On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 07:26 -0800, Kerim Aydin wrote: > A very old tradition is that we used to give a strong weight to AFFIRM > in the name of "this is a game, and judges work hard, and we should fucking > listen to them." I'm very, very, sorry that's dead. Actually, I agree. Appeals panels should judge AFFIRM and OVERRULE more often; at the moment, we seem to have a culture of "Oh, I can't be bothered to judge this appeal properly, just REMAND". We've been having too many appeals, recently; to some extent this is because we've been having poor-quality judgements in some cases, but also because there's more of a culture of appealing.
Probably the slipping power of AFFIRM is a symptom, rather than the problem itself; people are scared of AFFIRM because it makes a judgement unappealable, and nobody, not the original judge, not the appeals panel, has really bothered to look at the situation properly... Another symptom of this is that new arguments keep coming up well after the original judgement, often, where really they should have been considered earlier. -- ais523
