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Twenty-First Century Fingerprinting: Supreme Court in King to Determine Privacy Interest in Arrestee DNA


by April 22, 2013 ,

HiRes_paint

Described by Justice Alito as “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this Court has heard in decades,” the Supreme Court’s decision in Maryland v. King will have far-reaching Fourth Amendment implications. In 2008, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Maryland DNA Collection Act, amending a 2002 statute that expanded police authority to collect DNA samples from those arrested for certain offenses. Under the statute, samples are collected at the time of arrest, but can only be analyzed once the arrestee has been charged and arraigned. Once collected, the DNA sample is immediately processed, submitted to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System database (CODIS), and compared against other samples.

 

Loss of Chance, Probabilistic Cause, and Damage Calculations: The Error in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum and the Majority Rule of Damages in Many Jurisdictions More Generally


by March 19, 2013 ,

Did the SJC get the math wrong in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum?

This short commentary corrects an erroneous understanding of probabilistic causation in the loss-of-chance doctrine and the damage calculation method adopted in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is not alone. Many other common law courts have made the same error, including Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

 

Disclosure and Offer at Twenty-Five: Time to Adopt Policies to Promote Fairly Negotiated Compensation


by and February 25, 2013 ,

Med-Mal

A quarter century ago, the Lexington, Kentucky Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center pioneered a risk management program now known as “disclosure and offer.” Its guiding principal was that patients injured by malpractice should be told about the incident and “made whole” without having to litigate. After a patient suffered an injury that the VA judged to have been caused by a departure from the standard of care, the VA contacted the patient and, along with an attorney of his choosing, invited him to meet with VA staff.

 

Obviously Obvious: Federal Circuit Reverses District Court’s Decision That Online “Shopping Cart” Patents Are Nonobvious as a Matter of Law—Soverain Software LLC v. Newegg Inc.


by February 25, 2013 ,

Patent Non-Obvious

Litigation is expensive, plain and simple. In a typical patent-infringement dispute, defending a case from start to finish—that is, from the complaint to the appeal—may cost a company upwards of a million dollars. Accordingly, the defendant-company will often choose to pay the patent holder a licensing fee instead of advancing its case to trial.

 

Supreme Judicial Court in Lopez Permits Interference Discrimination Claim Against Third Party Without Proof of Discriminatory Intent


by February 25, 2013 ,

Police Image

In Lopez v. Commonwealth, police officers sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Division of Human Resources (HRD), alleging HRD engaged in racial discrimination by creating and administering a multiple-choice examination for candidates seeking promotion to police sergeant that resulted in a disparate impact on minority candidates. The plaintiff class included all African-American and Hispanic police officers employed by civil service municipalities throughout Massachusetts who took the police sergeant promotional examination in the years 2005-2008 and were not “reached for promotion.”

 

Discovering New Ways to Deter Terrorism: The ATA and the Cross-Border Discovery Catch-22


by February 25, 2013 ,

Discovery docs

Federal judges have a variety of tools to sanction litigants who fail to comply with discovery orders. After years of discovery disputes in Linde v. Arab Bank, PLC, the district judge issued “severe” sanctions against Arab Bank, which, according to the bank’s attorneys, turned a multi-billion-dollar case “into a show trial.” The plaintiffs are thousands of victims and family members of victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel between 1995 and 2004.

In the News

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman, read Note Editor Andrew Stark's recent Case Comment here

Wash. Supreme Court cites David Fine's note in Lowy v. PeaceHealth

2013 Write-On Competition Announcement

Congratulations to the newly elected Volume XLVII editorial board!

Professor Wayne LaFave cites to seven Suffolk University Law Review student pieces in his treatise, Search & Seizure (5th ed.)