Evidence Commons^™

Breaking The Ice: How Plaintiffs May Establish Premises Liability In "Black Ice" Cases Where The Dangerous Condition Is By Definition Not Visible Or Apparent To The Property Owner, Hon. Mark Dillon

Hon. Mark C. Dillon

Plaintiffs that are injured as a result of encounters with "black ice," as distinguished from regular ice, face peculiar difficulties in establishing liability against property owners for the dangerous icy conditions on their premises. Black ice results from a unique process under certain conditions by which air bubbles are expelled from water during the freezing process, rendering the ice virtually invisible to the naked eye. Property owners therefore are not typically on actual or constructive notice of black ice conditions as to become subject to the legal requirement of undertaking measures to remedy the conditions. This article explores the law …

The Conversational Consent Search: How “Quick Look” And Other Similar Searches Have Eroded Our Constitutional Rights, Alexander A. Mikhalevsky

Georgia State University Law Review

One area in which law enforcement agencies have stretched constitutional limits concerns the scope of a suspect’s consent to search his or her vehicle. Police forces across the country have tested the limits of consent by asking vague, conversational questions to suspects with the goal of obtaining a suspect’s consent to search, even though that individual may not want to allow the search or may not know that he or she has the right to deny consent.

Conversational phrases like “Can I take a quick look?” or “Can I take a quick look around?” have “emerg[ed] as . . . …

"Not Just A Common Criminal": The Case For Sentencing Mitigation Videos, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

Sentencing mitigation or sentencing videos are a form of visual legal advocacy that is produced on behalf of defendants for use in the sentencing phases of criminal cases (from charging to clemency). The videos are typically short (5 to 10 minutes or so) nonfiction films that explore a defendant’s background, character, and family situation with the aim of raising factual and moral issues that support the argument for a shorter or more lenient sentence. Very few examples of mitigation videos are in the public domain and available for viewing. This article provides a complete analysis of the constituent elements of …

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …

Responding To Independent Juror Research In The Internet Age: Positive Rules, Negative Rules, And Outside Mechanisms, Robbie Manhas

Michigan Law Review

Independent juror research is an old problem for jury trials. It invites potentially prejudicial, irrelevant, and inaccurate information to guide jury decisionmaking. At the same time, independent juror research compromises our adversarial system by preventing parties from responding to all the evidence under consideration and obfuscating the record on which the jury’s decision is made. These threats have only increased in the internet age, where inappropriate sources of information are ubiquitous and where improper access is hard to detect. Nevertheless, courts and parties continue to engage in the same inhibitory measures they have employed for decades. This Note argues for …

Back To The Future: The Constitution Requires Reasonableness And Particularity—Introducing The “Seize But Don’T Search” Doctrine, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Issuing one-hundred or fewer opinions per year, the United States Supreme Court cannot keep pace with opinions that match technological advancement. As a result, in Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, the Court needs to announce a broader principle that protects privacy in the digital age. That principle, what we call “seize but don’t search,” recognizes that the constitutional touchstone for all searches is reasonableness.

When do present-day circumstances—the evolution in the Government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years …

Tell Us A Story, But Don't Make It A Good One: Resolving The Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories And Federal Rule Of Evidence 403, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Abstract: Tell Us a Story, But Don’t Make It A Good One: Resolving the Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories and Federal Rule of Evidence 403 by Cathren Koehlert-Page Courts need to reword their opinions regarding Rule 403 to address the tension between the advice to tell an emotionally evocative story at trial and the notion that evidence can be excluded if it is too emotional. In the murder mystery Mystic River, Dave Boyle is kidnapped in the beginning. The audience feels empathy for Dave who as an adult becomes one of the main suspects in the murder of his friend Jimmy’s …