New Volume: Yearbook of International Disaster Law

In the case of Lines v. Timothy Britton Const. Servs., Inc., No. 948 W.D.A. 2024 (Pa. Super. July 1, 2025 Bowes, J., Olson, J., and Bender, P.J.E.) (Op. by Bowes, J.), the Pennsylvania Superior Court addressed the proper procedure relative to a Petition to Strike and/or Open a Default Judgment. In the end, the court reversed a trial court’s Order dismissing a Defendant’s Petition to Strike and/or Open a Default Judgment.This matter arose out of a lawsuit brought by a homeowner against the Defendant for breach of contract and violation of consumer protection law claims. According to the Opinion, the Plaintiff’s Complaint did not contain a required Notice to Defend. When the Defendant made no response, the Plaintiffs ultimately obtained a default judgment. The Defendant then petitioned to strike and/or open the judgment based upon the deficiencies with the Plaintiff’s Complaint. With the parties’ consent, the trial court struck the initial default…

We hope you will join us in September for the next offering of our Orientation to Legal Research webinars, focusing on U.S. federal statutes, followed by the next entry into the Lunch and Learn webinar series focusing on using secondary resources to conduct legal research. The September webinars will finish with another entry in the Orientation to Law Library Collections webinar. It will cover digital resources available through the Law Library’s website as well as those available on-site. Within this webinar, there will be a guest presentation as part of the 50 State Outreach Project by staff from the Texas State Law Library. Amy Small, executive director, will present from the Texas State Law Library during the webinar. Amy notes that [o]riginally established in 1854 as the library for the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas State Law Library split off as an independent judicial agency in 1972. Since then, our focus has been to serve the people of Texas as well as the high…

Anyone who suspects that a child is being abused or neglected can make a report to the Department of Social Services or Child Protective Services in North Carolina. This system is intended to protect children and ensure they have safe caregivers and homes. If a report is determined to be unfounded, it means that an investigation found no evidence of the reported neglect or abuse. Use of the System as a Weapon While most people who report abuse do so out of legitimate concern, the system is sometimes used by one parent as a tactic to hurt the other parent. This can also have harmful consequences for the children involved, as undergoing physical examinations to check for abuse can cause psychological harm. In the matter of K.E.P., a child in Sampson County, North Carolina, an appellate court removed the child from her mother’s home after multiple unfounded allegations were made by her mother against her father. In re: K.E.P. The child was born in 2018, and within months of…

This morning, we kick off the final day of ILTACON 2025 at 9 a.m. in Potomac A/B with a Keynote Recap of this year’s G100/G200 programming. Join Steve Assie, Michael Bruckner, Karen Campbell, James McKenna, and Andrew Powell as they offer overviews, key discussion points, and poignant takeaways.  Follow the links below for more on some of the sponsors you’ll be meeting: • Aiden• Litera• Opus 2• Traveling Coaches Thursday’s first round of educational sessions starts at 11 a.m. and includes learning opportunities like The Yin and Yang of Cybersecurity in Ediscovery, Transform Your Organization with the Microsoft Power Platform: Real World Success Stories, Change Management and Training: The PB and J of Adoption, Legal Collaboration with Microsoft Loop Ahoy, SaaS Security: Beyond Prevention, Realizing Value With Your Data Science Team: Notebook to Production, Integrating AI with Customer Service: Preserving…

Texas spouses may agree in writing to partition or exchange some or all of their community property between themselves such that the property becomes the separate property of one spouse.  A former wife recently challenged her divorce decree, arguing the trial court erred in awarding a reimbursement claim against her, reducing the spousal maintenance below the amount stated in the parties’ agreement, and including contingencies on the spousal maintenance that were not in the agreement. According to the appeals court’s opinion, the parties married in 2006. They signed a Marital Property Partition and Exchange Agreement in 2020 that made two pieces of property the wife’s sole and separate property.  She agreed to be responsible for the debt associated with them.  The husband, however, made some of those payments from his community property income until the date of divorce. The couple stopped living together in 2022 and the husband petitioned for…

Author’s Note: After I wrote this column, but a couple of days before it was published, Open AI upgraded its GPT Chatbot from version 4 to version 5. Among the negative reactions to the change was a sense that ChatGPT-5’s artificial personality had becomes more distant and less complimentary. As you’ll see below, I don’t think that’s a problem. But there are early indications that Open AI might tweak the model again to reintroduce the earlier version’s “warmth,” which would make my warnings below more relevant again. Something that many people have expressed concern about, when it comes to using AI, is intellectual atrophy. As described by Ethan Mollick in a recent article, the fear is that AI over-reliance will cost us our ability to think critically and creatively, just as smartphone over-reliance has cost us our ability to remember phone numbers. This is particularly worrisome for lawyers, because if we lose our intellectual…

