Week of November 10
Welcome to our Supreme and Appellate Court summaries webpage. On this page, I provide abbreviated summaries of decisions from the Connecticut appellate courts which highlight important issues and developments in Connecticut law, and provide practical practice pointers to litigants. I have been summarizing these court decisions internally for our firm for more than 10 years, and providing relevant highlights to my municipal and insurance practice clients for almost as long. It was suggested that a wider audience might appreciate brief summaries of recent rulings that condense often long and confusing decisions down to their basic elements. These summaries are limited to the civil litigation decisions based on my own particular field of practice, so you will not find distillations of the many criminal and matrimonial law decisions on this page. I may from time to time add commentary, and may even criticize a decision’s reasoning. Such commentary is solely my opinion . . . and when mistakes of trial counsel are highlighted because they triggered a particular outcome, I will try to be mindful of the adage . . . “There but for the grace of God . . ..” I hope the reader finds these summaries helpful. – Edward P. McCreery
Posted November 10, 2014
This decision held while an Application to Compel Arbitration has been found not to be a “civil action” subject to Requests to Revise, Discovery, etc. ,…..that does not mean it should not be treated as a civil action in other respects. In this case it was determined it was a civil action for purposes of “due diligence” and thus the trial court had jurisdiction to grant a Motion to Dismiss the application per PB 14-3 when the plaintiff did nothing for over two years to push his application after making the request. The inherent powers of the trial court to control its own docket was also cited as authority to justify the dismissal. Two years of inactivity on the court file alone justified the dismissal without delving into the prejudice claimed by the defendants due to multiple relocations, loss of records and death of a co-defendant in the intervening years. (The Court noted it has not yet determined if an Application to Compel Arbitration may be subject to a Motion to Strike as an ordinary civil action might.) |
- AC35211 - Miller v. Commissioner of Correction
The facts and holdings of any case may be redacted, paraphrased or condensed for ease of reading. No summary can be an exact rendering of any decision, however, so interested readers are referred to the full decisions. The docket number of each case is a hyperlink to the Connecticut Judicial Department online slip opinion. Copyright 014 Pullman & Comley, LLC. All Rights Reserved.