Several friends and fellow bloggers have asked over the past several days how the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (website currently down) is dealing with the destruction that has resulted from Hurricane Katrina, so I made a couple of calls yesterday to determine the Court’s status and pass along the following information.
The Court will probably relocate on a temporary basis to Houston, where two of the Court’s most prominent members — Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King and Edith H. Jones — make their homes and maintain offices. Thankfully, of the Court’s 15 judges, only three of them live in New Orleans — Jacques Wiener, James Dennis and Edith Brown Clement — and each of them has been relocated and are safe.
For now, Judge King’s office in Houston is serving as the court’s unofficial clerk’s office and is coordinating emergency matters in pending cases, such as death penalty stays. The Court has not yet determined when it will resume regular operations, so filing deadlines have been extended and appellate attorneys are instructed not to send any filings to the New Orleans courthouse. Further instructions regarding emergency Court matters can be found here for the time being, and then at the Fifth Circuit’s website when it is back up and running, which is expected soon.
The Fifth Circuit has had in place contingency plans for a Katrina-type disaster for some time, so the Court is currently proceeding according to that plan. As the storm approached New Orleans over this past weekend, court staff started moving some files from the first floor to the second floor in anticipation of flooding. On Saturday, the court cancelled its oral argument schedule for this week and ordered staff to evacuate the city. Most of the Court’s recent documents are digitized and stored on computer, which are backed up daily and stored on servers located in Baton Rouge and Shreveport, so the Court’s current cases should not be adversely affected to any large degree.
I will post periodic updates on the Fifth Circuit’s operations as more information becomes available over the next several days.