In a brief, one-sentence order, the United States Supreme Court rejected a request by a Kentucky county clerk to stay a U.S. District Court ruling that ordered her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In the months following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples have a constitutional…
For several weeks over the course of the early summer, former Oklahoma teacher Jennifer Caswell and former Utah teacher Brianne Altice waited anxiously to find out what their punishment would be after entering guilty pleas to charges of sex with underage students. Their wait is now over. Earlier this spring, I wrote about Caswell’s case…
It has been difficult to concentrate today, following the horrifying news that 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman, Adam Ward, were assassinated on live television by a disgruntled former employee of WDB7, the local Roanoke news station for which they worked. It has been difficult to concentrate because I have worked as a…
An elementary school teacher in the Bloomfield [NJ] School District has been charged “with possessing, uploading and distributing videos and images of child pornography from his home and workplace.” Nicholas K. Schumacher, 29, had been under investigation since May 4 after the Morris County prosecutor’s office received a tip from the National Center for Missing…
Dorman High School, located in Roanoke, South Caroline (just south of Spartanburg), may now hold the record for fastest termination of a teacher accused of digital misconduct. On Tuesday, 8/18, officials at the school were told by a student that math teacher and assistant cross country coach John Sewell had been sending him sexually explicit…
Back in June, I wrote about the case of Patrick Newman, a Social Studies teacher at Trinity High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Louisville, KY. Following a tip by Twitter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, investigators determined that Newman had used Vine (a video app owned by Twitter), Kik, and…
One of the great things about writing about the impact of technology on law and society is that there is a seemingly endless supply of innovations that address problems that we didn’t know we had. Often, as we’ll see, these innovations employ creative interpretations of existing law to justify their existence (or at least their…
A 15-year-old student at Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, CT plead guilty on August 14 to two counts of criminal impersonation and was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and two years of probation. In April, Eddie Matos was arrested on charges that he solicited nude Snapchat photos from teen boys and men using a…
Unless you’ve been living under a fairly large rock for the past few months, you are probably aware of the fact that former Secretary of State (and Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton has been in a little bit of hot water over the fact that she set up and used a private email server in…
According to a recently-released study by the Department of Psychology at Drexel University, nearly 9 out of 10 readers of this blog post (87.8%) have “sent or received a sexually suggestive message over the internet at some point in their lives.” And what’s more, you almost certainly think that sexting is awesome — 95.9% of…
