From the monthly archives:

June 2008

Thoughts on the Art of Persuasion and the Defense in the Entwistle Case

June 30, 2008

Some thoughts on the recently concluded Entwistle murder trial in Massachusetts. A trial is the art of persuasion. Civil or criminal, jury or jury-waived, the same principles of persuasion apply. Generations of lawyers have spent their careers thinking about these principles, trying to understand, refine and apply them. The huge number of uncontrollable variables in

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More Legal Humor from Evan Schaeffer

June 16, 2008

We need more laughs in the legal profession, believe me. Lawyers take themselves way too seriously – and I’m putting that very politely. Evan Schaeffer of The Legal Underground is working to correct this with a long-running series of “advice” letters: advice to young lawyers, advice to federal judges, advices to partners, and so on.

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The Entwistle Trial

June 13, 2008

I would be remiss if I didn’t provide a link to the Boston Herald blog on the Entwistle case, which is being tried in Middlesex Superior Court in Massachusetts. The case has attracted international attention due to the horrific and gruesome facts of the case, and that the defendant, who is accused of the cold-blooded

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Universal Music Gets a Lesson on the First Sale Doctrine

June 12, 2008

When I started a music blog a couple of years ago (sadly ignored of late), I started getting promotional CDs from some small publishers. I’m not sure how they got my home address, and for the most part the music wasn’t very good. However, I did notice that in a few instances the CD cases

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Important, If True …

June 11, 2008

The Massachusetts employment bar is abuzz with word that a Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) Commissioner has publically stated that the Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act (MMLA) will apply to new parents of either sex. This means that new fathers would be entitled to eight weeks of unpaid leave upon the birth or adoption of their

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Quant Computer v. LG Electronics – the Supreme Court Rules on "Patent Exhaustion"

June 10, 2008

Yesterday’s decision in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. is linked below (via scribd.com, which I am becoming quite enamored of as a place in the “cloud” to hold and link to documents or embed them in a web site or blog). This is a very technical case, and probably is of little interest

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Lawyerly Humor

June 9, 2008

I don’t think Letterman or Darrell Hammond have a lot to worry about, but it’s nice to see a lawyer making fun of himself once in a while. Tom Goldstein: Hire Me For Your Supreme Court Case Share This:TwitterFacebookStumbleUponDiggDelicious

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The Agony of Inadvertant Disclosure

June 8, 2008

Sometimes being a lawyer is like being an airline pilot – hundreds of hours of tedium, interrupted by moments of sheer panic. In the case of lawyers, the panic can hit from a number of sources: a missed court filing date or statute of limitations, the discovery during trial that your client has failed to

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Yoko Ono, Ben Stein and Copyright Fair Use

June 3, 2008

Here is a copy (below) of the June 2, 2008 decision of Judge Sidley Stein in the Southern District of New York, holding that a 15 second snippet of the Lennon song “Imagine,” within the feature length movie “Expelled“, is “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. In other words, the film makers did not infringe

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