33rd & 424th District Courts

OK, color me crazy but I thought the Geesa (Geesa v.

The question "on ho wmany previous occasions have you qualified as an expert" is objectionable hearsay, or so says Edward J. Imwinkelried in an article in the October 31, 2005 issue of The National Law Journal.  I agree.

Address for the Texas Child Support Disbursement Unit a/k/a State Disbursement Unit or simply SDU.

PO Box 659791, San Antonio, TX 78265-9791.

The following is taken from the online Sup. Ct. emails of synopses of cases and is of broad enough interest to replicate here.

03-0448

Texas A&M University v. Paul A. Bishop

from Galveston County and the 14th District Court of Appeals, Houston

Justices Brister and Green did not participate

REVERSED AND DISMISSED, opinion by Justice O’Neill:

The principal issues in this
personal-injury suit arising from an accidental stabbing during a
student play are (1) whether the play’s director was an independent
contractor or university employee and (2) whether, if the directors
were independent contractors, the Texas Tort Claims Act’s exception for
the use of tangible personal property is triggered when a student actor
accidentally stabbed another with a knife provided by the independent
contractor during a play the faculty advisors supervised. In this case
Bishop, a student actor, was stabbed by another student during
performance of the play “Dracula.” The play’s director had approved use
of a real knife with a “stab pad,” but the faculty drama club advisors
testified they were unaware of that decision. University policy forbids
dangerous weapons on campus. The court of appeals affirmed the trial
court’s judgment in Bishop’s favor, holding that the faculty advisors
were negligent in supervision of the play and that negligence was a use
of tangible personal property.

We (judges and lawyers alike) frequently deal with the "Objection, 401, 404b, 403" litany and we know intellectually what all that means, but do we have a structure within which to actually "run the traps" on the filter that those sections of the Evidence Code provide?

There is an interesting article on a site regarding emails and confidentiality, entitled Email, Privilege, Condifential Information and Inadvertent Disclosures by Rebecca J. Foote of the firm of Ford Marrin Esposito Witmeyer & Gleser, L.L.P., New York.

In case you don't get enough of it from the news media, the Peterson trial is extensively covered, analyzed, dissected, editorialized, commented upon and otherwise reported about on the CourtTV Peterson site. That link is to the jury blog itself but there are many links in the sidebar.

A 'web page archive' is a page that is no longer an active page on the web but which has been archived by a search engine. Google does this and there is a site whose sole function is to archive web pages.

On the front page is a Google search box. It does not search this site but the box at the upper right of the front page does. So what about this Google search?

Christine Delmas kindly forwarded some major news about new CLE and research tools on the http://texasbarcle.com/ site. In this article I will repeat all of that for the benefit of those who might not be on the Yahoo Groups email list and for the continued edification of those who are. Note: The links below may not work unless you are logged into the bar site.

keywords: confrontation clause, sixth (6th) amendment.
The case: Crawford v. Washington, ___ U.S. ___, 124 S. Ct 1354 (2004) (158 L.Ed.2d 177, 72 USLW 4229, 63 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 1077, 4 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 2017, 2004 Daily Journal D.A.R. 2949).

If you are a news junkie, legal news or otherwise, you need to read this.

News aggregation is the use of an online software tool to gather news items in one place. Most portals (e.g. Yahoo and the like) do some degree of pulling together various news sources and placing them on a single page.

However, there is a better way to do it. Actually a couple of ways.

One way is to have a web page on which 'newsfeeds' can be aggregated. That was formerly done on this site but when nobody ever looked at it, I moved all of my feeds to my personal site.

Effective immediately mediator fees do not need to be paid via the District Clerk's office. The mediator is to be paid directly and the mediator will be solely responsible for the fiscal matters with the attorneys and parties.

Document Management in the Digital Age - From the Network of Trial Law Firms
"When formulating a document retention plan, remember that documents today are not always on paper."

There appears to be a consensus that the discovery stay during the mediation period (the period between the issuance of the order for mediation and the mediation date) should be deleted.

If anyone wants to weigh in pro or con, vote in the POLL (left column, near bottom) and add a comment there if you wish to further amplify your thoughts on the matter.

The Honorable Greg Abbott
Attorney General of Texas
Attn: Opinion Committee
P.O. Box 12548
Austin, Texas 78711-2548

Re: Is the Texas grandparent access statute, Section 153.433 of’the Texas Family Code, unconstitutional based on the United States Supreme Court ruling in Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000)

Discuss in this forum the effectiveness of CPS, ways that the Court can differently handle the CPS cases, modifications that might be made to orders, etc.

Feel free to "vent" as may be necessary or helpful to your own mental health, but I'd like to also solicit your ideas about positive improvements that I can make in our processes.

The following has been shamelessly lifted from Steve Volk, Footnote/Endnote Citation Form: A Short Guide by Steve Volk, Oberlin College, http://www.oberlin.edu/faculty/svolk/citation.htm (2004). I feared that it might one day not still be on the web and thought it to be so handy that it should be preserved here.

Footnote-Endnote Citation Form