When is the right time to rebrand your legal practice and how do you actually pull it off? In this episode of New Solo’s First Flight series, Adriana Linares talks with Kristen Rizzo, a former employment litigator who built a thriving solo practice before making a bold, calculated shift to mediation and impartial workplace investigations. Kristen shares how she planned her transition from Rizzo Law to Rizzo Resolution, the value of becoming a subject-matter expert, and how she used branding, visibility, and pro bono work to launch a neutral practice with intention. Adriana is later joined by ALPS Insurance’s Rio Laine to explore how preparation, professional boundaries, and proper coverage help lawyers lower risk during big career pivots.   Hear the original episode with Kristin Rizzo  Learn more about ALPS Insurance.  Receive email notifications every time we release a new episode.

Editor’s Note: The International Legal Technology Association Conference (ILTACON) is one of the world’s premier annual gatherings for professionals at the intersection of law, business, and technology. Drawing thousands of lawyers, technologists, executives, and innovators each year, ILTACON serves as a barometer for the trends transforming the global legal sector—from artificial intelligence and process modernization to client service innovation. At ILTACON 2025 in National Harbor, Maryland, longtime industry analyst and strategist Reena SenGupta delivered a keynote for professionals in cybersecurity, legal technology, and information governance. Her seven “evolutions” of legal practice—grounded in nearly three decades of research and advisory work—offered a practical framework for building legal services that are proactive, multidisciplinary, and sustainable. Her organic metaphor of the law firm as a living organism, particularly as…

When a customer harasses an employee, the EEOC says employers are liable if they knew or should have known and didn’t act. The Sixth Circuit says: not unless you intended it to happen. TL;DR: An employee claimed a customer sexually harassed her and her employer should be liable under Title VII and Michigan law. The EEOC applies a negligence standard: if you knew or should have known and didn’t act, you’re liable. The Sixth Circuit held liability exists only if the employer intended the harassment, meaning it wanted the conduct to occur or was substantially certain it would happen. Leaning on the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision, the court stressed that agency interpretations aren’t binding and judges must read the statute for themselves. 📜 Read the full decision The incident and the layoff The facts were straightforward — and uncomfortable. The employee, a sales rep for a cleaning products company, went on a motel sales call…

Should the law be more forgiving? Martha Minow, former dean of Harvard Law School, joins Preet for a wide-ranging conversation on what justice means today—inside and beyond the courtroom. They discuss the erosion of public trust in the legal system, the dangers of outcome-driven thinking, and why Minow believes we can’t “achieve” justice. Plus, they explore how self-interest in the Trump era has eroded our institutions, from the Supreme Court to Congress. In the bonus for Insiders, Minow explores whether judges should be more outspoken amid the rise of political attacks, death threats, and a breakdown in civic education. Then, Preet answers listener questions. Join the CAFE Insider community to stay informed without hysteria, fear-mongering, or rage-baiting. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up. Thank you for supporting our work. Show notes and a transcript of the episode are available on our website.  You can now watch this episode! Head to…

IGNACIO ADRIAN LERER has posted The Legislator as Extended Phenotype: A Darwinian Theory of Legal Evolution on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Background: Legal theory often assumes legislators consciously design laws to solve social problems. Drawing on Dawkins' (1982) concept of the extended phenotype, this paper challenges the Lamarckian assumption in legal scholarship and proposes a Darwinian framework: legislators function primarily as vehicles for replicating pre-existing legal "memes" whose survival depends on environmental fitness. Methods/Approach: The analysis combines: (1) Autobiographical case study—Argentina's 1981-1987 mortgage crisis, observed first-hand, illustrating memetic competition between pacta sunt servanda and rebus sic stantibus; (2) Comparative historical analysis—Three generational responses to currency-related credit crises (1981-1987, 2001-2003, 2016-2024); (3) Theoretical synthesis—Integration of cultural…

