Honesty Accidentally Makes Its Way Into Published Federal Opinion

Sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy, as U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel learned this week.

Judge Curiel — best known as the Indiana-born judge who Donald Trump can’t stop calling Mexican — filed an opinion on an outstanding Motion to Dismiss with an uncomfortably honest assessment of the underlying research:

Congratulations to the writers of the Simpsons for again landing a word they created in the annals of federal jurisprudence.

This was almost certainly a clerk’s note to themselves and while we’re all going to have a good laugh about it, it really isn’t the end of the world. Still, word processing software includes options for annotation that allow the author to make any number of notes to themselves that will never find their way into a final printed version. It’s even easier to visually identify outstanding issues than relying on your eye to catch a comment buried in the text. Once again, technology was there to save the day if lawyers were just savvy enough to use it.

The opinion has now gotten a facelift on PACER, but the impact of the “Meh Heard ‘Round The World” will go on in screengrabs like the one above.

Perhaps it’s time to amend the old maxim and declare “proofreading is the best policy.”

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Honesty Accidentally Makes Its Way Into Published Federal Opinion curated from Above the Law