Many thanks to all of you who have found value in these posts on daily Fifth Circuit opinion releases and the monthly and annual compilations of statistics that I mine from those releases. And curses to those of you who have said, “You should have a Substack,” because now there is one. It isn’t “Take the Fifth,” because I’m not stopping what I do here on daily and monthly and annual bases, but it is “Not Taking the Fifth.”
Over there, on occasions through each week, I’ll author posts and articles on legal issues not necessarily involving the U.S. Fifth Circuit. For instance, in the past couple weeks I have posted a handful of articles on H.B. 731, an attempt in the current Louisiana legislative session to exempt pipeline companies from obeying the laws that have for more than a century obligated them to not damage the property across which their rights-of-way run; along with a lengthy explanation of the public trust doctrine and the recent ways in which Louisiana’s legislature has undermined this ancient guarantor of how people have chosen to live in harmony with each other. (See “Stop Louisiana’s Legislature from Flushing Our Land Away,” “The Distilled Basics of H.B. 731: Get educated, then get active,” “An open letter to Louisiana state legislators about H.B. 731,”What the pipeline companies knew, and when they knew it, about the destruction of Louisiana’s wetlands and about how the Civil Code governs their relationships with landowners,” and “Restoring the trust to the public trust.”).
And, on Fridays, at least my intent is to publish the types of statistics I do here on monthly and annual bases, but for the opinions released over the prior week, along with a few interesting tidbits from those opinions. The first one went up tonight, capturing statistics and tidbits from the opinions released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit between March 20 and March 26, 2026.
And on weekends (approximately), you can learn some things about me, your humble author, with posts about my non-legal writing forays into fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as personal posts of perhaps-broader interest and applicability — for example, my post a couple weeks ago about the one-year anniversary of my traumatic bicycle wreck last year (well, one of the two, but definitely the most traumatic of the two).
So, please stay tuned here for the opinion summaries and statistics you’ve come to expect (though for the past week I’m trying and I think I’ve committed to slightly expanded summaries, which hopefully continues); but I also invite you over to my “Not Taking the Fifth” Substack. Visit, subscribe (all free, at least for now; I’m still figuring it all out as I go along).
Take the Fifth 