Associate's Mind

  Over at r/law on Reddit, someone asked the question: “What are the most amazing Supreme Court oral arguments of the past few years?” The user had their own opinion: I discovered that the U.S. Supreme Court publishes audio of oral arguments online, which can be freely downloaded by anyone. I also discovered Oyez, which [...]

The Ninth Circuit has held that it is the right of the United States government to seize a digital device at a border crossing*, transport it to a secondary location, and retain the data from the device indefinitely until it can be accessed. It has been true for awhile that any device, any data, may [...]

Surprise, surprise, Courts seem to be split on the issue of whether or not Wikipedia is a proper legal source. In the previous post, people were discussing this link on Wikipedia: Which is a listing of holdings from Courts that have cited Wikipedia in various countries, including the United States. So I started digging through them and found what seems [...]

Just saw this over at Legal Writing Prof Blog. The court notes here that defense counsel appears to have cobbled much of his statement of the law governing ineffective assistance of counsel claims by cutting and pasting, without citation, from the Wikipedia web site. Compare Supplemental to Motion for New Trial (DN 199) at 18-19 with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strickland_v._Washington [...]

Yet another good find over at Internet Cases. I think it’s going to officially be added to my RSS Reader. Excerpt below: Mother sought appellate review of the lower court’s order that awarded primary physical custody of her daughter to the child’s father. The mother argued, among other things, that the court improperly considered Facebook photos showing [...]

From the EFF Deeplinks blog, in the matter of US v. Warshak: As the Court held today, Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication [like postal mail and telephone calls], it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection…. It follows that email requires strong protection under the [...]

Corynne McSherry over at the EFF’s Deeplinks Blog posted a breakdown of a recent decision from the Ninth Circuit in the matter of Vernor v. Autodesk, D.C. No. 2:07-cv-01189-RAJ (PDF download of opinon). In a triumph of legal formalism over reality, the Court held that the copyright’s first sale doctrine – the law that allows you to [...]