Law Commons^™

Standards Of Review In Law And Sports: How Instant Replay's Asymmetric Burdens Subvert Accuracy And Justice, Steve P. Calandrillo, Joseph Davison

Articles

A fundamental tension exists in both law and sports: on one hand, adjudicators must “get the decision right” in order to provide fairness to the parties involved, but on the other, they must issue speedy and certain rulings to avoid delaying justice. The certainty principle dictates that courts follow stare decisis in the law even if they believe that an earlier decision was wrong. However, it is often the case that there is a need to reverse earlier decisions or the law itself in order to make the correct call on appeal.

Both law and sports are constantly balancing the …

Missing Police Body Camera Videos: Remedies, Evidentiary Fairness, And Automatic Activation, Mary D. Fan

Articles

A movement toward police regulation by recording is sweeping the nation. Responding to calls for accountability, transparency and better evidence, departments have rapidly adopted body cameras. Recording policies require the police to record more law enforcement encounters than ever before. But what happens if officers do not record? This is an important, growing area of controversy. Based on the collection and coding of police department body camera policies, this Article reveals widespread detection and enforcement gaps regarding failures to record as required. More than half of the major-city departments in the sample have no provisions specifying consequences for not recording …

The Priest-Penitent Privilege – An Hibernocentric Exercise In Postcolonial Jurisprudence, Walter J. Walsh

Articles

Although much has been written on the history of the priest-penitent privilege, this Article will show that such writing tends toward an unconscious, but strong, anglocentric tilt. It seems that no scholar has tried to locate and interpret all the Irish and American sources that inspired this initially hibernocentric, later more generally American, postcolonial deviation from the English common law. Since the Second World War, the significance of Philips and its 1828 New York codification have gained widespread recognition, but the scholarly inquiry has never advanced in any truly historical fashion. This article is thus the first history of the …

Attorney-Client Confidentiality And The Assessment Of Claimants Who Allege Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Robert H. Aronson, Lonnie Rosenwald, Gerald M. Rosen

Articles

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was first recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. A PTSD diagnosis requires an individual or individual's loved ones to have experienced a traumatic event that was a threat to life or physical integrity and caused the individual to react to the incident with a specific number of avoidance, reexperiencing, and hyper-arousal symptoms. Obtaining a PTSD diagnosis can be of great value to a personal-injury plaintiff who claims damages due to a traumatic event. Further, if the traumatic event is unquestioned and the individual reports the classic symptoms, a PTSD diagnosis is relatively easy to …

Still Adjusting To Markman: A Prescription For The Timing Of Claim Construction Hearings, William F. Lee, Anita K. Krug

Articles

This Article argues that, in most cases, there is an optimal time for holding the Markman hearing.

Part II provides a short summary of both the Federal Circuit's holding in Markman and the rationale behind the Supreme Court's affirmance of that holding. It then delves into the predictable effects of Markman, as well as into the maze of questions that the decision has engendered and the ways in which the district courts have answered those questions.

Part III discusses the issue of the timing of claim construction hearings, presenting at the outset the possible alternatives. It argues that holding …