As an appellate lawyer sitting at home being notified about once a day of another court order delaying an oral argument or extending the deadline to file a brief or motion, I turn my attention to issues I thought I would never find time for (like pondering the merits of ending a sentence with a preposition). So here goes one such issue. Consider the following sentence, “In modern times, a lawyer who wants to write a persuasive brief knows that he should not use “he”, except when he is referring specifically to a male, lest he offend.” Because both words and gender equity matter, you need to have a strategy for dealing with the three offending “he’s”. One strategy is to rewrite the whole sent
“Top” is a word of some ambiguity. One definition is the size of the newspaper headline the day after the decision came out. On that basis, Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms International, LLC, 331 Conn. 53, clearly is the #1 case of the year because it was front-page news in the New York Times. A 4-3 majority held that a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the firearm used in the Sandy Hook massacre survived a motion to dismiss based on a federal immunity statute. The significance of Soto for a more-run-of the-mill litigator, however, is the expansive interpretation of Connecticut Consumer Protection Law (CUTPA) for commercial advertising. A second headline producing case is Henning v. Commission