Experience with K-12 education is nearly ubiquitous. Almost everyone remembers their own experiences, some more fondly than others, sitting in class, working on assignments, and going to football games or senior prom. Many of us will broaden these experiences by sending our children to schools, or making careers in the K-12 setting.  However, despite this shared experience, not many of us have taken the time to understand the legal considerations that shape schools; by dictating the length and content of the classes, the assignments required for completion, and the content allowed at school events, almost every occurrence within the school day is proscribed by law. To understand these issues and more, Education Law: an Essential Guide for Attorneys, Teachers, Administrators, Parents, and Students is a great place to start.

LOCATION:

Education Law: an Essential Guide for Attorneys, Teachers, Administrators, Parents, and Students is located in the Treatise section of the Charlotte School of Law Library on the Environmental, Healthcare, Education, and Entertainment Law Shelf. Locating the call number, KF4119.G47, from the Library catalog, using the search terms “education law,” takes you right to the treatise.

CONTENTS:

Contained in a single volume, the second edition of Education Law was published in 2007. The resource contains a Table of Contents, References Page, Endnotes Page, and Index. The Table of Contents is divided into 20 broad areas of education law (i.e. Fourth Amendment—Search and Seizure) with more specific, related issues underneath (i.e. Drug-sniffing Dogs). Each chapter also begins with this delineation to allow for more targeted reading without returning to the Table of Contents. The Endnotes section provides the citation for many important cases related to education law and sentence summaries of many of the holdings. Summaries of each case, instead of only a few, would have been more helpful. Finally, there is a general index that provides an appropriate amount of terms and cases.

HOW TO SEARCH:

To illustrate how to search this treatise, suppose you learn that your child’s high school will institute random drug testing of all students next year. You see this as an invasion of your child’s privacy and want to challenge the policy.

Armed with Education Law, you begin by checking the Table of Contents. You immediately notice that “Chapter 10: Drugs, Weapons, and Zero Tolerance Policies.” Upon scanning the sub-topics, however, you realize that the chapter deals with the repercussions of drug use, not testing for drug use. You know that your child is perfect and would never actually use drugs, so you are not concerned with the punishment. Instead, you want to focus on the privacy concerns of allowing random testing.

You then turn to the Index and search for “drug testing.” Luckily, this term appears and provides for more specificity: 1) of student athletes and 2) of students engaged in non-sports extracurricular activities. Both of these are located in “Chapter 11: Search and Seizure.” The relevant pages in Chapter 11 provide an overview of recent cases that deal with schools’ drug testing of students, with and without reasonable suspicion. Therefore, it provides a metric by which to measure, and probably challenge, the school’s proposed policy.

CONCLUSION:

Education Law provides an easy-to-follow introduction to areas of educational law with both analysis of case law and relevant statutes. To supplement this information, visit Education Law Center, ACLU’s Students! Know Your Rights, and Georgetown Law Library’s Education Law Research Guide.

CITATION: Gerstein, R. (2007). Education law: an essential guide for attorneys, teachers, administrators, parents, and students.  Lawyers and Judges Publishing Company: Tucson, Arizona.

~ C. Matthew Ferguson, Class of 2013 ~

Gamification seems to be the hot new buzzword in the library world. You can even pay $175 for a four week course entitled Game Based Learning in Library Instruction. What is gamification all about? Is it really something new?

What is it?

Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior. Businesses have been using Gamification for years to build brand loyalty. One of the earliest strategies is whenever you buy 9 widgets; you get the 10^th one free. Kohl’s sends out postcards where you peel off the sticker to find out if you get 10%, 20% or 30% off on your next purchase. Maybe you are taking advantage of Westlaw or Lexis Nexis point system.

In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested more than $20 million to develop game based learning tools for children in the United States. Other similar initiatives mean that our future law students will be familiar with gamification techniques in education.

In a recent AALL Spectrum article, Carli Spina states that gamification when done right “can lead people to a state of flow.”  Flow is a term created by Mihaly Csikszantmihaly which refers to the state of mind in which people lose themselves through complete focus on an enjoyable activity.

According to EDUCAUSE, gamification is “most effective as a pedagogical tool where it forms part of a well-planned strategy to encourage research, inspire creativity, teach basic principles, or hone problem solving skills.” A more simple explanation would be to learn while playing a game and having fun.

Who is doing it?

