Hat tip to the Adjunct Law Professors Blog, the NLRB is now posting its appellate briefs and motions on-line. From the site:

After the Board issues a decision and final order in a contested unfair labor practice case, any person aggrieved may seek review of the final order, and the Board may seek enforcement of its order, in an appropriate United States Court of Appeals. The General Counsel represents the Board in the Court of Appeals. The briefs and occasional motions filed by the General Counsel in support of the Board’s orders are listed chronologically by filing date.

Nice to see what the NLRB is arguing these days.

I have heard writing coaches encourage their students to commit to writing in a journal every day to improve their writing skills. I am not sure this is what they had in mind. But, if you love Twitter and love to record your day in tiny bites, check out Memiary. Sign up for the service and then begin entering five events in your day in short Twitter-esqe style. Then, at a later time, search by day or show entries for set periods of time. Instant diary, no tiny key combination required.

Writing: Memiary Records Your Daily Top Five

Orlie Yakuel over at Go2Web2.0 reports on a nifty little application called iSpeech, which permits reading with ones ears. The player converts text to audio and, according to Yakuel, can convert favorite websites, RSS, blogs and documents to speech with a PC or mobile device, which, in turn, can be downloaded as MP-3 to your iPod. The site promises that you can effectively listen to any text source that you previously read, but it is still in development and not all links are working. You can go to the site and enter text in a demo box, which I just used to order my husband to leave and get our Thai take out. iSpeech promises to be an interesting tool for multi-tasking at those time when the eyes need to be busy elsewhere. I am going to keep my eyes, I mean, my ears open to news of this application going live.

The bad news is that there is subtle sexism at play in our language and writing conventions. The other bad news is that lawyers are fairly insensitive to the divide and are not particularly proactive in modifying these conventions through the use of gender-neutral pronouns. The Legal Writing Prof Blog references an article on the topic by Pat Chew and Lauren Kelly-Chew abstracted over at the the Social Science Research Network entitled Subtly Sexist Language. The authors discuss research of “hundreds of legal documents”, including judicial opinions, legal briefs and law review articles, that exhibit dominant use of male pronouns in most of the word pairs examined. The articles are published at the U. of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-30 and Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, Vol. 16, p. 643, 2007. The article includes proactive suggestions for altering the language from its pro-male bent and a guide on gender neutral language tailored to the legal community.