Declaring a mistrial here was the only effective way to guarantee the defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial, including the right to examine the evidence against him. There's quite a bit of jurisprudence on the use of expert testimony to make sure it's relable, and allowing the jury to just Google whatever they want for information just tosses that process out the door.

Imagine you've been falsely accused of child molestation, based on the faulty science of "recovered memories." Would you want the opportunity to challenge the evidence against you through cross-examination, or would you prefer it if the jury could just pull up some article written by a quack and be swayed by it, with no chance for you or your defense to explain the basic fallacies it contained?

Then you can choose not to have contacts with those states. New York isn't forcing you to sell your products to residents of New York.

If you have contacts with a forum state, you're subject to that state's jurisdiction in matters related to those contacts.

Voters have no way to directly influence FCC policy.

That's incorrect; the FCC is legally obliged to consider the input of the public. If you have a substantive comment to a proposed rule and the FCC doesn't consider it as part of the rule-making process, the rule can and will be struck down.

Not legal advice, but you might consider that there is not only a criminal case against the thief, but also a civil case. If you want it back badly enough, you may be able to get a local lawyer to initiate a civil action against the John Doe and subpoena the university to get the identity of the person in possession of the laptop (you could also do this yourself, but it could be very easy for a non-lawyer to make a fatal mistake when going up against the general counsel of a university to enforce the subpoena, assuming they don't just give in, so I don't really think I'd recommend it). That not only identifies who it is so that you could potentially get it returned through the civil court system, it also may increase the likelihood of the police doing something.

The opinion is remarkably poor legal advice, as it fails to account for the relevant differences between local governments and universities and does not speak to the general grants of authority given to Virginia universities to craft their own rules.

The lawyer in question, Pegeen Rhyne, holds himself out as being appointed as an AUSA back in 2001, which would make him a Bush appointee. It's also exceedingly unlikely that this position got put before the Attorney General, let alone the President.

In what universe is 10% "the bulk?"

Also, you have to remember that this is a settlement, not a court decision. A settlement, being a compromise between the plaintiffs and defendants, will naturally be less than what the full value of the judgment could be. Additionally, the lawyers would have gotten much more in fees had the case gone to trial, because trials in class actions can get very expensive very quickly.

Not "may be," "is."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html

It was really SMS that inspired the further direction -- the particular constraint of 140 characters was kind of borrowed. You have a natural constraint with the couriers when you update your location or with IM when you update your status. But SMS allowed this other constraint, where most basic phones are limited to 160 characters before they split the messages. So in order to minimize the hassle and thinking around receiving a message, we wanted to make sure that we were not splitting any messages. So we took 20 characters for the user name, and left 140 for the content. That’s where it all came from.

Perhaps because it was designed with SMS limitations in mind?

No, "productive" in this context means "substantive," "based in reality," "possible in the current political climate," and, most importantly, "not subject to the Internet-poll effect." The highest rated "idea" right now is basically telling people to shut the fuck up about their bullshit Birtherism. That may be many things, but it's not "productive."

By narrowing the topic of discussion, it filtered out more of the trolls and thereby increased the signal-to-noise ratio.

From TFA:

In the case of the underage labor, three facilities had hired 15-year-olds in countries where the minimum employment age is 16.

That's incorrect.

The school officials were not held individually responsible, because it was not "clearly established law" (there were enough lower court decisions holding that such searches were legitimate to make it difficult for the Supreme Court to hold that the law was "clearly established"). That does not, however, mean that "there was no punishment." The school district was still liable, which is generally the more important thing, because the school district is the entity with the deepest pockets.

There's a difference between talking about the law and "legal advice." I have an ethical obligation to avoid giving anyone a sense that I am forming an attorney-client relationship with them by giving them legal advice. The signature is a snarky way of making it clear that, while I might be talking about the law, I am not giving anyone any legal advice in any sense that should be relied upon.

As for my client pool, my client is the largest employer in the country, so I'm not exactly looking to build a private practice. My goal in coming here is to talk nerdery, being a geek who dual-classed into law.

I'm not a tax attorney, but I do know a little about the situation. Here's a brief summary:

There's a lot of concern over how to classify workers as either "employees" or "independent contractors." Each has its own pros and cons, but in general, it's better for a company to consider its workers as contractors from a tax perspective. Because taxes are radically different based on how an employee is classified, a misclassification that is turned up by the IRS can be very expensive for a company. As such, there is a "safe harbor" which protects companies who have a reasonable basis in considering an employee to be an independent contractor.

There was a sense this was being abused in the technology industry in the 1980s, and as such, Congress amended the law. The amendment didn't change the classification system of employees versus independent contractors, but did remove the safe harbor. As such, companies became much more reticent to hire a worker as an independent contractor, because the penalty for getting it wrong was much more likely to be assessed.

There is a very large difference between "cold to the touch" and "well below freezing."