A UNC School of Government Blog
Jeff Welty 
Shea Denning, who is the motor vehicle and DWI expert on the School of Government’s faculty, has read, re-read, and re-re-read State v. Fowler and State v. Palmer, the recent Court of Appeals cases concerning the special procedures for motions to suppress and motions to dismiss in DWI cases. The product of her labors is … Read more
Several interesting news items have cropped up recently. First, the United States Supreme Court decided District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, in which a 5-4 majority ruled that there is no constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing. Having slogged through the whole decision, my sense is that it will have limited impact in North Carolina given … Read more
It seems that video cameras are everywhere, these days: at the bank, at every youth soccer game, in jails and prisons, at Wal-Mart. One often-cited (but apparently questionable) statistic suggests that Londoners are caught on camera 300 times per day. Americans, too, are videotaped frequently. Some of the cameras belong to police departments, who often … Read more
The Supreme Court (Washington, not Raleigh) has been exceptionally busy with criminal law matters over the last few months. As readers of this blog know, two of the blockbuster decisions this Term have been Arizona v. Gant, which severely restricted vehicle searches incident to arrest, and Herring v. United States, which held that the exclusionary … Read more
Editor’s note: Several readers have reported technical difficulties with the blog. I’m trying to solve the problem, but in the meantime, (1) it seems to be limited to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer, so using a different browser may help, and (2) the last two days’ posts should be viewable here and here. My apologies. … Read more
My wife reads celebrity gossip magazines, and one she brought home recently featured a couple who (a) apparently like to hit the nightspots (not necessarily with one another) and (b) have eight children. I assume that they don’t bring the kids with them when they go out on the town, and I don’t have any … Read more
I’m getting ready to teach a session at the Superior Court Judges’ Conference about searches of computers and other electronic devices, so I’ve been reading all the computer search cases I can get my hands on. Recently, I stumbled on United States v. Crespo-Rios, __ F. Supp. 2d __, 2009 WL 1595463 (D. Puerto Rico … Read more
North Carolina has been all over the web recently. The News and Observer’s habitual felon article, which I discussed in a previous post, has made a splash on several of the most-read criminal law blogs — here and here (both links involve some scrolling) — with some of the reaction being positive, and some less … Read more
Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court decided a case that could have been the subject of a John Grisham novel. The case is Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company, and the basic facts are as follows. Massey is a huge coal mining conglomerate. Caperton is the president of a much smaller company. Caperton and his … Read more
The second most interesting news story of the past couple of days is a New York Times piece about the looming demise of some of the nation’s biggest law firms. Wait, you mean the business model of paying brand-new law school graduates $160,000 per year to review documents isn’t working? But the most interesting news … Read more