• The University of California-Merced (UC-Merced) Library uses SCVNGR. SCVNGR is one gaming platform used by both businesses and universities. Participants earn points and rewards by completing challenges. UC-Merced used it to introduce students to library and campus resources on the first day of school. Although they had a low turnout, they were encouraged by the level of student interest.
• Purdue University has used Passport platform where educators or librarians can develop customized challenges and design badges to be awarded when students gain new skills. Students can display their badges on the Passport platform.
• The University of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, England uses LibraryGame. LibraryGame has two forms: Lemontree for academic libraries and Orangetree for public libraries. Lemontree uses the library’s management system to collect information about student participants and rewards them for specific activities like using the e-learning resources or frequently visiting the library. In addition, Lemontree’s leaderboard can be shared on Facebook.
• Other libraries use gamification on a limited basis such as teaching a particular type of legal research or more extensively across the whole library experience. See the references at the end of this blog for further information.

What are the negatives?

First, some critics point out that gamification can actually decrease motivation if it focuses solely on a reward system to encourage participation. From traditional psychology, over time external motivators have less impact than internal motivators. Second, some educators feel that including game elements trivializes the instructional material. Students may also feel frustrated if they are not successful. Competition may just add another level of complexity to learning the material. From a legal perspective, questions have been raised concerning privacy. Many of the gamification applications track participant’s activities to award points or use a leaderboard listing the top achievers. Students may not realize that their results may appear in social media sites. Of course, the opposing argument would be to take these concerns in consideration during the design phase. Lastly, gamification can be difficult to implement effectively. Even at UC-Merced, unforeseen factors impacted the results. Just administering the program by having to maintain points, tokens or badges can be time consuming for the administrator.

What’s the future?

Our students will be familiar with gamification. Incorporating game elements in library instruction offers the possibility of changing up instruction with contests, leaderboards, or badges that gives students opportunities for recognition. People like to play games whether it is against themselves or others. However, gamification, done correctly, can be a time consuming and complicated project which will take plenty of creative thought and technical skill to be successful. Gamification is not new. The challenge for libraries is to use gamification as a way to take advantage of engaging students in a different way.

So let the games begin…..

References

• 7 things you should know about…gamification. (2011, August). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-gamification
• Danforth, L. (2011, February 15). Gamification and libraries. Library Journal, 136(3), 84.
• McMunn-Tetangco, E. (2013, April).  If you build it….?: One campus’ firsthand account of gamification in the academic library.  C&RL News, 74(4), 208-210.
• Spina, C. (2013, April). Gamification: Is it right for your library?  AALL Spectrum, 17(6), 7-25.
• Weaver, A. (2011, September). Gamification – time for an epic win?  Access, 25(3), 2023.

~Betty Thomas~

Ask for Circulation Staff (listed below) at the Circulation Desk to assist you in locating the books. You can claim any books you are interested in and set up a time to collect them with the staff.  If you would like more information please contact Brooke Rideout at brideout@charlottelaw.edu.

Circulation Staff:

 Kim Allman: kallman@charlottelaw.edu
Aaron Greene: agreene@charlottelaw.edu
Erica Tyler: etyler@charlottelaw.edu
Brooke Rideout: brideout@charlottelaw.edu

~Brooke Rideout~

Treatises offer a wealth of background information on a particular topic, and should be one of a researcher’s very first authorities to consult when dealing with a new issue. The aim of this post is to walk through how to locate and use a particular treatise dealing with employment law issues, Workplace Discrimination, Privacy and Security in an Age of Terrorism (2007), as well as the contents of this treatise.

How to Locate the Treatise:

To find the resource, head to the Charlotte School of Law Library, located at the Suttle campus, and follow the signs within the library through the glass doors to the treatises section. The call number for this particular treatise is KF3319.A2C67 (using the search terms “workplace discrimination” in the CSL Library catalog gets you here).  Within the row of compact shelving labeled “KF3315-KF3736,” the treatise is located on the first section of shelves to the left, on the middle shelf.

Content:

In a nutshell, Workplace Discrimination is a single volume treatise from 2007 that examines some of the more common employment discrimination issues with more of a focus on how the laws have been altered or interpreted differently since September 11, 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror. Because of the contextual focus, the treatise is of good size to give an adequate overview of the issues.

