Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog

Two Interesting Links:

Two thought-provoking links for the day:

• Over at his blog, Adamsdrafting, Ken Adams has an interesting post about the admissibility of expert testimony in the context of ambiguous contract terms.  Whether a contract is ambiguous is a legal question. Does that mean that, without regard to context, expert testimony is never admissible to help a generalist judge determine whether the words are reasonably susceptible to multiple interpretations?

• Over at Drug and Device Law, a "spirited off-line discussion" (of which I was a part) generated an interesting post regarding ethics in the adversarial system.  In short, we all know that sometimes in advocacy we win a point we should lose because our adversary defaults and somehow forfeits the point that she should have won.  What are the ethical implications of taking obviously-wrong-if-but-only-if--objected-to positions? Is there a difference between, say, introducing hearsay and removing a case late?  Click here to join the discussion.

Junior Federal Courts Conference at Michigan State

Click the link to view an updated flyer for the Federal Courts Conference at Michigan State this fall.  Prof. Lou Mulligan is the contact person, and you can find his information in the flyer.  Download Federal Courts Conference Flyer1