Law School

A contract is a legally binding agreement that defines and governs the rights and duties between or among its parties. A contract is legally enforceable when it meets the requirements of applicable law. A contract typically involves the exchange of goods, services, money, or a promise of any of those. In the event of a breach of contract, the injured party may seek judicial remedies such as damage...

Negligence. Amongst unintentional torts one finds negligence as being the most common source of common law. Most Americans are under the impression that most people can sue for any type of negligence, but it is untrue in most US jurisdictions (partly because negligence is one of the few torts for which ordinary people can and do obtain liability insurance.) It is a form of extracontractual liabili...

Intentional torts. Intentional torts involve situations in which the defendant desires or knows to a substantial certainty that his act will cause the plaintiff damage. They include battery, assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress ("IIED"), trespass to land, trespass to chattels, conversion, invasion of privacy, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, fraud, indu...

Public interest law refers to legal practices undertaken to help poor or marginalized people, or to effect change in social policies in the public interest, on 'not for profit' terms (pro bono publico). It is not a body of law or a legal field. Rather, it denotes the clientele they represent. Instead of serving powerful economic interests, it stands for the advocacy of otherwise under-represented...

Sports law in the United States overlaps substantially with labor law, contract law, competition or antitrust law, and tort law. Issues like defamation and privacy rights are also integral aspects of sports law. This area of law was established as a separate and important entity only a few decades ago, coinciding with the rise of player-agents and increased media scrutiny of sports law topics. Ama...

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is a tax imposed by the United States federal government in addition to the regular income tax for certain individuals, estates, and trusts. As of tax year 2018, the AMT raises about $5.2 billion, or 0.4% of all federal income tax revenue, affecting 0.1% of taxpayers, mostly in the upper income ranges. An alternative minimum taxable income (AMTI) is calculated, by...

Paternity law refers to the body of law underlying the legal relationship between a father and his biological or adopted children and deals with the rights and obligations of both the father and the child to each other as well as to others. A child's paternity may be relevant in relation to issues of legitimacy, inheritance and rights to a putative father's title or surname, as well as the biologi...

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc v Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, (2021), was a 2021 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States related to securities fraud class actions. Background. A group of investors sued Goldman Sachs after the financial crisis of 2007–2008 to recover up to $13 billion in losses. In 2020, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit allowed the cl...

Derivative suits. Because directors owe their duties to the corporation and not, as a general rule, to specific shareholders or stakeholders, the right to sue for breaches of directors’ duty rests by default with the corporation itself. The corporation is necessarily a party to the suit. This creates a difficulty because almost always, the right to litigate falls under the general powers of direct...

Space law is the body of law governing space-related activities, encompassing both international and domestic agreements, rules, and principles. Parameters of space law include space exploration, liability for damage, weapons use, rescue efforts, environmental preservation, information sharing, new technologies, and ethics. Other fields of law, such as administrative law, intellectual property law...

Tax administration. Taxes in the United States are administered by hundreds of tax authorities. At the federal level there are three tax administrations. Most domestic federal taxes are administered by the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms taxes are administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Taxes on i...

Parenting coordinator (PC) is a relatively new practice used in some US states to manage ongoing issues in high-conflict child custody and visitation cases by professional psychologist or a lawyer assigned by the Court. There are 10 states as of May 2011 that have passed legislation regarding parenting coordinators: Colorado (since 2005), Idaho (2002), Louisiana (2007), New Hampshire (2009), North...

Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving eminent domain and labor relations. In its decision, the Court held that a regulation made pursuant to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that required agricultural employers to allow labor organizers to regularly access their property for the purposes of union recruitment constituted a per se takin...

Directors' duties. While corporate constitutions typically set out the balance of power between directors, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, additional duties are owed by members of the board to the corporation as a whole. First, rules can restrain or empower the directors in whose favor they exercise their discretion. While older corporate law judgments suggested directors had to pr...

Custody evaluation (also known as "parenting evaluation") is a legal process, in which a court-appointed mental health expert or an expert chosen by the parties, evaluates a family and makes a recommendation to the court for custody matters, usually including residential custody, visitation and a parenting plan. When performing the custody evaluation, the evaluator is expected to act in the child'...

Some jurisdictions may commit certain types of dangerous sex offenders to state-run detention facilities following the completion of their sentence if that person has a "mental abnormality" or personality disorder that makes the person likely to engage in sexual offenses if not confined in a secure facility. In the United States, twenty states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia...

Property taxes Most jurisdictions below the state level in the United States impose a tax on interests in real property (land, buildings, and permanent improvements). Some jurisdictions also tax some types of business personal property. Rules vary widely by jurisdiction. Many overlapping jurisdictions (counties, cities, school districts) may have authority to tax the same property. Few states impo...

Mahanoy Area School District v B L (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the ability of schools to regulate student speech made off-campus, such as speech made on social media. The case challenged past interpretation of Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District and Bethel School District v Fraser, previous Supreme Court decisions related to student speech which m...

While the board of directors is generally conferred the power to manage the day-to-day affairs of a corporation, either by the statute, or by the articles of incorporation, this is always subject to limits, including the rights that shareholders have. For example, the Delaware General Corporation Law §141(a) says the "business and affairs of every corporation ... shall be managed by or under the d...

A habitual offender, repeat offender, or career criminal is a person convicted of a crime who was previously convicted of crimes. Various states and jurisdictions may have laws targeting habitual offenders, and specifically providing for enhanced or exemplary punishments or other sanctions. They are designed to counter criminal recidivism by physical incapacitation via imprisonment. The nature, sc...

Credits A wide variety of tax credits may reduce income tax at the federal and state levels. Some credits are available only to individuals, such as the child tax credit for each dependent child, American Opportunity Tax Credit for education expenses, or the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income wage earners. Some credits, such as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, are available to businesses, inc...

Shared parenting, shared residence, joint residence, shared custody or joint physical custody is a child custody arrangement after divorce or separation, in which both parents share the responsibility of raising their children, with equal or close to equal parenting time. A regime of shared parenting is based on the idea that children have the right to and benefit from a close relationship with bo...

Collins v Yellen, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with the structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). The case follows on the Court's prior ruling in Seila Law LLC v Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found that the establishing structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), with a single director who could only be removed from office "fo...

Delegated management and agents. Although a corporation may be considered a separate legal person, it physically cannot act by itself. There are, therefore, necessarily rules from the corporation statutes and the law of agency that attribute the acts of real people to the corporation, to make contracts, deal with property, commission torts, and so on. First, the board of directors will be typicall...

Recidivism (/rɪˈsɪdɪvɪzəm/; from recidive and ism, from Latin recidīvus "recurring", from re- "back" and cadō "I fall") is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have experienced negative consequences of that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense. The term is frequently used in conjunction with cr...