BLS Library Blog

This article addresses a nagging issue in the field of scientific evidence: What should the legal system do when experts developing a statistical approach to forensic identification are making good progress, but are not provably more accurate than experts who make judgments, often convincing judgments, based upon the their analysis of the specific facts of each case? That is the state of affairs in the field of authorship attribution: Computer scientists and computational linguists develop and test their models while a group of forensic linguists continues to testify in cases without mathematical checks on their conclusions. The legal system rightly prefers algorithmic expertise over intuitive expertise, but when it is not clear that the algorithms do a better job, the question becomes more difficult. The article discusses the psychological literature on the question of algorithm versus intuition and applies it to authorship attribution. It concludes that the insights of the intuitive experts, sometimes called practitioners of forensic stylistics, may have a great deal to contribute to the models created by the computational experts; that practitioners of stylistic comparison have an obligation to conduct far more research into the accuracy of their methods, including, in the short-run, proficiency testing; and that a healthy combination of cooperation and competition is gradually leading to improvements in the field and convergence around those methods that prove successful.

In Abraham v. American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc., Brooklyn Federal Judge William F. Kuntz II of the Eastern District of New York ruled against several hundred current and former homeowners rejecting their mass action attempt, finding that they were joined improperly. The defendants were several dozen mortgage originators and servicers including MERSCORP Holdings Inc. Plaintiffs alleged that the defendants induced them to enter into mortgages based on inflated appraisals; purposefully avoided local recordation statutes, thereby clouding the plaintiffs’ titles; transferred, bundled, packaged and sold their mortgages to investors simultaneously betting against those mortgages; and failed to use Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, funds to help the plaintiffs, as required under law. The suit originated in New York Supreme Court, Kings County, in May 2012 but one of the defendants had the case removed to the federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(A)

Judge Kuntz rejected the mass action attempt by the plaintiffs, finding that they were joined improperly. A “mass action” is defined as any civil action in which monetary relief claims of 100 or more persons are proposed to be tried together on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ claims involve common question of law or fact. “According to the allegations in the complaint, Plaintiffs engaged in separate loan transactions with different lenders in different offices in different states over a nine-year period. It is well established that separate loan transactions by different lenders do not constitute a single transaction or occurrence and claims by plaintiffs who engaged in those separate transactions generally cannot be joined in a single action,” Kuntz wrote. “Indeed, even claims by plaintiffs who engaged in separate loan transactions by the same lender cannot be joined in a single action.

Judge Kuntz also ruled that the plaintiffs failed to plead “sufficient factual matter” to state a claim to relief that is “plausible on its face.” “Plaintiffs appear to argue that their claims arise out of a common series of transactions because ‘Defendants were involved in a common scheme and plan,’” Kuntz wrote. “Plaintiffs have not provided any factual allegations supporting these contentions, such as evidence that Plaintiffs’ individual mortgages were based on inflated appraisals or specific omissions by particular employees responsible for issuing Plaintiffs’ mortgages.

See Brooklyn Law School Library’s copy of A Practitioner’s Guide to Class Actions by Marcy Greer ( Call #KF8896.P735.2010) for more on the subject of class actions. This comprehensive guide provides practitioners with an understanding of the intracacies of the class action lawsuit.

LLRX, the “go-to” website for researchers seeking to leverage the expanding expertise and knowledge of legal resources, has published in its May 2013 edition an article titled Negotiating Justice: The New Constitutional Spectrum of Plea Bargaining by Ken Strutin. The article focuses on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Missouri v. Frye, 132 S.Ct. 1399 (2012) and Laflerv. Cooper, 132 S.Ct. 1376 (2012), and the upcoming appeal in Burt v. Titlow. The cases have divided practitioners and scholars into two camps: (1) those who consider the rulings to be a new statement in the law of plea bargaining and right to effective assistance of counsel; and (2) those who believe they are only a restatement of established principles. The cases have generated interest in the regulation of plea bargaining, the ethics and effectiveness of defense counsel as negotiator, the oversight of prosecutors regarding charging decisions, sentence recommendations and pre-trial discovery, and the scope of federal habeas corpus review and remedies.

