Moritz Legal Information Blog

In continuing recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, here are several exhibitions which might be of interest: At the Library of Congress website, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom .  The physical exhibit is in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, but the online exhibit features a great deal of multimedia , including interviews with author Toni Morrison, Tuskegee Airman Lee Archer, and NAACP lawyer Benjamin Hooks. Also at the Library of Congress website is Voices of Civil Rights , a solely online exhibition focusing on oral histories of individuals of the Civil Rights Movement. Closer to home, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum recently concluded an exhibit on Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics .  You can also learn about their newest exhibits here .

Professor Ric Simmons recently posted on his new blog about Fourth Amendment issues related to the Silk Road. The Silk Road is part of the dark web/deep web/dark Internet ---that part of the Internet that isn’t searched by Google. Though many used the Silk Road purely to avoid prying eyes, others use it to conduct illegal transactions without prying eyes. The person who ran the site, Ross Ulbricht, is currently on trial, and one of the pre-trial issues, which Professor Simmons addresses, is whether an illegal hack is an illegal search. For more information, check out Professor Simmons's blog Search and Seizure , "exploring the reach and the limits of the Fourth Amendment in the modern world."

The career and legislative accomplishments of Congressman William M. McCulloch (R-Piqua), who represented Ohio’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives (1947-1973), are currently featured in a new library exhibit curated by Jeffrey Thomas, Archivist of the University Libraries’ Ohio Congressional Archives . The exhibit includes facsimile reproductions of papers, correspondence, photos and other items included in the Archives’ collection of McCulloch’s papers. An alumnus of the OSU College of Law (Class of 1925), McCulloch had a distinguished career as a lawyer, politician and member of Congress during a turbulent era. He is receiving renewed attention today for playing a pivotal role in ensuring passage of key civil rights legislation during the 1960’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later legislation to end housing discrimination. The exhibit highlights McCulloch’s legislative accomplishments, service on crime commissions and w

Revelry after Monday night's national football championship got a bit out of hand . Police used tear gas and/or pepper spray to control the crowd of rowdy students. I skimmed the photos, and I am pleased to report I did not spot a single law student in the bunch. I did wonder, however, how many of those on the streets and causing property damage aspire to be law students. With this in mind, I posed a question to our bar exam expert, Katherine Kelly : If the person who tweeted about the torn down Ohio Stadium goal post (or actually helped take it down) was a law student and they were caught, could that affect their bar admission? (Because as you all know as future lawyers, there are differences between committing a crime, getting caught committing a crime, and gleefully taking credit for a crime by posting evidence of the crime on social media that will last forever .) Here's Professor Kelly's response: "Absolutely. That person would have to report it on the C

When I was in law school, we had an attorney come speak who'd accomplished what was touted as a wildly rare feat: he'd argued TWO cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. To emphasize how rare this is, we were told the Court receives around 10,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari per year and only a fraction of those are granted and heard (less than 100). I was duly impressed, but it turns out I was not doing my due diligence. I didn't ask the right questions when given statistics designed to wow. Turns out for some attorneys, their petitions are reliably granted by the Court. So, it is quite possible the attorney I heard didn't have a mere 75/10,000 chance of being heard. Instead, his odds were likely  much better. Reuters news service did a little research and produced The Echo Chamber, which concluded that in the last nine years, "66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Th

Slate has prepared an extraordinary mash-up of performances by the Duck's marching band and TBDBITL in the interest of assessing who would win the national title if band performance was key. For more on copyright issues and marching bands, check out our previous post . Go Bucks!

We've written here before about how to get a cheap flight, and if you were lucky enough to score tickets to the national college football championship, you may be scratching your head on how to afford a flight to Dallas. Plane tickets from CMH are running around $600. Skiplagged to the rescue? The service basically works like this: Let's say a flight to Chicago from Columbus is $279, but a flight to Madison, Wisconsin, with a layover in Chicago is $259. Skiplagged tells you so you can purchase the ticket to Madison and simply "miss" your connection to Madison and save $20. Genius entrepreneurship or something illegal? Well, you've been in law school for at least four months now or up to two years and four months. If you wanted to sue, what would you sue for? (Because you know someone wants to sue the creator .) I puzzled over it for a while; then I did what any good lawyer should do: Look it up. I went to Bloomberg Law (you should have received a usernam