Court of Appeals Petition Rulings Unmasked
Continue Reading Unmasked: Court of Appeals to Begin Disclosing Identities and Votes of Members of Petition Panel … 90 Days Later

Fox Rothschild's blog about practicing law in North Carolina state and federal appellate courts
Court of Appeals Petition Rulings Unmasked…
Continue Reading Unmasked: Court of Appeals to Begin Disclosing Identities and Votes of Members of Petition Panel … 90 Days Later
If you’ve regularly read my blog posts here over the past few years (in other words, if you are my mom), you will know that I find Fourth Circuit published…
Continue Reading Another Published Rehearing Denial
The world of Fourth Circuit en banc review has provided much fodder for my postings on this blog (See, e.g., here, here, here, here). On…
Continue Reading En Banc Review Results in Equally Divided Fourth Circuit (Again)
Generally, you can ask a judge to change her mind, but you can’t ask her to change a different judge’s mind. For example, at the trial-court level, a judge can…
Continue Reading The Panel of Theseus
An interesting recusal issue recently faced the Supreme Court of North Carolina, requiring the Court to invoke the “Rule of Necessity” in order to hear a high-profile case on North…
Continue Reading “Rule of Necessity” Not Necessary for Federal Circuit Courts
Another week, another published ruling on an en banc rehearing petition from the Fourth Circuit. Last week we saw Judge Niemeyer arguing in a published concurring opinion that en banc …
Continue Reading The Fourth Circuit’s New Normal?
A few years ago I wrote about The Curious Cases(s) of the Published Denial of Rehearing. In that post, which focused on two published denials of rehearing from the…
Continue Reading The Not So Curious Case of the Published Denial of Rehearing
Almost two years ago, I blogged about a relatively rare phenomenon: a published denial of a petition for rehearing. Back then, two recent Fourth Circuit cases had produced petitions for…
Continue Reading Another Published Denial of Rehearing, Another 4th Circuit Case to the Supreme Court?
NOTICE: Take the following post with a grain of salt. The Court of Appeals issued an updated opinion in the Ellis case on 20 August 2019. Although the opinion is…
Continue Reading Right for the Wrong Reasons, Redux