With law school exams right around the corner, it is not too soon to be thinking about your study approach. For some people, it was being a stenographer of commercial outlines and creating a 100 page outline. For me, I always liked to see the whole big picture on just a couple pages. Then, once I understood how the main concepts fit together, I was able to build on that knowledge. I found these checklists and mnemonic useful for helping me prepare for law school exams.
I am obsessed with this new Iphone App–Siri. It operates like a personal assistant from ordering you a cab, locating the nearest Starbucks, etc. etc. What better way to streamline your busy life then with this App! Best of all, it’s free!!
Confused about Water Rights in Property? You’re not alone! Here’s a short guide to the main types of water rights theories.
Water Courses:2 Approaches:
(1) First Appropriation: (Western states) The person who first appropriates (captures) water and puts it to reasonable and beneficial use has a right superior to later approportioners.
POLICY: Direct consequence of the scarcity of water in the west
Serve better as a base-line for bargaining subject to reasonableness than riparianism. If you are first your rights are assured.
Lower transaction costs: less people affected
It is easily measured as opposed to reasonableness of riparianism.
Ensures usage: If you stop using your water you lose it vs. riparian – you don’t need to use it.
PROBLEM: encourages premature development and excessive development – and rations poorly when supplies dwindle periodically.
No incentive: to save water via irrigation – no obligation to others.
(2) Riparian Rights: (Eastern – where water is abundant): Each owner of land along a water source (riparian land) has a right to use the water, subject to rights of other riparians.
Rule: Reasonable Use: rule of capture with the slight addition that wasteful uses of water, if they actually harmed the neighbors, were considered unreasonable and hence unlawful.
In both English and American rules there is no principle of apportionment among overlying users
Designed to make it not so important whether you are upstream or downstream: equal
Today groundwater is commonly governed by legislative and administrative programs: Statutes. >We are talking about common law categories.
Reasonable use is divided into necessary and artificial use
Necessary use: household
Artificial use: commercial (use to power mill etc.)
The rights are tied to the land; the water rights do not have to be used to be maintained.
Restrictions: rights are equal; you can’t take this water and put it in another water shed.
It is all reasonableness and will probably go to the jury – BUT> in times of shortage it comes down to necessary use.
POLICY: Relation to rule of capture or first in time; b/c claims rest on the underlying holding of land, and the land itself was originally acquired by first possession.
PROBLEMS:
takes little or no account of the relative productivity of the land the water services,
encourages the development of uneconomical “bowling alley” parcels of land perpendicular to the banks of a stream, and ration poorly when stream levels are low.
Under Riparianism you need to have to buy land in order to get the water
With Riparian reasonableness you are not sure what you are getting; it is not well articulated. Versus First appropriation you are measuring the water and it is well-articulated
Costs of defining what a reasonable use is. Judicial balancing.
CA: Coase Theorem.
BUT> high transaction costs b/c of the number of people on the stream who claim use.
Looking for more property law resources? Click here.
This.is.an.absolute.outrage. Despite increased unemployment and slow economic recovery, AIG plans to pay about $100 million in bonuses. Worse yet, the bonuses will go to the division that led to the need for the federal bailout.
While you’re swimming in student loans and law books, click here to see AIG is using American’s tax dollars. The nerve is this country is just beyond words.
In an era of bitter law school graduates, Duke Law School has taken the innovative approach by offering an LL.M. in Entrepreneurship.
Here’s what they say about the program:
James Cox, the faculty director of Duke’s new LLM program, says the program makes sense, as students and lawyers are taking a broader view of their career prospects. “You’re increasingly finding more law schools graduates who want to go out into the business world rather than go sit behind a desk at a law firm,” he said.
Colorado law professor J. Brad Bernthal, who’s overseeing that school’s entrepreneurial law program, justifies the program partly by emphasizing that counseling start-up companies requires a broad range of skills and a wide range. “Start-up clients need everything under the sun,” Bernthal said. “You need to understand the key drivers of the business and help them prioritize their needs.”
