The past year was one of transition for the Connecticut Supreme Court: Two new justices with atypical resumes and pioneering personal histories, Andrew McDonald and Carmen Espinosa, joined the Court in early 2013. Meanwhile, Justice Dennis Eveleigh emerged as a thoughtful, frequent dissenter whose judicial philosophy often diverged from the Court’s mainstream.
Before I turn to those subjects, however, an update: Last year in this publication, I called for the appellate record “to go the way of the dodo,” in hopes that the long-overdue extinction of that canary-colored anachronism would speed the time between briefing and oral argument. I was merely one of many voices clamoring for the elimination of the record, which had ceased to perform any useful function that the parties could not duplicate via appendices to their briefs.
