Parties should be free to
cite unpublished opinions as persuasive, while not binding upon the court.
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M.J. wonders what she should do when she encounters such attorneys improperly
citing unpublished opinions as authority.
Not exact matches
One way to do this in federal court is to
cite only
unpublished opinions, which «are not binding precedent.»
And most people actively use
unpublished opinions and there's a lot of courts say you can't
cite a case that's not been published in a book, but that's evaporating day by day.
The author of this article requested that the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Two (Riverside) take judicial notice of an
unpublished opinion cited solely for any pursuasive value the case may have in a pending appeal.
In this conflict, the judicial notice statute should take precedence, and courts should allow
unpublished opinions to be
cited as persuasive authority.
South Carolina Appellate Court Rule 268 (d)(2) states, «Memorandum
opinions and
unpublished orders have no precedential value and should not be
cited except in proceedings in which they are directly involved.»
Rule 268 (d)(2), SCACR («Memorandum
opinions and
unpublished orders have no precedential value and should not be
cited except in proceedings in which they are directly involved.»)
While I've been critical of these sorts of
unpublished opinions, I still don't
cite them as authority in other cases.
In an
unpublished opinion of this length and depth, rest assured that this case was important to the panel of judges assigned to hear and decide it; and I can reasonably assure you that they will not forget this case in the future, even though you may not be able to
cite it in the present.
I don't like the idea of allowing
unpublished opinions to be
cited, which is another way of saying that I think courts should be permitted to designate some of their decisions as nonprecedential and therefore not worth
citing.