The Toronto International Film Festival has removed from its 2025 schedule a documentary film by Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich that tells the story of Noam Tibon’s mission to save his family during the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel. The film is based on the excellent book by Amir Timon, the Gates of Gaza, which recounts both the rescue effort and the longstanding fraught relationship between Israel and Gaza. According to Deadline, the film, titled The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, was scheduled to be included in the program announced last week. But TIFF asked that the source of Hamas body-cam footage included in the film be identified and to provide copyright clearances for the video. You read that correctly: TIFF wanted the filmmakers to obtain copyright licences from Hamas terrorists. From a copyright law perspective, the copyright claim is so ridiculous that it hardly needs debunking and is beneath what is supposedly a credible organization that has…

The issue in The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust v YD & Ors [2025] EWCOP 31 (T3) was the potential withdrawal of treatment from a 60-year-old man, YD, in a “permanent vegetative state”. YD was in simultaneous relationships with two women, JG and MB, and both they and the Official Solicitor opposed the application. JG did not consider that YD was religious, but was “deep into his spirituality, how things are, why they are” and that he he took it seriously; the fact that he agreed that she should call an ambulance after she had found him collapsed in October 2024 “proves to me that he chose conventional medicine and wants to heal as much as he can” [36]. MB was equally convinced that YD would not want treatment to be withdrawn, and told the Court of Protection: “YD would like the opportunity to heal and not be forced to end life, he would choose to leave when he is ready and naturally or when the body chooses to give up, he…

Volume 42:4 (November 2024) of Law and History Review, delayed by a malware attack on Cambridge University Press last summer, is now complete and available online.Emergency by Design: The “Native Repressive Tribunals” and the Normalization of Exception in Colonial Algeria, 1858–1904Sarah GhabrialLegacies and Legalities: Bequests of Land to Ecclesiastical Institutions in England c. 1180–1300Sarah B. WhiteRabbinic Evidence for the Spread of Roman Legal Education in the ProvincesYair FurstenbergThe Isle of Man, Channel Islands and Statutes of the English Parliament, to 1640: Development and Change in Territorial ExtentTim ThorntonInnovation in the Courts: Ellis and Jeffery Hart Bent in New South Wales—an Analysis of Minute BooksPaula Jane Byrne“Lost in Translation”: Extraterritoriality, Subjecthood, and Subjectivity in the Anglo–Yemeni Treaty of 1821Itamar Toussia CohenConstitutional Panic in British India: How the Ilbert Bill…

Is discrimination against immigrant workers just a social harm or also an economic injury that antitrust law can remedy? In a recent article, Gregory Day, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, argues the latter and that discrimination against immigrant workers is an illegal exercise of market power that violates antitrust law. Day explains that because antitrust’s consumer welfare standard—which intends to benefit consumers collectively—does not protect particular groups such as immigrants, antitrust law allows for the exclusion of immigrants in an effort to promote competition. Native workers in the United States, Day contends, historically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used labor unions to discriminate against immigrants that competed with them for jobs.. Unions worried that immigrants would lower wages, break up strikes, and take jobs. In an effort to defeat competition, labor…

The Roberts Court has sometimes hinted at supporting a strong version of the “unitary executive branch” theory—one in which Presidents can personally control all executive functions.  The Court’s hints, in turn, have emboldened the Trump Administration to take broad views of presidential power.  This term, however, the Court poured cold water on that view.  Judging by its decision in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc., the Court appears committed instead to a more moderate—and more legally sound—understanding of executive unitariness. The unitary executive branch theory of course is the idea that, by vesting “[t]he executive Power” in the President and requiring Presidents to ensure faithful execution of the law, Article II of the Constitution necessarily gives the President control over the executive branch. Courts and commentators have most often discussed the theory in connection with debates over…

Dr. Kamshad Mohsin (Maharishi University of Information Technology - School of Law) has posted Emerging Technologies and Islamic Laws: A Comparative Analysis of Prominent Islamic Jurisdictions on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and digital cybersecurity tools present profound ethical, legal, and societal challenges. This paper examines how Islamic laws (Sharia) respond to these technologies, drawing on principles like Maqasid al-Sharia (objectives of Islamic law) and usul al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence). A comparative analysis is conducted across prominent Islamic jurisdictions, including Sunnimajority countries (e.g., Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey) and Shiamajority ones (e.g., Iran), using doctrinal research methods supplemented by recent developments up to 2025. Key findings reveal convergences in ethical frameworks emphasizing human dignity (karama), justice (adl), and…

Dentons Lee announced that on August 7, Attorneys Seul-Ah Kim and Sung-Eun Ahn participated as legal advisors at an event hosted by the Korea Artificial Intelligence Software Industry Association (KOSA). Intellectual Property and Technology, Tax, Overseas Investment, Customs Law, Seoul