There was an article in the Times yesterday on law schools, debt, and the awful state of the legal job market. It's something anyone considering attending law school should read. Very carefully.
See:
http://bit.ly/g3taZO
Google Scholar now has searchable legal opinions. They're not that comprehensive right now, but they have a primitive equivalent of Keyciting/Shephardizing.
Update:
Here's a link to Google's blog entry.
According to this piece from the University of Florida, a hunch is worth listening to. One of my professors at law school said that if you were talking to a client and something seemed off, it probably was.
There's a funny article in this month's ABA magazine about trial techniques, and how an attorney has won cases by using some unorthodox methods. There is not much legalese in it, so it should be funny even for a non-lawyer. Be forwarned, the article does contain profanity. Here is a link.
There was an interesting post on Boston 1775 (a blog I read) about a Virginia Supreme Court case that involved a copy of the Declaration of Independence that was stored in the attic of a house in Maine. It looks like Maine's attorney, by not preserving issues for appeal, lost out on arguing a number of things before the Virginia Supreme Court.
There was an interesting article in the Times today about a Manhattan assistant district attorney who intentionally lost a case where he did not believe in the conviction. According to the Times article, the responsible court agency (which I presume is the First Department Disciplinary Committee) chose not to purse a case against Mr. Bibb. The case raised the question of what zealous representation means when one is a district attorney.
There's been an interesting discussion in both the mainstream media and Facebook's blog (there have been two entries) about Facebook and copyright law. My three cents is that the only thing that Facebook needs a perpetual license to is an email that I send to a friend via Facebook. I think it's weird that they'd even need this, given the fact that one normally doesn't think of email as copyrighteable. If I send an email on Gmail to my friend on Yahoo!, am I really granting Gmail a license to copy my email and send it to my friend? Ordinarily, I wouldn't have the need to claim copyright on an email I sent. Even if I was sending my friend a manuscript for a book I was writing, could I then sue Gmail for copyright infringement? I don't think I'd have a cause of action.
Anything else that I post on Facebook, like a wall post or photo, can be deleted. Therefore, any license I give Facebook for posting something like that should be revocable at my will.
I wonder whether someone who sued Facebook for copyright infringement for redistributing his or her pictures would even have a cause of action (so long as Facebook posted them in compliance with his or her privacy settings). I guess Facebook is covering itself, but are they going over the top?
Flickr's terms of service are pretty clear. Once I remove my content from Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!), Yahoo!'s license to display and/or distribute this information is instantly revoked. Sometimes, as when I submit content to a Flickr-sponsored group, the license, by its terms (you'll need a Yahoo!/Flickr account to see these terms), expires at a certain time.
Google's answer to Flickr (Picasa Web), on the other hand, has much broader (and less favorable) terms for me as an end-user. If I upload a photo to Picasa Web, under the terms of service (Section 11.1), I give Google what essentially amounts to an irrevocable royalty-free license to display my information. As a result, I don't use Picasa much.
It's interesting to see what at tangled web is woven with all these license agreements. It also shows the importance of reading license agreements.
In March, I wrote how the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a criminal sentence of a spammer from North Carolina who used AOL's servers. The Virginia Supreme Court issued a new opinion on Friday, vacating the convictions based on the First Amendment and the spammers right to free speech. Here is a link to the summary (search for Jaynes within the page if you don't see it at the top). Here is a link to the opinion (a PDF).
If you're going to spam people, don't use Virginia ham in your spam. A North Carolina man who spammed people using AOL's servers had his sentence upheld recently. AOL is based in Virginia, which is how Virginia got jurisdiction over him. For those who don't want to read the opinion, there is a short summary here (search for Jaynes on the page if you don't see it at the top). Here's a link to the court's decision.
I've been driving back and forth between Chambersburg and metro Washington, DC recently and have noticed that there is a particular intersection that people seem to have problems understanding the meaning of a yield sign. The intersection is I-81 and I-70, going east on I-70 towards Frederick/Baltimore. For Dicksonians, this is the intersection that you'd go through if you were going to the Hagerstown outlets.
Anyhow, I-70 is essentially three lanes at this point, with one lane being a segregated lane that is meant to just be used by traffic getting on from or off onto I-81. I go around the cloverleaf from I-81 south onto I-70 going east and am in this third segregated lane. This lane will end shortly after the intersection (it merges with I-70 east) so I have to be at highway speed or close to it. Shortly before the third segregated lane merges with I-70, traffic from I-81 north merges in, at a yield sign. There is no merge area. The yield sign tips people off to the fact that there is no merge area. Despite this, people come into this intersection and expect me to yield to them.
A yield sign means that you may proceed if the way is clear. It does not mean that you can proceed if in so doing you'll require another car to apply its brakes hard (or, technically, apply its brakes at all) or take evasive action. Yet, at this intersection, people seem to take it that way. If you have to stop at this yield sign, because there is no merge area, then you have to stop.
Of course, I'm not going to prove my right of way to them, sure, I may have the right of way, but I'll also have a car in an accident, with all the hassle that comes with. So I've just learned to watch other cars at this intersection.
Of course, why Maryland thinks it is a good idea to have no merge area where two interstates merge together is another question, but that's for another blog entry.
A defendant wrote: "Like the Beetles say, 'Let It Be.'" when asked how he should be sentenced. The judge in his case, in Yellowstone County, Montana, wrote a two page opinion in which he incorporated many Beatles songs. He also took the opportunity to correct the defendant's spelling of The Beatles.
