Category Archives: Law

You Shall Not Pass: Making the Most of Your Passport

A British biometric passport.
A British biometric passport.

The idea of a document that extends protections over subjects as they travel is old — as in, Old Testament old. But the standardized booklet that we now use for establishing identity and citizenship when crossing international borders has only been with us for about a century. More to the point, in the post-9/11 world, it’s become a lot more important.

In this article, I cover the ins and outs of how to get one, when you’ll need one, and what to do if you lose one.  Along the way, I’ll pass along some travel tips, discuss passport alternatives and help you protect your children from  abduction across national borders.

How Passports Work 

Blood Will Tell: A Blood Spatter Analysis Update

Eduard Piotrowski of Poland’s University of Krakow published the first major blood spatter study in 1895, but its impact was limited to a few inventive European sleuths like German chemist Paul Jeserich and French forensic scientist Victor Balthazard. The American legal system did not adopt spatter analysis as evidence until the landmark case of State of Ohio v. Samuel Sheppard, and the field did not truly take off until the 1970s, after forensics expert Herbert MacDonell published his influential Flight Characteristics of Human Blood and Stain Patterns.

Blood spatter analysis has undergone major refinements in methods and language since then, including a recent and growing shift toward incorporating computers. I discuss several of these shifts in my 2015 update of Shanna Freeman’s 2007 article:

How Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Works

A Brief History of the Affordable Care Act

President Barack Obama signs the health insurance reform bill in the East Room of the White House, March 23, 2010.
President Obama signs the health insurance reform bill. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is the latest milestone in a century-long struggle to reform healthcare in America and the most significant achievement in that area since President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965. Its passage was a hard-won victory marred by compromise and sapped by a ceaseless campaign to block its passage, halt its implementation and gut its funding – a struggle that continues to this day. Already the ACA has overcome one Supreme Court challenge, with another appearance before the highest court in the land likely in 2015.

Amid all the wrangling and vitriol, it’s easy to lose track of what happened and when, but don’t worry. My latest article has you covered.

The History of the Affordable Care Act

The Internet of Things…that Go Bump in the Night

An artist's rendering of the Internet of Things.
Drawing by wilgengebroed.

As sci-fi and techno-horror flicks are fond pointing out, the future is chock-full of things that want to kill us. Yep, our own technological progeny want to consign us to the great bit-bucket in the sky but, hey, at least we were warned, right?

Well, sure, if we had any intention of heeding these cinematic Cassandras. Think about it: The Terminator warns us about Skynet, so what do we do? We set to work on autonomous drones. Christine  frightens us with a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury, so we get busy designing self-driving cars. It’s like we want to die.

And then there’s the Internet of Things: Trillions of everyday objects exchanging data, everywhere, all the time, with only the most basic human oversight. Can’t wait to see how that one turns out.

10 Nightmare Scenarios From the Internet of Things

Felon gun ownership: clause and effect

Twisted gun sculpture
“Non-Violence” by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. Photo by Francois Polito.

The idea that criminals should forfeit certain civil rights reaches back at least to the 19th-century concept of civiliter mortuus (“civil death”). Today, federal law bars convicted felons from possessing firearms or ammunition. Case closed, right? Wrong. Federal law works in mysterious ways, particularly when it bumps up against state interests and high court interpretations.

Can a Felon Own a Gun in the United States?