Want to hear a story about the growth of a new parenthetical in legal writing . . . that's 𝙣𝙤𝙩 about (cleaned up)? Then read on to learn about (capitalization normalized). /1

(Cleaned up) wasn't the only novel parenthetical being used in the past week. On March 1, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued Arunachalem v. IBM, employing (capitalization normalized) several times. /2

From the context, it looks like (capitalization normalized) means that the original used nonstandard capitalization or perhaps all caps and the author (the ubiquitous Judge Per Curiam) simply converted that to normal capitalization./3

And this wasn't the first time that (capitalization normalized) has appeared in an opinion from a federal appellate court. I found more than a dozen Federal Circuit cases going back to early 2020, including opinions from Judges Wallach and Prost. /4

And that wasn't the beginning either. There's one recent Tenth Circuit opinion using (capitalization normalized) from Judge Hartz, but several more written by Judge Tymkovitch -- from 2013!

So was Judge Tymkovitch the creator of (captialization normalized)? Nope! In total I found 142 cases using the parenthetical, not only from those two circuits, but also nine federal district courts, two state appellate courts, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana. /6

So who was the first judge to use this innovative and useful parenthetical? Well, I'll give you a couple hints and then you guess. Ready? /7

1. The judge is on Twitter and widely admired by #AppellateTwitter./8

2. The judge is from Texas./9

3. She is a personal hero of mine.
Okay, so now your turn to guess.
Ready for the answer?/10

If you guessed @JusticeGuzman, you are correct! The first decision I could find with (capitalization normalized) was AVCO Corp. v. Interstate Southwest, Ltd., 251 S.W.3d 632 (Tex. App. 2007), when she was serving on the Texas Court of Appeals.

Well done your honor! /x

Belated thanks to @cafconeliners, who I did not realize was on Twitter, for alerting me to (capitalization normalized).