There’s a certain romance to the idea that if one courthouse door closes, another—perhaps with better lighting and more favorable precedent—must surely be open somewhere else. But as one group of particularly determined preemption refugees recently learned, civil procedure is not a game of judicial Whac-A-Mole.
The story begins in Utah, where 50 plaintiffs brought
Did it seem to you in law school that sometimes the hardest part of reading cases was not deciphering some obscure legal principle — say, the difference between larceny by trick and taking under false pretenses, or the Rule in Shelley’s Case, or pretty much anything in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code —
Today we ponder “do-overs,” a timely topic as the House of Representatives struggles, over and over, to elect a speaker. As we write, the seventh unsuccessful vote has just concluded. We have learned that the record stands at 22 votes before the beleaguered candidate finally prevailed. This was in 1820, as John W. Taylor, an