Tiffany Lay, et vir v. United States

Whether Federal District Court judges properly comply with FRCP 52(a) in conducting complex bench trials, by issuing ostensible “findings” which fail to specially and specifically state and provide any citations to the thousands of pages of record, transcript testimony, and exhibits, to appropriately allow parties and appellate Courts to examine, understand, and/or challenge the bases for the trial Court’s “findings.”

Whether the Circuit Courts of Appeal should properly distinguish obiter dictum (dicta), from precedential value under stare decisis, when the predicate basis for decision, was a sentence or two in a lengthy and inapposite forty-year-old case, never before cited in support by any District or Circuit Court, and appears to contradict at least three subsequent precedents of the Fifth Circuit requiring trial judges in bench trials, to issue detailed findings and citations in support.