Court Opinion of the Day

From a real court opinion:

We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate. Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, forty years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before.

Thirty years ago, this court decided all boundary disputes between the Ute Indian Tribe, the State of Utah, and its subdivisions. The only thing that remained was for the district court to memorialize that mandate in a permanent injunction. Twenty years ago, we modified our mandate in one respect, but stressed that in all others our decision of a decade earlier remained in place. Once more, we expected this boundary dispute to march expeditiously to its end. Yet just last year the State of Utah and several of its counties sought to relitigate those same boundaries. And now one of its cities tries to do the same thing today. Over the last forty years the questions haven’t changed – and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.

(h/t Howard Bashman of the How Appealing blog)

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About Hue White

Former BBS operator; software engineer; cat lackey.

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