Obermayer Attorneys Discuss the Art of Petitioning for Pennsylvania Supreme Court Appeals in The Legal Intelligencer
In an article published in The Legal Intelligencer on August 2, 2024, Mathieu J. Shapiro, Hillary J. Moonay, and Melissa M. Blanco examine the art of petitioning for allowance of appeal. Securing permission to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is not easy.
Securing permission to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is challenging, with the court granting fewer than 10% of petitions. Given these odds, parties must craft allocatur petitions that stand out. Over the past two years, Obermayer’s appellate attorneys have successfully done so multiple times.
For example, in August 2022, they petitioned for an appeal concerning quasi-judicial immunity for court-appointed guardians ad litem. In March 2023, the court granted an appeal on child support obligations for third parties seeking physical custody, and in June 2024, it accepted an appeal involving a municipality’s sale of its wastewater system for health and safety reasons.
The 2023 case of Caldwell v. Jaurigue exemplifies Obermayer’s effective issue framing and is the focus of the article titled “Rote Error Correction or Unstable Question of Law: Framing Issues to Capture the Pa. Supreme Court’s Attention.“. A team of Obermayer lawyers—including Hillary J. Moonay, Mathieu J. Shapiro, Amanda Frett, and Melissa Blanco—represented Philip P. Jaurigue. The case questioned whether a prior Supreme Court decision, A.S. v. I.S., extended child support obligations to third parties seeking custody rights less than those of a biological parent.
The article outlines three key strategies used by the attorneys to persuade the Supreme Court to grant discretionary appeal:
- Find the Supreme-Court-Worthy Issue (Instead of Focusing on the Error)
- Answer the Critical Question: Why Should the Justices Care?
- Tell a Captivating Story About the Law (Not the Facts)
In conclusion, while every appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court involves a claim of error, effective petitioning requires framing the issue in a way that highlights its broader scale. Skilled appellate attorneys understand how to dig through a record to identify those special and important issues and present them to the court in a way that explains to the court why it should care about those issues.
Read the full article here.
