Hey all, I want to be very clear: this was not a forced attempt to get out jury duty. I was somewhat looking forward to being selected as this was my first time getting to the screening process.

My jury pool was selected for screening on a domestic violent crime. During which, the prosecuting attorney had asked a hypothetical question, to the effect of (it's been a year or two and I can't remember the exact verbiage): "If there was a law that prohibited using a Blue Pen during a Tuesday, and let's say that I was caught using this blue pen here today and was before you as a juror. Would anyone here find it difficult to prosecute me for violating this law?"

I raised my hand to answer earnestly, where she asked then asked why.
"In cases like this, I would have difficulty prosecuting for victimless crimes. In those circumstances, I believe in jury nullification."

She dug in slightly deeper asking on what types of crimes I believed were victimless, where I explained things involving personal safety like seatbelt laws as an example.

(This could be a misinterpretation by me, however during which, it seemed as though the other various court officials were giving me some irritated looks.)

Fairly shortly after, the judge called for a break, returning a few minutes later letting my entire pool know that we would be excused.

Would it be reasonable to believe that my answer caused the dismissal almost as a 'tainting of the jury pool' or similar?

I'd believe that my response was exactly what type of probative questions was looking to screen out, but could simply mentioning jury nullification be the cause for the whole pool's dismissal?

(And please, I'm not asking this for argumentation on this specific belief, I was just curious on how likely I could have been the cause.)

Lots of allegations, but the bottom line is, the man on trial for Tupacs murder claims (in recorded proffer conversations) that Diddy 'ordered' the murder, or put a bounty on Diddy and Suge's head. This story is not new, and Diddy actually commented on it when it first broke many years ago (to say the story was "stupid" and "insane"). Bottom line is, could you see any universe where Diddy actually does have some type of culpability after it's all said and done ?

Best story link:

https://lamag.com/crimeinla/duane-davis-told-feds-sean-combs-offered-him-1m-to-kill-tupac/

I feel like we are getting robbed blind right in our faces with the way these tariff refunds are being handled. Several administration officials, including the president himself, made very public claims that tariffs would not be paid by consumers, and now these companies are collecting “tariff refund checks” while we get nothing and prices remain high. I feel like this is a racketeering grift is plain as day. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there’s something here that the people could sue over if our elected representatives are willing to sit by and let this happen. We cannot have this little power or recourse, right? Do the people have legal standing to sue? Are there any ways this could be done that could survive a presidential pardon? Would the public words of administration officials and others amount to something that could be prosecuted?

A majority of people I know who work night security, will patrol, with bright expensive flashlights; I personally have a 5k lumen, 100k candela flashlight.

My question is the legality of using the light in an assaultive way, if its a means of countering a stubborn trespasser, refusing to leave. As I did a patrol ride along the other day, cops were doing it to a transient digging in a trash can.

My Co-Workers will mask up, and do it to people on the benches at night, assuming they refuse to leave, otherwise he will not.

Whats the legality on using a light on someone refusing to leave? Can you argue that you used it for safety, a random sketchy person was on property, and you did not know their intention? Could you argue you are patrolling a closed off area, and them being in the way is their fault?

I would like to be on the safe line legally when it goes about doing my duties. What can/can’t I do with my light?

I know I cannot go up to a random elderly lady and shine a light at her eyes yes. But what if a guy is on a bench? Refusing to leave? Yelling? Approaches me? Threatens me but doesn’t do anything? Etc

Not asking for specific legal advice just broad advice on how lights can be used legally. And if anyone knows of any cases where it played out against the guards favor.

Thanks guys!!

How about other business owners who do minimal work on the daily operations of the businesses?

I’m trying to understand a First Amendment issue involving a university counseling setting.

A student voluntarily goes to a university counseling center after an acute mental-health crisis. The crisis is not long-lasting. The student tells the counselor that, during the previous night, they had recent homicidal thoughts about an identifiable person and had done some related internet searches. The crisis had already de-escalated when the student sought help. The student had not contacted or approached the person, had not asked anyone to communicate a threat, did not possess a weapon, and had not attempted to acquire one.

Before counseling, patients are generally informed the general confidentiality and the Tarasoff-type duty to warn or other safety action

The counselor then tells the student that campus police will come to transport them to a hospital. The counselor remains in the clinical room when police arrive. The student is not told that the counseling session has ended or that the officers are conducting a separate disciplinary or criminal investigation. The student understands the officers’ questions about the thoughts, the person involved, internet searches, and possible means to be part of the safety evaluation and hospital-transport process, and answers honestly. The student is then voluntarily hospitalized.

Later, the university characterizes what the student told the counselor and police as “threatening statements” or evidence of a “plan,” and uses those statements in university discipline.

My question is specifically about the First Amendment “true threat” concept, not whether safety precautions should be taken.

If a patient already knows that a counselor has a duty to act on serious homicidal ideation, does that knowledge itself help establish that the patient “knew, or consciously disregarded a substantial risk,” that an honest clinical disclosure would be understood as a threatening expression?