There was an interesting Supreme Court decision published Monday where Philip Morris tried (and failed) to argue that because it used the government's method of testing cigarettes, it fell under a statute that allowed removal to federal court when someone acted "under" a federal officer. The opinion talks a lot about federal officers being accused of murder during prohibition and using the statute to get their murder cases removed to federal court. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this use of the statute, although I suppose the climate was different then and states had less respect for the federal government than they do now. A federal court (and its jury) might have more sympathy for a federal agent than a state agent would.
The opinion is pretty short and worth reading in my opinion. Who knows, maybe it will be used to torture first generations of law students for generations to come.
Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that the US (in particular the South) was so different forty or fifty years ago, with segregated schools, anti-miscegenation laws, etc. Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (which banned anti-interracial marriage laws).
There is a controversy in my town about a proposed carousel in Oyster Bay (my town). There is a waterfront park which was donated by the Theodore Roosevelt Association to the town of Oyster Bay in 1942. As part of the deed, it was ordered that there be no carousels or other mechanical rides. The Association (which still exists) has agreed to waive that provision of the deed, but there are a number of people who are still opposed to it. I wonder if (cue scary music) there is a Rule Against Perpetuities concern here, although maybe the way New York implements the RAP will prevent a problem with that.
The park is a relatively small park, and a number of people think that the carousel would add a lot of noise to the park. I tend to agree with them, I also wonder how they are possibly going to get enough visitors to the park to cover the cost of running the carousel.
The Main Street Association also thinks it will draw visitors to the downtown. I disagree. Unfortunately for Oyster Bay, it's on the northern shore of Long Island, and that means it is far away from major east-west arteries like the Long Island Expressway. Even a less major east-west artery (Northern Boulevard/25A) is probably four or five miles from downtown. There are no major roads that go through downtown Oyster Bay, so the downtown has suffered. Two car dealerships have closed, and the downtown is not doing so well. The problem is that the park is not that close to the business district, it's two or three blocks, so I don't think people are going to go to the park and then go shopping.
We'll see what happens, it's before the town board right now.
Here is an article from Newsday.
There was a posting on bottle deposits on a mailing list that I subscribe to. I think that bottle deposits are a good thing, I think that to encourage recycling it might be necessary to increase the deposit on the bottles from a nickel. It has been a nickel since I was a child, and I think longer than that. (By bottle deposit, I also mean the deposit on soda cans as well)
The problem, though, is, at least under New York State's law, if you show up at any store with a bottle of a drink that they sell, they have to give you a deposit back. You don't have to return it to the store where you bought it. This is a problem for mom and pop stores.
There was a New York grocery store that I used to go to that was on the Pennsylvania (no deposit) and New York border. Someone took bottles/cans that he got in Pennsylvania and brought them to New York, where he attempted to redeem them. The New York grocery store got tired of this and eventually stopped him, probably by noting that some of the cans he was redeeming were not stamped with a five cent refund, even though the barcode was the same as refundable cans. If they doubled it to ten cents (or even made the amount more meaningful, like a quarter) it might have a significant impact on a store's income. On the other hand, recycling has become bigger now, so maybe it is not necessary to have the deposit law at all.
I listen to a podcast entitled Newfoundland and Labrador This Week from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There was a segment about how a judge declared a mistrial because the entire jury pool for St. John's, Newfoundland had not been updated for eight years. (For those not up on their Newfoundland geography, St. John's is the capital of Newfoundland and is also it's largest city.) Apparently the person responsible for updating the jury pool just didn't, and so no one born after 1980 was listed in the jury pool. The judge hearing the case held that this violated the Candian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and rescheduled the case for October. All criminal trials in St. John's will have to be put on hold while they fix this problem. Plus, even the Justice Minister has conceded that people within the appeal period might have viable appeals about this. I don't know what Canada's jurisprudence is about juries, but it seems to me that they might have some argument to make. I had tried to find the judge's opinion online at this site (useful if you need to do Canadian law research), but no dice.
The best I could find was this article from the CBC.
Through RichardZ (which I found through Jerry and Tammy), I learned about how Ave Maria School of Law has decided to move to Florida from Ann Arbor, Michigan. After seeing what happened with DSL, it was interesting. Here is a link to a blog entry which sets forth the faculty view. In the interest of balance, I'm also including a link to Ave Maria School of Law's own page on the topic. I'm not taking a position on this, though.
Last Friday, the Animal Welfare Act came into effect in the United Kingdom. Quoting from the Department For Environment Food and Rural Affairs' web page...
The five essential requirements that the owner of a pet will need to provide are:
I was reading Boston 1775 and saw a neat post on "dentrifice" which from the description sounds like toothpaste. In the description, he said the following:
"This Essence and Dentifrice is prepared by himself, and warranted perfectly free from the least corrosive Particle or Injurious Property whatever."
And I realised it was an express warranty. Sigh.
Most people know that one of the rights set forth in the Bill of Rights is the prohibition against quartering soldiers in people's homes. That, supposedly, is one of the reasons that the colonists fought against the British in the American Revolution. However, according to this blog, the statute permitting quartering of soldiers never permitted quartering soldiers in people's homes. It permitted quartering in outbuildings, but even then, other resources had to be exhausted. Maybe whoever was responsible for quartering the soldiers chose to ignore the statute and quartered soldiers in people's homes anyway.
I must take issue, however, with the blog's belief that breaking and entering is redundant. It's not. Burglary requires two elements:
