Does &quot;statistically significant&quot; have a specific legal meaning? I occasionally write expert opinions as a statistician or econometrician for legal cases in the United States. On a few different cases, I have been hired to determine whether a given sample should be considered statistically significant, usually at the request of a judge. In other words, does it have enough observations/records? In standard statistical terminology, this is nonsense. A sample can't be statistically significant or not. Statistical significance is something that applies to the results of hypothesis tests, not samples, and the same sample can be used to conduct hypothesis tests that turn out statistically significant and also tests that turn out not to be. So far, I've just assumed that what they really want is for me to calculate the margin of error, and I do so. I've had no complaints. But seeing the same thing multiple times makes me wonder if I'm missing something. Is there a specific legal meaning of &quot;statistical significance&quot;, separate from the typical statistical meaning, that I should be looking at?
Most judges went to law school Therefore, my null hypothesis is that they have next to no knowledge of statistics and couldn’t tell a median from a mean on their best, let alone, their average day - mean, median, or mode. Courts turn to experts to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. If they are asking the wrong questions, then it is the expert’s job to, respectfully, tell them so and guide them to the right questions. However, you shouldn’t guess what the right question is. “Excuse me, your honour, the term “statistical significance” can’t be applied to a data set, only to the result of an a priori null-hypothesis tested against that data set.” Feel free to explain p hacking if necessary. Ask the judge to explain, in layman’s term, what they want from you. Feel free to admit that just like you don’t understand their legal jargon, you don’t expect them to understand your statistical jargon; if everyone speaks plain English, you can go and do your statistics thing and they can go and do their law-talking thing.
Yes. Opening statements and closing arguments are part of the record, but they are not evidence on the merits of the case. Courts often cite them in their rulings on various issues, especially because they are strong indicators of a party's theory of the case and what the jury was being encouraged to consider when rendering a verdict.
In the example given, both elements must be established. This is the most common meaning of the word &quot;and&quot; in a statute or rule or contract or other writing, but there are times when &quot;and&quot; does not have that meaning. One must always determine the meaning from context on a case by case basis. Words do not have a single universal meaning in all contexts for legal purposes. This variation by context in the meaning of words for legal purposes is especially frequent in countries with common law legal systems based upon the English legal system such as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and India to have situations where a word often means one thing in one legal context and another thing in different legal contexts. This is because the governing statutes and case law are written on a piecemeal basis by many different people with no one in charge of maintaining stylistic uniformity, over a very long period of time (often centuries). In countries like those of Continental Europe, Latin America and much of Asia and Africa, which have what are called &quot;civil law&quot; systems, that are based on European civil codes, there are comprehensive codifications of the basic laws of the land that are drafted by experts all at the same time, and amended only with great deliberation and care, and these codes tend to use a word more consistently in most contexts than common law legislatures and judges do, although even then, this principle is not absolute.
While &quot;clause&quot; has a specific definition in linguistics, that is not how it is used in laws and legal documents. These terms have no standard definition for legal writing. Documents or legal codes that use both generally use &quot;article&quot; to mean a larger division than &quot;clause&quot; does. In discussion of the US Federal Constitution, for example, the largest divisions are called &quot;articles&quot;, each of which is divided into several &quot;sections&quot;, and each section generally contains several &quot;clauses&quot;. Some of these are actually grammatical clauses, being part of a sentence with a verb and a subject, while others might be called paragraphs in ordinary prose. A given document or legal code should ideally define which terms it will use for its parts, and which contain which others. This can be done in whatever way the drafters wish, but it is desirable that it be clear. In addition to the terms you have mentioned, terms often used include &quot;subsection&quot;, &quot;subsubsection&quot;, &quot;title&quot;, &quot;paragraph&quot;, &quot;subparagraph&quot;, &quot;chapter&quot;, &quot;part&quot; and &quot;division&quot;. These are not used consistently, and I have never seen a single document or code that uses all of them. The Us law code is divided into titles, each of which contains sections. In some of these sets of related sections are grouped into chapters. Sections may have subsections or paragraphs. In my experience smaller contracts or business documents rarely use &quot;articles&quot; and some just use &quot;section&quot; for any named or numbered part of the document. Usually titles or section headers are explicitly stated to have no legal effect, and the division into sections or other parts is simply to facilitate reference, and does not have legal significance. Whether a provision is called an article, a section, or a clause will not normally change its legal effect. However, where one part of a document refers to another part, such as &quot;as specified in section 23&quot; then the reference will be found in and only in the designated part, and will not be looked for in some other part.
