The American Bar Association this week asks: “Do you apply lessons you learned playing sports to your work in law?” I was pitching in a youth-league baseball game when events turned out of my control. From the sideline, Mr. Kluxen yelled at me, “Concentrate.” That lesson has stayed with me for…
If you called my office the last couple of days, you got a recorded message saying you reached a number that is no longer in service. That’s true — it is no longer in service. Temporarily anyway, until Comcast fixes a problem that did not exist for the first 17 years Steven…
Overwhelmed by the white screen? Let Oscar Peterson’s piano massage your creative synapses with this 1964 version of C Jam Blues. (Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.) And remember this tried and true method to forge through writer’s block: What happened next; what happened next; what happened next…
Law should seek personal liberty. ABA asked: How would you #ChangeTheLawIn5Words?
Warren County Soil is important to Illinois appellate practitioners because it clears the confusion over the standard of review in appeals from orders growing from 2-1401 disputes. (Illinois Civil Procedure Code § 1401 allows relief from judgments that are more than two years old.) This is what the Illinois Supreme…
Illinoisappellatelawyerblog was born to worry. And opinions like Estate of York feed that congenital behavior. The First District Illinois Appellate Court woke us to attention with its first words. “The case before us serves as a cautionary tale to litigants to adhere to Illinois Supreme Court Rule appellate filing deadlines,…
The Eckersalls’ divorce included a fight over custody of their children. The couple agreed on a visitation schedule, but not on the terms and conditions of visitation. So the trial court entered a standard “Custody/Visitation Injunction Order” that in essence prevented either spouse from addressing the divorce case with the…
Daewoo International paid American Metals Trading $14.5 million for pig iron. But American Metals didn’t deliver, so Daewoo started an arbitration proceeding. In support of the arbitration, Daewoo got an order of attachment against American from a New York trial court. To support the attachment — i.e., trace where the…
Which deadline for filing a Notice of Appeal applies when the supreme court rules differ from the General Assembly’s statute? And what happens to the appeal when the Notice of Appeal meets the General Assembly’s deadline but not the supreme court’s? The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the General Assembly’s…
The Illinois Supreme Court’s single-paragraph opinion in Keating v. City of Chicago, 2014 IL 116054 (11/20/14), is remarkable because the court was unable to render a decision. The case involved the validity of Chicago’s red-light camera program [registered owner ticketed if the vehicle is photographed violating a red-light signal]. The…