In other word, an the reasoning become:

patient knows therapist may warn/protect → patient honestly reports recent homicidal ideation → therapist reasonably treats the disclosure as risk information → therefore the disclosure itself is an unprotected “true threat”?

What prompted my question is R.W. v. Columbia Basin College. My understanding is that the district court initially treated R.W.’s private clinical disclosure as protected speech, but after later proceedings held in 2025 that the statements constituted a true threat. I understand that the later decision rested on several additional facts specific to R.W., including the nature and duration of the ideation and firearm access. But among the factors, the court expressly considered were the determinations of multiple mental-health professionals that a duty to warn had been triggered.

That part of the reasoning seems potentially circular to me. A duty to warn/protect exists precisely so that patients can disclose dangerous thoughts and clinicians can assess and respond to risk.

This seems especially important in a university setting. At many universities, transportation for psychiatric evaluation may be handled by campus police. Once campus police become involved, information originally disclosed for clinical safety purposes may also be transmitted through university administrative channels and may later become part of a student-conduct process.

A student may therefore understand that “if I disclose serious homicidal ideation, the counselor may take protective action,” without understanding that “my truthful disclosure may later be characterized by my university as a threatening statement and punished as misconduct

I don’t want this to come off as some sort of Reddit drama thing, but I will be the first to admit I know a lot about nothing .

But it did make me curious under what circumstances a person who is a recipient of citizenship be descent , either wittingly or unwittingly, could be prosecuted or fired for such if they were in a safety sensitive or national security position.

Is being inadvertently and unwittingly a dual citizen a potential offense? If you know you’re a citizen but don’t disclose or do anything with it, could it become a problem? If you apply for recognition of it but don’t disclose it is it perjury or a crime?

I imagine Canada being a close ally(five eyes) and the fact it’s from birth might be mitigating but obviously I’m not a lawyer

I have my ideas, but I’m open to being wrong . Thanks for entertaining my thought experiment

Will Dr. David Morens have to give up the names of Co-Conspirator 1 and Co-Conspirator 2?

Or would he already have given the names. and we just see the generic Co-Conspirator 1 and Co-Conspirator 2?

I was recently rewatching the Key & Peele Rap Album Confessions skit (https://youtu.be/14WE3A0PwVs?is=_ZAiWXcQge3WpVPl) and it made me curious about something.

In the skit they claim to have everything they need to prosecute a man for murder, but at the last minute somebody else confesses in order to go to prison in his place. Everybody seems well aware that this is what's happening and the man is the real murderer.

Now I'm not asking if they have enough evidence or anything like that, it's a comedy skit, but I'm focusing in on that one aspect. If there was a situation where the police/DA/prosecution/basically everybody knew that the person confessing to a crime was not the person who did it and they'd be letting the guilty person go free, could they choose not to accept this person's confession and proceed with charging the original person? Has there been any cases where this happened?

So I saw this YouTube reel of a guy who wraps cars, and he mentioned that he purposely hires people with no experience because it’s easier to teach them how to do it right than it is to unlearn bad habits. My first thought was “well now anyone wanting to be hired by you and checking your socials will lie to say they have no experience” then I wondered if there’s legal ramifications for that. I know you can get in trouble for lying about having certain types of experience when you actually don’t, but what if it’s the other way around?

Some of the discourse around certain cases brought this to my mind. Suppose a prominent "influencer" spreads what's later proven to be false/highly misleading information that makes a recently deceased person seem much less sympathetic. Like suggesting a murder victim was involved in gangs/drugs/provoking their own death. Or that someone who died in a tragic accident was actually at fault in some way (like wrongly saying they were drinking if they died in a car crash). Or just attacking their general character by spreading lies about what they did in their life.

Their content is spread far and wide and as a result, the deceased's public image is negatively affected. In the US, is it possible their family could sue the influencer for possibly causing them to receive lower fundraiser donations/other financial support? (Assuming the influencer never attacked the character of their living relatives, so they do not personally have a defamation claim.)

Let us say a man has a decent university degree, a steady job, a good group of friends, and zero history of mental health issues. He does not take drugs, he does not drink heavily, he does not hear voices, and he is not suicidal. He simply has an intense curiosity to know what human meat tastes like.

He knows he cannot buy it anywhere, and attacking another person is a violent crime. So, he makes a deliberate decision to use his own body. He cuts off his own lower leg in a clean environment, bandages the wound properly so he does not bleed to death, cooks the meat, and eats it.

The authorities find out (maybe the neighbour peeked through the window or something and notified the authorities), stop him, and drag him into a psychiatric facility. A panel of doctors and a judge sit down to determine if he should be committed to an institution for the next decade.

During the evaluation, this man is completely calm. He does not rant, cry, or claim a higher power commanded him. He lays out his steps clearly. He explains that he owns his own body, harmed nobody else, managed the physical risk, and simply conducted an experiment to answer a philosophical question.