The standard of proof is "on the balance of probabilities", or, "preponderance of evidence", meaning that your claim must be more probable than the other guy's claim. Rules of evidence may preclude using certain kinds of evidence such as rule 403 The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence A supernatural alternative can, in fact, defeat all forms of evidence, including forensics and "I saw it directly" testimony. The courts do not exclude evidence (all evidence) on the grounds that you can imagine a sci-fi scenario where "it didn't really happen". The rules of evidence more or less encode the cases where evidence is generally found to not be reliable.
Evaluating a potential copyright violation is very fact-intensive, so we don't have enough information to answer the question. Making a copy is generally going to be a copyright violation, but there's still going to be a lot of breathing room under the fair use doctrine. Again, we'd need more details to provide a useful answer, but you may be able to analyze the question yourself using the following information. Analysis of fair-use defenses looks at four questions, and the answers to the questions can tip the scales in favor of or against a finding of fair use: Does your kind of copying affect the market for the original? To what extent can your copy fulfill the demand for the original? What if there were widespread copying of the kind you're considering? The more potential there is for the copies to replace the original, the less likely it is to be fair use. This is the most important factor in the analysis. Why did you make the copy? If you made the copy for purposes of news reporting, criticism, or commentary, it's more likely to be fair use. If you made a copy just so you could watch again later whenever you feel like it, that's may still be fair use, but it is somewhat less likely. If you made a copy so you could sell it for profit, that's almost certainly not fair use. How much did you copy? Did you copy the whole thing, or did you copy only as much as you needed to achieve your purpose under Question 2? If you copy "too much" -- both in the raw amount and as a fraction of the whole work -- it's less likely to be fair use. What did you copy? Such works can be copyrighted but are not part of the Highly creative works, such as poems, music, and movies, are at the "core" of copyright principles. A fair use analysis will be more stringent in these cases than when copying a purely factual work, such as a phone book, biography, or list of statistics. This is the least important factor in the analysis. So take all of those and imagine the answer to each on a spectrum. If you see things generally tipping in the direction of fair use, that's a good indication that you're going to be safe. If you see things tipping in the other direction, you may want to reconsider. Again, these can be notoriously tricky questions. If you're dealing with a real situation, you should consult an attorney to get an answer specific to your situation.
The court decides and there is precedent This type of definition is very common and the legislative intent is to give the court discretion to decide whether the particular relationship in the particular case is a “dating relationship”. The precedent for these is that the rules of statutory interpretation apply, primarily, what does the law say on plain reading? Well, this law gives three facts that need to be determined from the evidence (those in part B). When those facts are known, considering them as a totality, is it “continuing serious relationship of a romantic or intimate nature” and is it ongoing or “recent”. Once a court of record decides this for a case, that will set a precedent for similar fact patterns. That is, if the facts are close in another case, the result of whether it is or isn’t a romantic relationship will follow from the precedent. Other cases with dissimilar facts will set different precedents. In that way the woolly line will get more clear as individual cases are decided.
On an issue of pure law, an appellate court decides if the trial judge got it right or wrong from scratch, and if there is a case that is a better match than the one that the judge used that leads to a different outcome in the case, then an appellate court is likely to find that the trial court's ruling is a reversible error. On an issue of mixed fact and law, or on a legal issue where a judge has more discretion in how the law is applied (like many evidentiary issues), a judge is given more deference, and the judge will generally only be reversed if no reasonable judge could have applied the correct law to the facts viewed in the light in which the judge saw them, and then, only if an application of the correct law to the facts viewed in the light in which the judge saw them would have changed the outcome of the case. There are a couple of ways that this standard of review is described, one of which is called "abuse of discretion" review.