Balough
December 14, 2013
A trial court erred when, prior to trial, it restrained a former wife from posting on the internet allegedly defamatory statements about her former husband. The California appeals court found that to obtain an injunction before trial, “a proponent has a heavy burden to show the countervailing interest is compelling, the prior restraint is […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A Texas statute that prohibits the advertising or sale of sexual devices was declared a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment by a federal appeals court. The decision reversed the trial court’s finding that the plaintiffs, who marketed and sold sexual devices, had failed to state a cause of action. The Texas statute criminalized the selling, […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn quoted Richard C. Balough in a column discussing whether a principal who was caught on tape having sex in his office has any privacy rights. The column by Zorn pointed out that in Illinois there is no criminal statute against taking videos in an office when no audio is also […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A person who had Circuit City install a new DVD drive on his computer waived any right to privacy when the store found child pornography during a test of the new system, a Pennsylvania appellate court found. The ruling reversed the trial court’s suppression of the results of a search of Kenneth Sodomsky’s computer that […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
As widely anticipated, a federal judge has found the 1998 Child Online Privacy Act (COPA) violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. U.S. District Court Judge Lowell A. Reed Jr. found that the Act, which attempts to protect children from pornographic Internet sites by making it a crime for Web sites to allow […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Attaching a global positioning device on a car to track the suspect’s movements without a warrant does not constitute an unlawful search, the Seventh Circuit has found. However, if the government someday institutes a program of mass surveillance of vehicular movements, then the Court said it would “decide whether the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
A hospital is not liable for a phlebotomist’s casual comment, revealing the results of plaintiff’s pregnancy test, when the comment was made to plaintiff’s twin sister in a bar because the comment was not made in the course of employment, the Illinois Supreme Court found. “The only reasonable inference from the undisputed facts was that […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
A Marine Corps officer has an expectation of privacy in her e-mail messages sent and stored in a government computer system, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces found. The e-mails were from the officer’s account stored on an unclassified government computer system on which she had authorized limited personal use. The […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
The “pandering” provisions of the federal child pornography law are unconstitutionally overly-broad and vague, the Eleventh Circuit found, reversing a conviction under the statute. The PROTECT Act, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2252A(a)(3)(B) provides that it is a crime for any person to advertise, promote, distribute or solicit “any material or purported material in a manner that […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
A hospital may be liable for one of its employees giving out confidential health information in a bar, an Illinois Appellate Court found. Illini Community Hospital was sued by a patient after her positive pregnancy test was revealed to her twin sister by a hospital employee having drinks in a bar. The hospital filed a […]