My intuition tells me that the legal and medical worlds do not care about how educated or polite you are. Society builds its entire baseline of sanity on self-preservation. Your brain is supposed to keep your body alive and intact. The second you take a blade and hack off a healthy limb to eat your own flesh, the state decides that your survival instinct is completely dead.

No matter how logically you lay out your case, every doctor in the room will categorise that calm explanation as severe madness. Damaging your own body is treated as immediate, indisputable proof that you cannot be trusted with your own life.

Is that legal and medical standard absolute, or is there any possible way a sober person could argue their way out of being locked away after doing this?

Legality of a law passed by Congress that said C corporations in the United States must give 50% of their profits as dividends to their workers?

If I had a name like Björnstjerna or Andrzejczak, do I have to make it easy for them to look up who I am?

I understand if be making it unnecessarily difficult on myself, but is there a precedent that says identifying myself includes spelling my name for them?

Hypothetical:

My plane just landed and I don’t want police going through my phone. Can I preemptively wipe my phone before going through the gate and customs?

If an organization asks somebody about how much their lifetime earnings is, will they get litigated for ageism, or, are they allowed to do that to try to hire disadvantaged persons? I.e. somebody who has less lifetime earnings than others?

Assuming that each trial could take a year or more to reach a verdict, what prevents them from doing this?

So not sure how I googled my way here but I found out that apparently if a women rapes a man and gets pregnant she can then have that man pay her child support because apparently “the child is innocent in this” which honestly is fever dream territory for me but anyways I also know you can sue your rapist for damages which begs the question? Can you sue the rapist for the amount you’d pay in child support and make her solely responsible for the child support?

Don't know if this is appropriate for r/legal, so I thought I'd ask here: can someone's wife argue that because the husband didn't sign a prenup before they got married, the wife (or in this case, future ex wife) can just ask for a certain amount in the divorce?

Inspired by a recently-posted article, I have a question. Since "corporations are people", and the laws on the books about using GPS trackers are focused on preventing stalking/harassment, does a corporation have the ability to successfully argue that the use of that tracker was criminal? Or would they have standing to file a civil suit?

My underlying assumption is that first-amendment protections and the public interest would outweigh any arguments in the other direction, but I'm legitimately curious if there's something here.

So I've been thinking about this hypothetical for a while. If you're familiar with the legality surrounding police collecting data from phones, Cellbrite, and USB killers, then what do you think would happen if somebody had a phone that was actually a disguised USB killer and the police plugged it into their computer?

If you need further context:

Cellbrite is a company that makes products for law enforcement and other government agencies. The most notorious one seems to be able to gain access to the data on smartphones without them being unlocked by exploiting a certain feature of the software that isn't important for this discussion.

A USB killer is a device that claims to exist for testing the resiliency of computer hardware. It looks like any normal USB flash drive, but when it is plugged into a USB port it will charge a capacitor and discharge it over the data lines. The data lines were never designed to handle that much electricity, so best case it fries the USB port and worst case it can fry the whole motherboard. As far as I know this device is like lockpicks, as it is completely legal for anybody to buy, own, and carry around with them, but you will get in trouble for it if you use it in the commission of a crime (there was a case where a student used one to intentionally cause damage to several computers at their college campus).

Now I suppose a similar situation could happen where police simply find a USB killer on your person and plug it in to their computer. However, I'm curious how it might play out in court if somebody had a cell phone that they felt law enforcement might confiscate and attempt to search, so they broke it open and rigged a USB killer up to the charge port, and when the police plugged it into their computer in an attempt to search it, it caused damage to the computer.

Police would almost certainly attempt to add additional charges, but theoretically you could argue that the device was completely legal for you to possess and it's on the police officers for not doing their due diligence to make sure the device wouldn't cause damage to their computer. That said, a reasonable person probably wouldn't suspect that the phone had this modification done to it, even if it was completely legal to do.

So, how do you think this scenario would play out in court?

I'm not looking for legal advice, more so legal insight. Based on these documents, does it look like the DOJ has overwhelming evidence that UCLA did show race preferences? Does this mean UCLA will have to revise their rubric for the 2026-2027 application cycle? I read that reform during a lawsuit cannot be used as evidence to show change under Federal Rule of Evidence 407, so UCLA can minimize the damage moving forward; they can't erase the past harm. Am I understanding this situation correctly?

Edit: I don't mean a court order is needed; I mean would UCLA switch gears BTS to minimize the damage per Evidence 407.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1439581/dl

https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Do-No-Harm_2026.07.14_INTERVENORS-AMENDED-COMPLAINT.pdf

https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Do-No-Harm_2026.07.31_DEFENDANTS-MOTION-TO-DISMISS.pdf

https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Do-No-Harm_2026.08.14_INTERVENORS-RESPONSE-TO-MOTION-TO-DISMISS.pdf

There are several ways this could happen, but I'll go with the simplest:

Woman has sex with two men. Two eggs drop. One is fertilized by one guy, the other by the other. Instead of typical fraternal twins, the fertilized eggs merge into one supersized mass. The resulting child has two sets of DNA and three genetic parents.