A clerical error is an error on the part of an office worker, often a secretary or personal assistant. The phrase may also be used as an excuse to deflect blame away from specific individuals, such as high-powered executives, and instead redirect it to the more anonymous clerical staff.
A clerical error in a legal document is called a scrivener's error.
There is a considerable body of case law concerning the proper treatment of a scrivener's error. [lower-alpha 1] For example, where the parties to a contract make an oral agreement that, when reduced to a writing, is mistranscribed, the aggrieved party is entitled to reformation so that the writing corresponds to the oral agreement. [1]
A scrivener's error can be grounds for an appellate court to remand a decision back to the trial court. For example, in Ortiz v. State of Florida, [2] Ortiz had been convicted of possession of less than 20 g of marijuana, a misdemeanor. [3] However, Ortiz was mistakenly adjudicated guilty of a felony for the count of marijuana possession. The appellate court held that "we must remand the case to the trial court to correct a scrivener's error."
In some circumstances, courts can also correct scrivener's errors found in primary legislation. [4]
Over 18 minutes of the Watergate tapes were supposedly erased by Richard Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, in a claimed clerical error. Some writers have suggested that this may have changed the course of American history. [5] [6]
United States appellate procedure involves the rules and regulations for filing appeals in state courts and federal courts. The nature of an appeal can vary greatly depending on the type of case and the rules of the court in the jurisdiction where the case was prosecuted. There are many types of standard of review for appeals, such as de novo and abuse of discretion. However, most appeals begin when a party files a petition for review to a higher court for the purpose of overturning the lower court's decision.
In law, certiorari is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. Certiorari comes from the name of an English prerogative writ, issued by a superior court to direct that the record of the lower court be sent to the superior court for review. The term is Latin for "to be made more certain", and comes from the opening line of such writs, which traditionally began with the Latin words "Certiorari volumus...".
A scrivener was a person who could read and write or who wrote letters as well as court and legal documents. Scriveners were people who made their living by writing or copying written material. This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial, and historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities. Scriveners later developed into notaries, court reporters, and in England and Wales, scrivener notaries.
Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment prevented the conviction of Paul Robert Cohen for the crime of disturbing the peace by wearing a jacket displaying "Fuck the Draft" in the public corridors of a California courthouse.
The Supreme Court of California is the highest and final court of appeals in the courts of the U.S. state of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco at the Earl Warren Building, but it regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sacramento. Its decisions are binding on all other California state courts. Since 1850, the court has issued many influential decisions in a variety of areas including torts, property, civil and constitutional rights, and criminal law.
The law of the case is a legal term of art that is applicable mainly in common law, or Anglo-American, jurisdictions that recognize the related doctrine of stare decisis. The phrase refers to instances where "rulings made by a trial court and not challenged on appeal become the law of the case." "Unless the trial court's rulings were clearly in error or there has been an important change in circumstances, the court's prior rulings must stand." Usually the situation occurs when either a case is on appeal for the second time—e.g. if the reviewing court remanded the matter to the trial court and the party appeals again or if the case was appealed in a higher appellate court—for example, from an appellate court to the highest court.
Remand is when higher courts send cases back to lower courts for further action. In the law of the United States, appellate courts remand cases to district courts for actions such as a new trial. Federal appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, have the power to "remand [a] cause [sic] and ... require such further proceedings to be had as may be just under the circumstances." This includes the power to make summary "grant, vacate and remand" (GVR) orders.
The California Courts of Appeal are the state intermediate appellate courts in the U.S. state of California. The state is geographically divided along county lines into six appellate districts. The Courts of Appeal form the largest state-level intermediate appellate court system in the United States, with 106 justices.
In the United States, the Jencks Act requires the prosecutor to produce a verbatim statement or report made by a government witness or prospective government witness, but only after the witness has testified.
Sherwood v. Walker, 66 Mich. 568, 33 N.W. 919, was a case that has played an important role in the evolution of American contract law involving the doctrine of mutual mistake. One of the main issues in the case was whether the remedy of rescission is available if both parties to a contract share a misunderstanding about an essential fact. Commonly referred to as the "Pregnant Cow Case," the case is a staple of first-year law school contract law class discussions and textbooks and has been briefed extensively online.