The treatise is organized into four distinct sections – Workplace Discrimination, Workplace Privacy, Collective Bargaining, and Physical and Emotional Security – and one main Table of Contents that displays the various subtopics under each section. The treatise does suffer, however, from the lack of an index. As such, it’s really up to the user’s knowledge of the general issues in determining how easily they will be able to locate material solely through the Table of Contents. The Table of Contents does an adequate job including buzzwords for topics, like “Workplace Stress,” “Profiling,” and “Labor-Management.”  However, it should be noted that these topics are scattered about to fit within the four categories above, and are not organized into a more traditional topic list that sort of builds on topics from the ground up. As such, I think this treatise should not be used as a first look into employment discrimination issues. Instead, I think researchers would be better suited using this treatise once they’ve already built a foundation of information on the topic and subtopics through a more traditional, straightforward treatise or other secondary source.

Navigating the Treatise:

Let’s say you have a client who is a few years away from retirement, but was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As a result of the diagnosis, she also battles severe depression. The depression worsens the multiple sclerosis, and the multiple sclerosis worsens the depression. She has recently been in discussions with her employer over what she could and could not perform, and the employer has given her an ultimatum: continue doing the job she has done for many years, or have her employment terminated. What do you research the issue to best help your client?

As suggested above, I think the first step might be to consult a more traditional treatise to get an initial overview of the related issues. That way, when you’re ready to consult Workplace Discrimination, you shouldn’t have any trouble perusing the Table of Contents to find the relevant sections and chapters. Even without consulting another treatise first, however, you may be able to wing it and find your way by browsing the Table of Contents. Through an initial browsing of the content, Chapter 17 (page 501) – “Workplace Stress Claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act” – should immediately jump out. “Workplace Stress” would have been a difficult search term to come up with on my own, but the term “disability” from the chapter title grabbed my attention, as I would have likely used “mental disability” as an initial search term in an index, had the treatise included one. The good thing about this particular chapter is that it does not rely so heavily on the terrorism context, and is instead a more straightforward examination of workplace stress claims.

Conclusion:

Workplace Discrimination, Privacy and Security in an Age of Terrorism is an easy read, and deals with issues through an interesting lens. Because of the treatise’s niche-like status, it may not be the go-to secondary resource for employment discrimination.  However, I think the treatise works well as an advanced resource, undoubtedly helpful to anyone with facts even loosely involving terrorism or its impact on America’s culture and laws since September 11th.

Useful Alternatives:

While I don’t think there is great, free alternative to this treatise that provides employment discrimination information under such a lens as terrorism, there are plenty of alternatives that provide a wealth of information on employment discrimination issues in general. One such alternative, the American Civil Liberties Union, runs an employment discrimination blog, complete with up-to-date trending topics, key issues, videos, and more.

~ Zachary Oakes, Class of 2013 ~

To understand the importance of security interests, it is first important to understand the legal process involved when a lender does not have a security interest (i.e., is unsecured) in relation to the borrower. If a lender makes an unsecured loan and the debtor defaults, the lender must sue in court and obtain a judgment. However, this judgment by itself is worth nothing: suitable only for framing. Since the debt is unsecured, there is no specific property backing the debt, so the unsecured lender must obtain a writ of execution, which allows the local sheriff or federal marshal to seize upon any property of the debtor’s that can be found. If the debtor has filed for bankruptcy, the creditor will likely end up with nothing. As you can imagine, trying to recover on a bad unsecured debt can be an expensive, time-consuming and often fruitless exercise in frustration for the unsecured creditor.

Consequently, a lender will often require a debtor to agree to the creation of a security interest in order to protect that creditor. The security interest is the right of the lender to sell specific property in order to satisfy the debt should the borrower default. One of the most common security interests is found in a mortgage for real estate, but is also regularly seen in personal property transactions, both tangible and intangible. Tangible personal property includes cars, motorcycles, kitchen appliances and pretty much any movable physical property you can imagine. Intangible personal property includes things like accounts receivable, securities, and promissory notes. Generally speaking, the law of secured transactions is governed by Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code.

As a lender, making sure your debt is secured through the proper creation of a security interest often only gives you minimal protection. This is because the property referenced as collateral in the security interest may have been used by the borrower as collateral for other debts as well. In the case of a mortgaged real estate property, you will often see many secured interests: a first mortgage, a second mortgage, a security interest in a fixture such as a swimming pool or a garage, or perhaps a judgment lien from a lawsuit the debtor lost. As a lender, understanding your relative priority against other secured interests in a specific property and maximizing your place in that pecking order will sometimes make all the difference between getting something rather than nothing out of a bad debt. That process of enforcing your security interest against other creditors is known as perfection. Perfection involves putting the rest of the world on notice that you have an interest in the debtor’s asset.

