For the vast majority of its new, minute-long advertisement, Apple, in its classic, minimalist style, refuses to include any dialogue, merely cycling through moving images of people taking photographs with their iPhones. Only towards the end—literally the last three seconds of the ad—are we, as the audience aurally addressed. “Every day, more photos are taken [...]
The insanity plea is likely one of the most well-known criminal defenses. On May 7th, attorneys for James Holmes, the man accused of murdering 12 people in a movie theatre shooting in Colorado, stated that Homes wants to change his plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity. Unsurprisingly, this has received [...]
Patent trolls have long plagued the technology frontier, preying on unsuspecting and vulnerable startups and tripping up the tech giants. Known more formally as non-practicing entities (“NPEs”) or patent assertion entities, patent trolls buy mediocre, broadly-worded patents, wait for a company to develop a similar technology, and then sue for alleged infringement. Although many of [...]
Every modern police drama that has ever appeared on television has featured a scene where officers read someone their rights. These rights became enshrined in U.S. law (and subsequently in U.S. television) after the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona Supreme Court decision. Consequently, statements made by suspects in custody cannot be used in a trial if the statements [...]
As tuition rises and the number of job openings shrink, the legal world is attempting to deal with a looming crisis. For a long time, bloggers have been writing about the “law school scam.” Using charts and graphs to compare the value of a law school to its cost has become a popular past time. [...]
Since the advent of modern day computing and the internet, cybercrime and cyber security have become increasingly important issues. Cybercrime, which includes unauthorized access of computer networks, theft of documents and information, damage to computer infrastructures, and computer espionage, is borderless and almost always anonymous. Today, governments, not individuals, commit most of the world’s cybercrime. [...]
The $85 billion in automatic budget cuts, known as the sequester, went into effect this past Friday, March 1. Established by the Budget Control Act of 2011, these cuts were intended to be broad and indiscriminate. Rather than narrow in on specific government programs and waste, Congress enacted these cuts to force itself to take [...]
The American Bar Association (“the ABA”) has weighed in on the issue of judges’ use of social networking sites—a rare acknowledgement of social media’s impact by an industry that has been slow to adapt to the digital age. The ABA, the nation’s largest professional body of lawyers, issued an opinion on Thursday regarding protocol that [...]
On Tuesday, despite a series of decisions against them, nine alumni of New York Law School filed a motion for leave to appeal their case—one of the first of similar lawsuits around the country—to the New York State Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court), continuing their attempt to hold the school liable for allegedly [...]
A New York State appellate court on Tuesday ruled that a request made by the New York Times Company (“the NYT”) for access to a database of the names and addresses of New York City gun permit holders, under the Freedom of Information Law (Public Officers Law § 84 et seq.) (“FOIL”), violates the state’s statute. [...]
On Tuesday, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—in a decision authored by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, sitting by designation—asked New York State’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, to issue a ruling in a case regarding the constitutionality of the state’s handgun law eligibility requirements. The decision stems [...]
Nobody would disagree with the assertion that obtaining higher education is beneficial. Unfortunately, maybe a J.D. should no longer be included in that consideration. Only 55% of J.D. students in 2011 had a job in legal services nine months after graduation. In an already stagnant economy that saw only a 1.4 percent increase in jobs [...]