Essays on Federal District

Alignment of the single-sex admission policy of Virginia Military Institution (VMI) aligns with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was the issue raised in United States v. Virginia. VMI has been an all-male institution since its inception in 1839. In deciding that the single-sex admission policy of VMI violated the equal protection clause, the majority opinion relied on ‘intermediate scrutiny’ test applied in the prior case of Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. In the Hogan case, the Court employed the ‘intermediate scrutiny’ test, but applied this in terms of the ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ standard. The standard ...

United States and China

I. Legal System The United States criminal legal system is based on the British Common Law system. Common law refers to those laws that are created and imposed by judges in the absence of specific a specific code or applicable statute defining the law (LaFave, 2000). Accordingly, during the early years of the nation when a judge was faced with a criminal activity that was not covered by a statute, he would use precedent, or refer to the decisions of similar cases, for guidance. Absent statute and precedent, the judge would simple use his best legal, professional and personal judgment to make ...

Forensic Evidence 1: Kumho Tire Co. V. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999)Facts Patrick Carmichael was driving his minivan on July 6, 1993 when its right rare tire burst was causing the van to turn over. As a result, one passenger died, and several others sustained injuries. Carmichael, enjoined by the survivors and the deceased’s representatives, instituted an action against the tire manufacturer and distributor. They claimed that the accident was caused by a fault in the tire. The claimant’s case by and large relied on the expert opinion of a tire failure analyst. According to the expert opinion, ...

Facts: Gucci America, Inc., is a New York Corporation which headquarters are located in New York City. Gucci is engaged in manufacturing and distributing luxury goods: footwear, belts, sunglasses, wallets being sold worldwide. Gucci uses twenty-one federally registered trademarks. Wang Huoqing, a resident of the People’s Republic of China, has been discovered by Gucci to operate numerous Web sites offering for sale products which illicitly bear Gucci’s trademarks. Gucci hired a private investigator in California to buy goods from Wang Huoqing Web sites. The investigator bought a wallet labeled Gucci which was counterfeit. After that, Gucci claimed Wang Huoqing. ...

Introduction

Criminal justice has since been a long-standing issue in the city of Oakland, California, not least because of its effectiveness in combating crime. In fact, Oakland currently stands as perhaps the most crime-ridden city not only in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA), but also throughout California, with alarming rises in homicide and robbery cases. Such owes largely to the ineffectiveness of the Oakland Police Department (OPD) – a matter this essay seeks to elaborate through reviews on the articles written by Robert Gammon for the East Bay Express and Jonathan Mahler for The New York Times.

The Contemporary State of Criminal Justice in Oakland

The perceived incompetence of the ...

Introduction

The Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act is a law that has been codified in the United States that was specifically made to establish the grounds and limitations as to whether a foreign entity, or a foreign sovereign nation at that, can be charged and be subject to trial in a U.S. federal or state court . Apart from being a common legal ground for various legal cases that mostly involve multi-national entities or those that have different international origins, the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FISA) may also be used as a strong basis—in fact, in many legal cases, it the Act is being used as the sole ...

20-8: A Question of Ethics New Orleans Paddlewheels, Inc. (NOP), is a Louisiana corporation formed in 1982, when James Smith, Sr., and Warren Reuther were its only shareholders, with each holding 50 percent of the stock. NOP is part of a sprawling enterprise of tourism and hospitality companies in New Orleans. The positions on the board of each company were split equally between the Smith and Reuther families. At Smith’s request, his son James Smith, Jr. (JES), became involved in the businesses. In 1999, NOP’s board elected JES as president, in charge of day-to-day operations, and Reuther as chief ...

As most students learn in American history class, even during middle school, the American government was designed so that each of the three branches would have some control over the other two. That way, the runaway totalitarianism that made life under the British monarchy so outrageous would not characterize life in the United States. One of the earliest Supreme Court decisions, Marbury v. Madison, established the precedent that the courts could review acts of legislation passed by the legislative branch and authorized by the executive branch and, in instances where the courts found those acts to violate the constitution, ...