As mentioned previously, the UCC typically governs the rules regarding security interests generally and issues of perfection specifically, and is beyond the scope of this modest article. That being said, what you should know as a lender right here and right now is that the where and the when of filing for perfection of your security interest is of the utmost importance. Generally speaking, if you’re dealing with movable personal property like appliances and HDTVs, you will perfect your interest by filing a UCC statement with your state’s Secretary of State office. If your security interest is a fixture attached to real property, generally speaking that perfection notice will be filed with your county registrar of deeds. If the secured property is a motorcycle or automobile, your state statutes may provide that perfection is handled through a certificate of title. The law can vary from state to state, so please check your own state’s statutes.

Filing for perfection in the right office will generally be sufficient to put other creditors on notice of your interest. However, you must also be aware of the priority of your interest in relation to those other creditors. More often than not, that priority is determined by who filed for perfection first. In short, you are in a race with other creditors, and the sooner you file for perfection, the better. Be aware, too, that a creditor can often file for perfection even before the security interest itself is filed with the appropriate office. Delays can be costly to you, so don’t tarry! Lastly, keep in mind that in limited cases, you may lose the priority battle among creditors, even if you were the first to file for perfection. Generally, you will see this when a repairman claims a mechanic’s or workman’s lien for work done on the property in question. However, state law again can vary some in this area, so if in doubt please consult with a knowledgeable attorney in your jurisdiction.

My goal here is not to offer a solid tutorial in security interests and perfection, and it is certainly not to provide any legal counsel or advice. Instead, my hope is that after reading this article you will be adequately informed as a consumer in the legal marketplace when it comes to establishing and protecting your security interests. Some knowledge regarding creating security interests, and where to go to perfect those interests, should help you as a future creditor in maximizing peace of mind now and avoiding legal headaches later. Please engage the services of an attorney competent in commercial law should the situation call for it.

~David Williams, Class of 2013~

Each chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the procedural and evidentiary rules for each topic (i.e. discovery, depositions, marital property, spousal support, child support, termination of parental rights, evidence, etc.) with citations to primary authority.  Additionally, each chapter contains a “Forms” section, which includes practice checklists, sample discovery, sample motions, and other family law forms.   There are multiple chapters for each topic, and each chapter has its own table of contents at the front.  For example, discovery is covered over seven chapters (Scope, Discovery Devices, Planning Devices, Interrogatories, and Production of Documents).  This makes the treatise a very comprehensive guide to each aspect of family law.  This treatise would be particularly useful to an attorney who is new to practicing family law because it provides an overview of each topic, cites to primary authority, and contains forms which are a great starting point.

As a law student, the organization of the Index makes sense; however, it would be difficult for a lay person to navigate.  The index is organized using broad topics, such as “Child Support”, “Abandonment”, “Briefs”, “Attorney Client Privilege”, and “Cross Examination”.  Some of this terminology is not familiar to lay people.  Under each topic, there are several smaller sub-issues arranged alphabetically.  If a researcher is successful at navigating the Index, or knows enough about a topic to generate specific legalese search terms, the Index can be very useful; however, I found it just as easy to browse topics by Chapter, since each chapter is so specific and contains its own table of contents.

Overall, this treatise is comprehensive and user-friendly, and the forms are a great supplemental tool. On the negative side, the treatise is expensive, particularly for a solo practitioner or small-size firm.  As such, if a lawyer does not have access to this resource through a law library, he or she may have to find a more cost effective, alternate source.

For North Carolina attorneys, the Rosen Law firm, which has offices in Raleigh, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Durham, provides several great resources that are available for free online.  The website provides access to resources for two categories: (1) Child Issues (which covers Child Custody and Child Support) and (2) Spousal Issues (which covers Absolute Divorce, Alimony and Support, Domestic Violence, Mediation, and Property Division).

Each topic contains several additional, useful resources, including step-by-step guides, articles, forms, videos, podcasts, relevant statutes, and other tools such as payment calculators.  The website also contains a section where any person can post questions to which a lawyer from the firm will respond.  This resource can be useful for attorneys and is more user-friendly for lay people.  In fact, I have used this source as a lay person, prior to having any knowledge of family law in North Carolina.  While the source is user-friendly, it provides a more general overview of major issues, but is not nearly as comprehensive as the LexisNexis treatise discussed above.  Additionally, practitioners may find it time consuming to have to weed through questions and other postings by lay people that are case specific, and not general practice questions.  Overall, however, it is a great free resource for general information for lawyers and lay people, or a great place to begin a research assignment for a general overview.

