comments, and questions): info.arjd@gmail.com ARJD Members Facebook page: (to send communications directly to all ARJD Facebook group members via Facebook Wall): members.arjd@groups.facebook.com Address Changes and Corrections? Please alert us by sending an to: info.arjd@gmail.com. 10