Reforming the Summary Judgment Problem: The Consensus Requirement

If one or more federal trial or appellate court judges disagree on whether summary judgment should be ordered, summary judgment can still be granted when an appellate majority finds in favor of summary judgment. The case will be dismissed, and a jury will not try it. Logically, however, should this occur? At least one judge has stated that a reasonable jury could find for the party against whom summary judgment has been ordered. In these situations where judges disagree on whether summary judgment should be granted, they often portray the case’s facts in very different ways—what I refer to as “massaging facts. The massaging of facts, along with the issues of summary judgment’s unconstitutionality and the underlying reasonable jury standard’s impossibility, make summary judgment legally problematic. At the same time, courts extensively employ summary judgment to dismiss many factually intensive cases, including police brutality and sexual harassment cases. Given that summary judgment has no prospect of being eliminated any time soon, the question is whether the “summary judgment problem” can be reformed to make the procedure more defensible. This Article explains the summary judgment problem including the concept of massaging facts. It then analyzes “the consensus requirement”—an effort to make summary judgment more justifiable given its continued use today

On Chase Termination Beyond Stratification

We study the termination problem of the chase algorithm, a central tool in various database problems such as the constraint implication problem, Conjunctive Query optimization, rewriting queries using views, data exchange, and data integration. The basic idea of the chase is, given a database instance and a set of constraints as input, to fix constraint violations in the database instance. It is well-known that, for an arbitrary set of constraints, the chase does not necessarily terminate (in general, it is even undecidable if it does or not). Addressing this issue, we review the limitations of existing sufficient termination conditions for the chase and develop new techniques that allow us to establish weaker sufficient conditions. In particular, we introduce two novel termination conditions called safety and inductive restriction, and use them to define the so-called T-hierarchy of termination conditions. We then study the interrelations of our termination conditions with previous conditions and the complexity of checking our conditions. This analysis leads to an algorithm that checks membership in a level of the T-hierarchy and accounts for the complexity of termination conditions. As another contribution, we study the problem of data-dependent chase termination and present sufficient termination conditions w.r.t. fixed instances. They might guarantee termination although the chase does not terminate in the general case. As an application of our techniques beyond those already mentioned, we transfer our results into the field of query answering over knowledge bases where the chase on the underlying database may not terminate, making existing algorithms applicable to broader classes of constraints.Comment: Technical Report of VLDB 2009 conference versio

PREVIEW; \u3cem\u3e City of Helena v. Parsons\u3c/em\u3e: Reckless Vigilante or Good Samaritan Done Wrong?

This case arises from Ronald Parsons’ (“Parsons”) actions that ended a police chase outside an elementary school in Helena in March of 2016. The city of Helena (“Helena”) charged Parsons with negligent endangerment and reckless driving because he maneuvered his truck and trailer to block the route of a suspect evading law enforcement, which caused the suspect to crash. The Arrest by a Private Person statute authorizes a person to use reasonable force to arrest another when there is probable cause to believe that the person is committing or has committed an offense. Parsons attempted to use this statute as a defense, but was barred from doing so as both the municipal court and the district court concluded that the statute was inapplicable to Parsons’ criminal case. The jury was therefore not instructed on the statute in any way, and Parsons was convicted on both charges. Parsons appeals what he contests were substantially prejudicial rulings, which led to his conviction. The main issue here is whether, by not instructing the jury on the Arrest by a Private Person statute, the court substantially prejudiced Parsons and deprived him of a fair trial

PREVIEW; \u3cem\u3e City of Helena v. Parsons\u3c/em\u3e: Reckless Vigilante or Good Samaritan Done Wrong?

This case arises from Ronald Parsons’ (“Parsons”) actions that ended a police chase outside an elementary school in Helena in March of 2016. The city of Helena (“Helena”) charged Parsons with negligent endangerment and reckless driving because he maneuvered his truck and trailer to block the route of a suspect evading law enforcement, which caused the suspect to crash. The Arrest by a Private Person statute authorizes a person to use reasonable force to arrest another when there is probable cause to believe that the person is committing or has committed an offense. Parsons attempted to use this statute as a defense, but was barred from doing so as both the municipal court and the district court concluded that the statute was inapplicable to Parsons’ criminal case. The jury was therefore not instructed on the statute in any way, and Parsons was convicted on both charges. Parsons appeals what he contests were substantially prejudicial rulings, which led to his conviction. The main issue here is whether, by not instructing the jury on the Arrest by a Private Person statute, the court substantially prejudiced Parsons and deprived him of a fair trial

Letter from A. N. Wormser to J. A. Wormser

A long letter written by A. N. Wormser to J. A. Wormser, providing much information about the family migration to Iowa in considerable detail. A. N. Wormser paints a very negative picture of Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte and his colonizing efforts in Michigan, negative to the point of being slanderous. A.N.W. also writes negatively of Rev. Hendrik P. Scholte. Wormser takes a very dim view of the American way of doing things. Attached to his letter is a description of a cattle round-up.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/vrp_1840s/1178/thumbnail.jp