The Goodson Blogson

Late last week, a former member of the Apex Town Council sued North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore for "alienation of affection" and "criminal conversation," domestic torts claims that are currently recognized in only a handful of states. Scott Lassiter, now an assistant principal in Wake County, alleges that Moore engaged in a years-long extramarital affair with the plaintiff's wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter, from whom he is now separated. The complaint also includes causes of action for conspiracy, trespass, conversion, and invasion of privacy against an unknown "Defendant John Doe" for allegedly entering Lassiter's property to install a motion-activated surveillance camera. The suit seeks more than $25,000 in damages. House Speaker Moore and Lassiter's wife both criticized the lawsuit to the media this weekend, with Moore calling the claims "baseless" and Liles Lassiter describing the filing as an "outrageous and defamatory su...

Getting ready for the July bar exam? You're not alone: next month, thousands of aspiring attorneys will sit for a bar examination, just like more than 45,000 applicants did in July 2022. (The National Conference of Bar Examiners publishes annual statistics on bar exam administration in its Bar Examiner magazine and website.) The majority of jurisdictions now administer the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) , a two-day exam that allows test-takers to more easily transfer their score from one UBE jurisdiction in order to seek admission to another. UBE components include the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE) , a set of brief essays; the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) , an analytical writing simulation; and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) , a 200-question multiple-choice portion. UBE jurisdictions may also separately require a state-specific essay component. In addition, nearly every US jurisdiction (excepting Wisconsin and Puerto Rico) requires bar-takers to pass the separate M...

In 2019, engineer Phillip Wang launched a website called "This Person Does Not Exist," which harnessed the StyleGAN AI system to generate realistic-looking photographs of nonexistent people. Although Wang's original website is now defunct, scores of similar sites do exist, including a variation of This Person Does Not Exist and a variety of generators designed for such diverse uses as helping programmers look busy at work , creating a geography guessing game out of Google Street View , and introducing made-up dictionary definitions into the lexicon . Just a few years later, large language model (LLM) chatbots are the hottest trend in generative AI technology, with OpenAI's ChatGPT , Microsoft's Bing Chat (powered by ChatGPT), and Google's Bard the best-known of their kind. It's easy to see their appeal – type a quick prompt and almost instantly generate a wall of convincing-sounding text, complete with citations. Sound too good to be true? Alas, it ...

Whether you are graduating from Duke Law this May or continuing your legal studies next year, your access to legal research services and other campus databases may change this summer. Below is a summary of policies for the major legal research databases that you might wish to access over the summer. Continuing Students Westlaw allows continuing students to use Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw® and Practical Law, over the summer for non-commercial research (i.e., "to gain understanding and build confidence in your research skills, but you cannot use them in situations where you are billing a client"). Examples of permissible uses for your academic Westlaw password include summer coursework, Research Assistant assignments, research for journal/law review or moot court, non-profit/clinic work, or an externship sponsored by the school. Your Westlaw summer access will continue automatically - no action is needed on your part. Lexis : All returning students have auto...