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Fordham Law Review

2009

Evidence

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

Ferreting Out Favoritism: Bringing Pretext Claims After Kelo, Daniel S. Hafetz Jan 2009

Ferreting Out Favoritism: Bringing Pretext Claims After Kelo, Daniel S. Hafetz

Fordham Law Review

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that governments may take one’s private property and give it to another for the purpose of promoting economic development. The Court held that, in evaluating Fifth Amendment challenges to such takings, courts should defer to legislative judgments as to what constitutes a valid public purpose. Critics argue that this decision opened the floodgates to pretextual abuse. Specifically, they contend that local governments that exercise the eminent domain power are often motivated by a desire to favor another private party. After Kelo, courts have struggled to reconcile …


Best Evidence And The Wayback Machine: Toward A Workable Authentication Standard For Archived Internet Evidence, Deborah R. Eltgroth Jan 2009

Best Evidence And The Wayback Machine: Toward A Workable Authentication Standard For Archived Internet Evidence, Deborah R. Eltgroth

Fordham Law Review

This Note addresses the use of archived Internet content obtained via the Wayback Machine, a service provided by the Internet Archive that accesses the largest online digital collection of archived Web pages in the world. Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, Internet content is constantly changed, amended, and removed. As a result, interim versions of Web pages have limited life spans. The Internet Archive indexes and stores Web pages to allow researchers to access discarded or since-altered versions. In the legal profession, archived Web pages have become an increasingly helpful form of proof. Intellectual property enforcers have …


A Matter Of Context: Social Framework Evidence In Employment Discrimination Class Actions, Melissa Hart, Paul M. Secunda Jan 2009

A Matter Of Context: Social Framework Evidence In Employment Discrimination Class Actions, Melissa Hart, Paul M. Secunda

Fordham Law Review

In litigation disputes over the certification of employment discrimination class actions, social scientists have come to play a central, yet controversial, role. Organizational behavioralists and social psychologists regularly testify for the plaintiffs, offering what is commonly referred to as social framework testimony. These experts explain the general social science research on the operation of stereotyping and bias in decision making and examine the challenged workplace to identify those policies and practices that research has shown will tend to increase and those that will tend to limit the likely impact of these factors. Defendants fight hard against the admission of social …


Reconciling Classified Evidence And A Petitioner's Right To A "Meaningful Review" At Guantanamo Bay: A Legislative Solution, Sarah Lorr Jan 2009

Reconciling Classified Evidence And A Petitioner's Right To A "Meaningful Review" At Guantanamo Bay: A Legislative Solution, Sarah Lorr

Fordham Law Review

In Boumediene v. Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay have a constitutional right to a writ of habeas corpus and are entitled to a “meaningful review” of their habeas petitions. This Note attempts to reconcile the need for a “meaningful review” with the government’s reliance on classified evidence that is completely inaccessible to the detainee-petitioners. After examining three other contexts in which the reliance on classified evidence has been sanctioned—federal criminal courts, immigration cases, and the ongoing military commissions at Guantánamo—this Note concludes that a “meaningful review” of the Guantánamo habeas petitions requires …


The Right Remedy For The Wrongly Convicted: Judicial Sanction For Destruction Of Dna Evidence, Cynthia E. Jones Jan 2009

The Right Remedy For The Wrongly Convicted: Judicial Sanction For Destruction Of Dna Evidence, Cynthia E. Jones

Fordham Law Review

Many state innocence protection statutes give courts the power to impose appropriate sanctions when biological evidence needed for postconviction DNA testing is wrongly destroyed by the government. Constitutional claims based on wrongful evidence destruction are governed by the virtually insurmountable “bad faith” standard articulated in Arizona v. Youngblood. The wrongful destruction of DNA evidence in contravention of state innocence protection laws, however, should be governed by the standards used to adjudicate other “access to evidence” violations in criminal cases, including disclosures mandated by the rules of criminal procedure, the Jencks Act, and Brady v. Maryland. Under the “access to evidence” …