People v. Pointer, 151 Cal.App.3d 1128, 199 Cal. Rptr. 357 (1984), is a criminal law case from the California Court of Appeal, First District, is significant because the trial judge included in his sentencing a prohibition on the defendant becoming pregnant during her period of probation. The appellate court held that such a prohibition was outside the bounds of a judge's sentencing authority. The case was remanded for resentencing to undo the overly broad prohibition against conception.
People v. Berry is a voluntary manslaughter case that is widely taught in American law schools for the appellate court's unusual interpretation of heat of passion doctrine. Although the defendant had time to "cool down" between his wife's verbal admission of infidelity and the killing, the California Supreme Court held that the provocation in this case was adequate to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter. The lower court had relied on the traditional definition of "adequate provocation" in its jury instructions. The California Supreme Court reversed Berry's murder conviction, while affirming Berry's conviction for assault using deadly force.
Douglas v. California, 372 U.S. 353 (1963), was a case before the United States Supreme Court.
In law, an appeal is the process in which cases are reviewed by a higher authority, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of clarifying and interpreting law. Although appellate courts have existed for thousands of years, common law countries did not incorporate an affirmative right to appeal into their jurisprudence until the 19th century.
Miller v. Universal City Studios, Inc., is a case where an appeals court found that although the plaintiff apparently deserved to prevail, it reversed the jury verdict and remanded the case for retrial because it found reversible error in the trial judges' instructions to the jury. The appellate court found that the judge's jury instructions, which included the statement that the labor of research by an author is protected by copyright, had been given in error. The court noted that plaintiff, over the objection of the defense, had urged the district court judge to include this instruction.
Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, 570 U.S. 595 (2013), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that land-use agencies imposing conditions on the issuance of development permits must comply with the "nexus" and "rough proportionality" standards of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, even if the condition consists of a requirement to pay money, and even if the permit is denied for failure to agree to the condition. It was the first case in which monetary exactions were found to be unconstitutional conditions.
People v. Jovan Jackson, 210 Cal.App.4th 525 (2012) is a landmark decision by the Fourth Appellate District of California, which affirmed that persons that associate to collectively cultivate medical marijuana are entitled to a legal defense as provided by California Senate Bill 420. The decision has defined medical marijuana law in the state of California.
Yorty v. Chandler, 13 Cal.App.3d 467 (1970), was a decision by the California Court of Appeals, 2nd District involving how strictly an editorial cartoon needed to be interpreted in lawsuits for libel. It is a significant decision in the case law of applying the First Amendment to editorial cartoons and has been cited as a persuasive authority by other U.S. courts.
The writ of mandate is a type of extraordinary writ in the U.S. state of California. In California, certain writs are used by the superior courts, courts of appeal and the Supreme Court to command lower bodies, including both courts and administrative agencies, to do or not to do certain things. A writ of mandate may be granted by a court as an order to an inferior tribunal, corporation, board or person, both public and private. Unlike the federal court system, where interlocutory appeals may be taken on a permissive basis and mandamus are usually used to contest recusal decisions, the writ of mandate in California is not restricted to purely ministerial tasks, but can be used to correct any legal error by the trial court. Nonetheless, ordinary writ relief in the Court of Appeal is rarely granted.
Kimmelman v. Morrison, 477 U.S. 365 (1986), was a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that clarified the relationship of the right to effective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment to other constitutional rights in criminal procedure. In this case, evidence against the defendant was probably seized illegally, violating the Fourth Amendment, but he lost the chance to argue that point due to his lawyer's ineffectiveness. The prosecution argued that the defendant's attempt to make a Sixth Amendment argument via a habeas corpus petition was really a way to sneak his Fourth Amendment argument in through the back door. The Court unanimously disagreed, and held that the Fourth Amendment issue and the Sixth Amendment issue represented different constitutional values, and had different requirements for prevailing in court, and therefore were to be treated separately by rules of procedure. Therefore, the habeas corpus petition could go forward. In its opinion, the Court also gave guidance on how to apply its decisions in Stone v. Powell and Strickland v. Washington.
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