a law student blog ::fighting the hypo, so you don’t have to ::
So, the New York Time reports that in order to prove what the “community standards” are regarding obscenity in Pensacola, FL, a lawyer representing a porn website operator offered as evidence the fact that Google Trends shows that residents in the area search the web for “orgy” more than they do for “apple pie.” And “what could be more American than apple pie,” he asks.
Continue reading ‘Google Knows It When People Search For It’
Interesting stuff… The WSJ Law Blog reported on Friday about Northwestern’s plan to offer a two-year JD program. WSJ quoting the dean of Northwestern Law School:
Tuition: Don’t expect to save money. Northwestern announced the program but won’t answer the $42,672 question of whether the compressed plan will be cheaper. Van Zandt told the Law Blog that, rather than the prospect of a cheaper degree, the financial attraction of the program is more likely to be the ability to be earning a salary a year earlier. (And yes, the $42k figure is NU’s annual tuition.)
Time This is a five-semester program that will begin in May. The 25 to 60 students expected to join will take the same number of credits as students in the three-year program. They’ll take extra courses each semester and pick up one or two credits through mini-courses between semesters.
Curriculum While the two-year option will have the same curriculum as the traditional program, the two-year students will be the first to test two new required courses: quantitative reasoning, including accounting, finance and statistics; and the dynamics of legal services behavior, including skills such as teamwork, leadership and project management.
Admission Applicants will be required to have two or three years of “substantive work experience” after college. People with work experience are likely to have “the good time management” necessary to success in the program, Van Zandt told Insider Higher Ed.
Not being a traditional JD student myself it’s hard to say whether this is a good or bad development or whether, in the words of one critic it will produce “substandard lawyers.” Other than the shorter time horizon, it’s hard to see what value this adds for the student. Or maybe that’s value enough?
Here’s a question for you: should someone who requests the death penalty be prohibited from receiving it?
From Friday’s New York Times:
[Khalid Shaikh Mohammed], the former senior operations chief for Al Qaeda, said he would represent himself and dared the Guantánamo tribunal to put him to death.
“This is what I want,” he told a military judge here, in his first appearance to answer war crimes charges for the terrorism attacks that killed 2,973 people and set America on a path to war.
“I’m looking to be martyr for long time,” he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret C.I.A. prisons.
Just in time for my Torts class’ discussion about Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress comes this lawsuit from Jeb Corliss (this story was posted less than 2 hours before class yesterday) :
Jeb Corliss, the professional parachute jumper who tried to leap off the Empire State Building on April 27, 2006, released a short video today showing him struggling with plainclothes security guards and police officers on the observation deck.
Wearing all black and a parachute on his back, Mr. Corliss can be seen awkwardly clambering over the inward curving, spiked fence around the observation deck, then clinging to the outside of it as security guards rush over.
[...]Mr. Corliss gave the film — refusing to disclose its source — to reporters in New York today as he filed a lawsuit claiming that it was his life, not anybody else’s, that was most endangered by his stunt, not because of anything he did but because of the actions of the security guards.
[...]He was there to file a $30 million lawsuit against the Empire State Building Company, accusing the building’s agents of defaming his character, unlawfully imprisoning him on the observation deck and causing him emotional distress and lost income. His lawsuit was a counterclaim to a $12 million lawsuit filed against him by the Empire State Building Company last year, accusing him of endangering innocent bystanders. A building spokesman said at the time that the lawsuit was intended to discourage others from emulating Mr. Corliss.
Let’s see…
Can you inflict IIED if you’re stopping someone from committing illegal act?
What if a court has already ruled that “as a professional, Mr. Corliss was experienced and careful enough to jump off a building without endangering his own life or anyone else’s”?
