Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

The new study (click on the post title for the Washington Post article) says Americans find spam less bothersome than a year ago. I wonder if there are other factors involved besides self-resignation. Most email providers now filter junk email - not perfectly, of course, but pesky ones about mortgages and another person in Nigeria wanting to give me $10 MILLION usually don't land in my Inbox (except at my work email account, which flags spam but doesn't screen it). Also, one would HOPE that more people are able to recognize immediately the same old come-ons and don't bother opening them.

Click here for the court's opinion. From the article (linked to in the title of the post): The little "black box" in [a litigant's] car is a reliable source of evidence that he was driving at more than three times the speed limit when he slammed into another vehicle and killed two teenage girls in Pembroke Pines, an appeals court ruled on Wednesday. In what appears to be the nation's first such appellate ruling in a criminal case, the 4th District Court of Appeal agreed with the trial judge who allowed Broward prosecutors to use evidence gathered from the car's "black box" in Matos' 2003 trial.

Another article on the new Texas study demonstrating that occasional large jury awards have minimal effect on the malpractice-insurance rates of phsyicians (which is the main argument being touted for misguided tort reform). Click on the post title to follow the link to the article.

From the article: New York's highest court ruled Tuesday that common law protects a record company's copyright on recordings made prior to 1972 — a decision that could have industrywide ramifications for everything from Bach to the Beatles. That lawsuit involved Franklin, Tenn.-based Naxos of America Inc., which restored and marketed 1930s classical records made in England by another company, The Gramaphone Co. Limited, after the 50-year British copyright had expired. Hollywood, Calif.-based Capitol Records Inc., which currently holds the rights to those recordings, sued. They won on appeal. "Naxos, which bills itself as 'the world's leading classical music label,' said it would appeal." Click here for the text of the Court's opinion.