Users of the Brooklyn Law School Library who want to research the subject of plea bargaining have access to The Ethics of Plea Bargaining by Richard L. Lippke (Call # K5458 .L57 2011). The book offers a full-length philosophical analysis of the ethics of plea bargaining and develops a sustained argument for restrained forms of the practice and against the free-wheeling versions that predominate in the United States. It offers an ethical argument for restrained forms of plea bargaining and provides a comparison between the different plea bargaining regimes that exist within the US, where it is well-established, England and Wales, where the practice is coming under considerable critique, and the European Union, where debate continues on whether it coheres with inquisitorial legal regimes. Addressing concerns about rewards for admitting guilt, penalties for exercising the right to trial, and the deliberate over-charging by prosecutors and charge bargaining, the author argues that the negotiation of charges and sentences should remain the exception, not the rule.

The Court of Appeals used the three-pronged test laid out in Brunner v. New York State Higher Educ. Services, 831 F. 2d 395 (2d Cir. 1987): (i) the debtor could not have maintained a minimal standard of living, if required to repay the full loans, (ii) circumstances indicated that the debtor’s inability to repay his loans would persist into the future, and (iii) the debtor made a good faith effort to repay his loans. The Court found that the Bankruptcy Court had not made any errors, had examined the evidence, had used the Brunner test, and that the reversal by the District Court was wrong. The Court then remanded the case back to the District Court to reinstate the discharge which the Bankruptcy Court ordered.

For more on the topic, see the Brooklyn Law School Library copy of Discharging Student Loans in Bankruptcy by David J. Light (Call # KF1530.D4 L54 2009). Contents include Legislative history of student loan dischargeability; Discharging student loans under Chapter 7; Discharging student loans under Chapter 13.

The latest edition the Brooklyn Law School Library New Books List has 68 items that cover a broad range of legal topics. All of the titles provide users of the BLS Library with content that can help their research needs on a wide number of subjects. These items on the list deal, to select just a few, deal with themes that are newsworthy and perhaps controversial: Capital Punishment’s Collateral Damage by Robert M. Bohm (Call #HV8699.U5 B64 2013); Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice by Karen Houppert (Call #KF336 .H68 2013); Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century by Alex Sayf Cummings (Call #KF3035 .C86 2013); The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform by Andrew Koppelman (Call #KF3605 .K67 2013); Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyersby Jill Norgren (Call #KF367 .N67 2013); and Payback: The Case for Revenge by Thane Rosenbaum (Call #K5103 .R674 2013). 
Readers of this blog post who want a preview any of these items can click on the links above to see the item record which contains information about on the subjects for the selected book and a dust jacket for the book. When an item in the BLS Library catalog has a dust jacket, users can click on it to get use Amazon’s Search Inside feature which allows users to find the exact book to borrow from the BLS Library. SARA, the BLS Library catalog also has a browse shelf feature for each item record. By clicking on the browse shelf link next to an item’s call number, users will be able to  quickly see what other items are located next to the item in the record.  This is useful for researchers who are interested in a specific topic or an author and would like to see what else the library might own quickly. 

Early Summer Hours: May 20 – May 31, 2013

Seven days a week:  9:00am – 10:00pm

Memorial Day, Monday, May 27th, 9:00am – 10:00pm

Summer Hours: June 1 – July 29, 2013

Sunday – Thursday:  9:00am – 12Midnight

Friday & Saturday:  9:00am – 10:00pm

Independence Day, Thursday, July 4th:  9:00am – 10:00pm

Late Summer Hours, July 30 – August 11, 2013

Sunday:  10:00am – 10:00pm

Monday – Saturday:  9:00am – 10:00pm

Have a great summer!