~Jessica E. Price, Class of 2013~

According to many, civil litigation has changed drastically and irreversibly.  Judge Mark W. Bennett, a U.S. district judge for the Northern District of Iowa, provides a satirical reflection on the American civil trial system in the Spring 2013 issue of Litigation, which celebrated the journal’s 40^th anniversary this year.  (Obituary: the American Trial Lawyer, Born 1641-Died 20?? by Judge Mark W. Bennett, Litigation, Vol. 39, No. 2, Spring 2013, p.5.)

Judge Bennett writes:

The American trial lawyer (ATL), who, in innumerable ways, enhanced the lives of so many Americans and made the United States a fairer, healthier, safer, more egalitarian, and just nation, passed away recently.  Although a precise age is uncertain, ATL is believed to have been at least 371 years old at the time of death.

Kenneth P. Nolan, a senior editor of Litigation and partner at Speiser, Krause, Nolan & Granito in New York City, provides a similar perspective, referring to the civil trial as “a dinosaur,” an extinction that resulted in the “loss of the soul of the profession.”  (Sidebar: Mediation by Kenneth P. Nolan, Litigation, Vol. 39, No. 1, Winter 2013, p. 59.)

Bennett argues that the trial attorney has been replaced by the “American Litigator,” which he jokingly refers to as the “bastard child” of the American Trial Lawyer and Alternative Dispute Resolution [ADR].  (Bennett, supra.)  He believes ADR devices, such as mediation and arbitration, were the result of “a genetic mutation of the civil justice system.”  He explains that the civil jury trial began to vanish after the 1986 United States Supreme Court decisions in Celotex-Anderson-Matsushita,[1] along with its more recent decisions in Iqbal & Twombly.[2]  According to Bennett, a civil trial attorney’s “lifeblood was trying cases in the courtroom.”

Nolan agrees, noting that “[i]nstead of inspiring a lethargic jury, we sit in lifeless conference rooms and advocate before restrained, thoughtful mediators with nervous eyes.  We argue with all the passion of an accountant at tax time.  It’s business, everyday business, lacking the fervor of cross-examination, the thrill of closing argument.”  (Nolan, supra.)

Empirical data supports these perspectives.  In 1936, one fifth of all civil filings in federal court ended in trial, according to the Spring 2013 issue of The North Carolina State Bar Journal.  By 2002, that percentage dropped to 1.2% and, at the state level, only 0.6% of civil filings were resolved by a jury trial.  (“So How Much is My Case Worth?” by Shannon B. English, The North Carolina State Bar Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 2013, p. 18. [3])

Author Shannon B. English, vice president of a litigation consulting firm in Winston-Salem, contends that the implementation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the courts’ interpretations thereof have significantly altered pretrial practice by requiring practitioners to focus on “information- gathering via the discovery process.”  (English, supra.)  Thus, she adds, “the facts of a case are typically uncovered and understood by all parties well in advance, thereby negating the need ‘to see what comes out at trial.’”  English’s analysis effectively explains the shift away from trying cases and toward settling them, described and examined by both Bennett and Nolan, supra.

For better or worse, all parties would agree: “Mediation is the present and the future.”  (Nolan, supra.)  It seems the days of regularly trying civil cases have come to an end, and, according to Nolan, it just may be time “for a proper Irish wake.”

Music: Jazz Fest, Jazz at the Bechtler, Summer Pops Series, Nnenna Freelon & Branford Marsalis Benefit Concert, Stonecrest Summer Concert Series, Brad Paisley, Earth Wind and Fire, Big Boi, Beach House, Passion Pit, Heart, Grizzly Bear, Lord Huron, David Bryne and St.Vincent, New Kids on the Block, 98 Degrees, Boyz II Men, Fleetwood Mac, Fall out Boy, Aaron Lewis, Gladys Knight and the O’Jays, Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band, Beatles Tribute Night, Chatham County Live, Rick Springfield

Performing Arts: Least Likely Friends, Hair, The Divine Sister, The Color Purple, Proof, Ruined, Dolly Parton’s 9-5: the musical, Catch me if you can, Charlotte Squawks Ninesense, Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Assassins, Taming of the Shrew

Art: Connectivity at the McColl Center for Visual Arts, Carolina’s Got Art

Bites and Brews: Taste of Charlotte, 3rd Annual Charlotte Fire Department Auxiliary pancake breakfast, Charlotte Brewers Festival, Pig Pickin’ and Cornhole Tournament , Celebrate Atherton Market’s 3rd anniversary, Fanta Festival, Juneteenth