Despite the credit crunch, deep recession, & lack of legal jobs, little has been done to resolve the problem of law graduates getting money for their bar expenses.
I received this message from the Alliance for Legal Education on allowing bar exam expenses to be eligible for the federal student loan programs:
This proposal was under consideration for inclusion in HR 1777, the Higher Education Technical Corrections Bill. Although this measure was not included in the final version of HR 1777 signed into law by President Obama, there was no known opposition to the initiative, and we hope this measure will pave the way for bar study funding for future law graduates.
At present, we are awaiting Senate consideration of pending legislation known as the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), HR 3221, since there is some chance that our issue could be included in the final language. We will continue to update you on our progress in the coming weeks as needed.
Through the work of the Alliance for Legal Education, we numbered more than 15,000 supporters in May 2009 and activists for the initiative generated 2,750 advocacy messages urging Senators and Congressional representatives to take action. This support could be invaluable in spearheading future legislative initiatives.
Chicago law students interested in taking the Patent Bar, BarBri is offering HALF OFF discount at BARBRI Patent Bar Review’s live lecture in Chicago, IL from March 15th-19th, 2010.
In order to qualify for the discount, you must mail your $100 nonrefundable deposit by February 1, 2010.
For more information, please call 877.728.2271 or visit us at www.patentbarbri.com.
This article discusses a lawsuit between a landlord and a tenant for comments that the tenant made about the landlord on Twitter. The offending post was:
“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay,” Amanda Bonnen wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m.
The court ended up dismissing the lawsuit Wednesday because the plaintiff could not prove an essential element of the case, which is that you must show that the comments made are specifically against the Plaintiff. The court felt that Amanda’s use of “Horizon” was too vague to give rise to a libel lawsuit.
The case is an excellent example of why you have to be careful when posting things on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. People have a tendency to vent their frustrations on these sites and many people will play fast and loose with the facts and the wording. Sometimes these posts can expose you to liability. Particularly, since these postings involve written rather than oral assertions, what you post online can expose you to a libel claim.
Slander and libel both involve making false statements of fact against a person or organization to a third party that harms the reputation of the person or organization. The difference between slander and libel is that slander is oral defamation while libel is written defamation. Therefore, if you post false information about someone on your Facebook wall you are 2/3 of the way to committing libel. The third element is that there needs to be actual harm to the person. HOWEVER, there are some exceptions.
There are some false statements that are so outside the bounds of decency that the law automatically assumes that harm is caused. These kind of false statements include:
Infidelity
Loathsome diseases (AIDS, Herpes, etc.)
A criminal act
Dishonesty in business
Therefore, if you post on Twitter that someone cheated on their wife, or has AIDS, knowing it is false, you have committed libel and that person does not have to prove specific damages and can instead collect general damages. For example, the court could assess $10,000 of damages against you without the plaintiff having to prove that they sustained $10,000 worth of damages.
As more and more avenues for us to communicate our thoughts to the world become available, we have to keep in mind that there can be consequences to the things we may innocently write on the Internet. It doesn’t matter if you post something and then take it down later, as soon as you post it is published for the world to see. So please be careful what you say, otherwise your Facebook status message could land you in front of a judge!
By Christopher Cali, esq. For more articles on various transactional legal areas, click here.
It seems that “there’s an app for that” for just about everything. Add to that, the BarMax Bar Review Iphone App! The app refers to the California Bar repeatedly, which leads me to think that they will make more apps particular to that state bar.
For $999, this app gives you access to:
- Outlines & audio lectures for all 12 subjects
- Email support (live contact with Harvard-educated lawyers)
- Skeleton outlines for note taking
- 1,371 real practice MBE questions from previous exams categorized by subject
- Over 1,000 flashcards categorized by subject
- 102 real practice CA essay questions with sample answers
- 18 real practice CA performance tests with sample answers