When you are done with finals and need a night at home on the couch, look no further than the library’s collection of DVDs for a fun and low-cost movie night. We have many recent titles, including:

Too Big to Fail

“Based on the bestselling book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big To Fail offers an intimate look at the epochal financial crisis of 2008 and the powerful men and women who decided the fate of the world’s economy in a matter of a few weeks. Centering on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the film goes behind closed doors to examine the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington.” – Amazon.com

Paradise Lost Trilogy

“The landmark documentary that sparked an international movement to ‘Free the West Memphis Three’, PARADISE LOST investigates the gruesome 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys and the three teenagers accused of killing them as part of a Satanic ritual. From real-life courtroom drama and clandestine jailhouse interviews to behind-the-scenes strategy meetings and intimate moments with grief-stricken families, acclaimed filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were granted unprecedented access to all the players involved, capturing the events as they unfolded. REVELATIONS delves deeply into the shocking aftermath of the trials, updating the story seven years after the murders. With Echols on death row and Baldwin and Misskelley serving life sentences, PURGATORY picks up the story and reexamines the horrifying crime with fresh insights that only the passage of time can provide. Facts are reexamined, new evidence is revealed and new suspects are scrutinized.” – Amazon.com

Stonewall Uprising

“Stonewall Uprising explores the dramatic event that launched a worldwide rights movement. When police raided a Mafia-run gay bar in Greenwich Village the Stonewall Inn on June 28 1969 gay men and women did something they had not done before: they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.” – Amazon.com

Margin Call

“Set in the high-stakes world of Wall Street, Margin Call is an entangling thriller involving the key players at an investment firm during the earliest hours of the 2008 financial crisis. When an entry-level analyst unlocks information that could prove to be the downfall of the firm, a roller-coaster ride ensues as the firm’s employees must weigh whether to save their own company (and their jobs) at the risk of fleecing millions of investors.” – Amazon.com

Inside Job

“From Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (NO END IN SIGHT), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.” – Amazon.com

Check one out today!

The Senate, by a vote of 69-27, passed S. 336, the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013, a bill designed to restore States’ sovereign rights to enforce State and local sales and use tax laws. The legislation seeks to reverse the decision of Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 US 298 (1992) in which the Supreme Court ruled that States cannot require a retailer to collect sales taxes on its behalf, unless that retailer has a physical presence in the taxing state.  The Marketplace Fairness Act eliminates the Quill standard and would allow States that meet certain minimal standards to require retailers in all States to collect taxes for them.

The BLS Library has in its internet collection a report from the Congressional Research Service “Amazon Laws” and Taxation of Internet Sales: Constitutional Analysis which examines efforts by States to tax internet sales. According to the report, New York was one of the first to do so. On March 28, 2013, the New York Court of Appeals found New York’s Amazon tax constitutional in Amazon.com, LLC v. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. That decision is important because, since New York enacted Tax Law §1101(b)(8)(vi) in 2008, eight other states have passed similar laws.

New York Law School Law Review has a new symposium issue, Volume 57, Issue 4, Trial by Jury or Trial by Motion? Summary Judgment, Iqbal, and Employment Discrimination. The issue is based on a symposium held at New York Law School in April 2012 which examined evidence that civil rights cases, especially those alleging employment discrimination, are susceptible to dismissal before trial as well as to unfavorable judgment notwithstanding the verdict after trial.

Among the many contributors who include practitioners, judges, and academics is Brooklyn Law School Professor Elizabeth M. Schneider who with Harvard Law Professor Nancy Gertner co-wrote the article “Only Procedural”: Thoughts on the Substantive Law Dimensions of Preliminary Procedural Decisions in Employment Discrimination Cases, 57 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 767 (2012-2013), which focuses on the “substantive law dimensions” of the procedural decisions that federal courts make in employment discrimination cases. Professors Scheider and Gertner take the Supreme Court decision Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. ___ (2011), which limited the availability of class actions as the starting point for their argument. 

The other articles published in the issue give an in-depth look at pretrial motion practice in employment discrimination cases both from the point of view of practitioners and academics, offering practical suggestions for attorneys for plaintiffs and guidance for judges in ruling on pretrial motions.