Law 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 …

Unconstitutionality And The Rule Of Wide-Open Cross-Examination: Encroaching On The Fifth Amendment When Examining The Accused, Ronald L. Carlson, Michael S. Carlson

Scholarly Works

When Georgia adopted a new evidence code on January 1, 2013, it embraced the rule on scope of cross-examination which local courts have traditionally followed. This is the wide-open rule which permits the cross-examiner to range across the entire case, no matter how limited the direct exam. Subjects foreign to the direct can be freely explored, limited only by the rule of relevancy.

Commentators have associated the majority, more limited cross-examination methodology with American jurisprudence and the wide-ranging approach with English courts. Reflecting this divide, the Supreme Court of South Dakota recognized "two principal schools of thought" when it comes …

Search Method In E-Discovery: How Rule 26'S Silence Poses A Risk Of Sanctions To Attorneys And Increases The Cost Of Litigation, Khanh T. Huynh

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The 2006 Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are the first codified references in the FRCP to electronic discovery. However, the lack of comprehensive rules in this area provides opportunities for attorneys to leverage search terms as a weapon, primarily to wear out opponents financially. Disagreement on search terms used to produce documents can prolong litigation. Complicated Boolearn search tems can be difficult to run. Other search methods, such as natural language search, cannot provide efficient and accurate results. The cost to run complicated searches is high, and the lack of rules addressing search terms in the FRCP …

The Discoverability Of E-Mails: The Smoking Gun Of The Modern Era, Michael J. Martin

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The discoverability of e-mails is an area of law that every modern day lawyer must be familiar with in order to avoid the risk of being sanctioned. Over the past years, courts have awarded sanctions to moving parties at a steadily increasing pace. These sanctions have included adverse jury instructions, default judgements, attorney's fees, large monetary fines, and in one instance, a jail sentence. Courts have sent the message that improper conduct will not be tolerated in this developing area of law by not hesitating to order sanctions. Thus, it is essential that modern day lawyers become acquainted with the …

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 …

Seeing Is Believing: The Anti-Inference Bias, Eyal Zamir Prof., Ilana Ritov, Doron Teichman

Indiana Law Journal

A large body of studies suggests that people are reluctant to impose liability on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone, even when this evidence is more reliable than direct evidence. Current explanations for this pattern of behavior focus on factors such as the tendency of fact finders to assign low subjective probabilities to circumstantial evidence, the statistical nature of such evidence, and the fact that direct evidence can rule out with greater ease any competing factual theory regarding liability. This Article describes a set of four new experiments demonstrating that even when these factors are controlled for, the disinclination to …