Movies: Saturday Night Cine Club: All Together, Rem Koolhaus: a different kind of architect, Order in the Court: Seven Classic Courtroom Movies, Summer blockbusters: Man of Steel(June 14), Monsters University(June 21), World War Z(June 21)

Just for Laughs: John Caparulo, Tracy Morgan

Races: Color my Run, Tri Latta Triathlon, King Tiger 5k, Skirt Chaser 5k, Warrior Dash

For the kids: Animal Grossology at Discovery Place, pick your own strawberries, PLCMC summer reading program

Events outside of Charlotte: Salute! The North Carolina Wine Celebration in Winston-Salem, Carolina Beach Music Festival, Blue Ridge Barbecue and Music Festival

Don’t forget Father’s Day is June 16th!

~Jamie Sunnycalb~

When I decided to attend law school, I had visions of myself standing in front of a jury box waxing eloquent about the merits of my client’s claim or defense. I would NOT be one of “those” transactional lawyers who spent their time agonizing over just the right word to place in some boring clause, within an even more boring contract. Surprise! I realize now that almost every lawyer will be a transactional lawyer, and will be one on a fairly regular basis. The reason for this is that nearly all agreements, reached by the attorneys for parties involved in a legal action, must eventually be reduced to writing. In order to achieve the best result for your client, you will want to be the attorney to volunteer to draft the agreement. You will agonize over the right word, because there is an art to drafting a contract.

Last semester, I reluctantly began a contracts drafting class with Professor Hefferan in order to fulfill my advanced writing component. Though I began the class with something less than enthusiasm, I am now convinced that this has been the most valuable class I have taken in law school. Not everyone has had the opportunity in law school to take an in depth course in contract drafting. Because of this fact, the treatise North Carolina Contract Law (2nd ed. 2001) and its cumulative supplement (2012) can be a valuable resource for attorneys required to draft a contract or agreement on behalf of client.  They can be found in the CSL Library by using the call number KFN7550.H88, or by searching with the keywords “North Carolina Contract” in the Library’s catalog.

What the Treatise Has to Offer

Lawyers practice within distinct jurisdictions, and the quirks of the jurisdiction as they apply to an area of law are important, even vital to practitioners. This treatise focuses its attention on North Carolina’s requirements for contracts as they are informed by state statutes, the North Carolina Supreme Court, and the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The first part of the book addresses the basic elements of contract formation and contract enforcement. The second part addresses contracts for the sale of goods under the Uniform Commercial Code, which North Carolina has adopted. This treatise is easy to search and use as it is divided by section numbers comprised of the chapter number followed by a topic number (i.e. Chapter 3, topic 44 is designated as §3-44 and is an introduction to the topic of contracts signed under seal).

The Importance of Jurisdiction Specific Research; Contract Under Seal

Part one of this volume is filled with references to North Carolina case law that will help expand an attorney’s understanding of some of the unique features of the state’s approach to contract law. For example, North Carolina is a jurisdiction that has unique statutory and case law surrounding contracts that are signed under seal.

I decided to create a brief research exercise within the volume related to the signing of a contract under seal. Both the table of contents and index contain information to help a lawyer or other legal professional easily navigate this topic within the treatise. You can find the topic of seals quickly within the table of contents; other terms useful to search, such as “seal,” “statute of limitations” and “consideration,” are contained in the index. What constitutes a seal and the implications of its use, or lack of use, are fully covered. Quite important to both plaintiffs and defendants in North Carolina would be the knowledge that generally a contract signed under seal has a statute of limitations that is ten years, rather than the normal three-year statute of limitations applied to contracts.

Conclusion

This treatise is an invaluable tool for those in the legal profession who draft, or seek to enforce or interpret contracts within the jurisdiction of North Carolina. I believe it is so useful that it is a text many legal professionals should consider purchasing for their own library. It is available from LexisNexis for $217.00. With the treatise in hand, North Carolina case law noted within it can be retrieved for free through the North Carolina Courts website. Statutes referenced in the text can be found on the internet for free as well through the North Carolina General Assembly website. Additionally, the internet provides many websites where sample contracts can be viewed, one example is www.onecle.com. While it is almost always helpful to have a template to follow, templates do not explain the law or the consequences of failing to understand contracts law in a particular jurisdiction.

~ Kathleen Vogel, Class of 2013 ~