It is my great honor and privilege to recognize Professor Charles C. Lewis on his retirement from the Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law at Campbell University after a long and rewarding career. Professor Lewis has dedicated himself to our law school and its students. For this, we thank him.
With the passage of House Bill 380 (H.B. 380) in 2011,1 the North Carolina General Assembly not only adopted a basic set of rules to govern the discovery of electronically-stored information (ESI) in the State courts, but also created a procedural framework that set the State on a path towards a more reasonable and efficient discovery process. North Carolina has long adhered to the policy of allowing parties to conduct the liberal discovery pioneered by the federal courts under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
This Article addresses the issues that are peculiar to claims of minors in North Carolina. Persons who are the age of majority prosecute and settle claims that raise numerous substantive and procedural issues. These issues can be compounded, however, when the claimant is a minor.
In May of 2010, Durham Regional Hospital began a program designed to educate new parents about Shaken Baby Syndrome. As part of this program, staff members instruct new parents on the dangers of shaking a baby and suggest alternative ways parents can attempt to calm a seemingly inconsolable child and relieve their own incidental stress. The instruction focuses on what research suggests is the primary reason that parents shake their children: parents immense frustration with a period of inconsolable crying that most children experience between two weeks and six months after the childs birth.
In Baumann-Chacon v. Baumann, decided in May 2011, the North Carolina Court of Appeals held for the first time that trial courts have the authority to enter orders related to child custody and child support before a husband and wife have separated. The Baumann court carefully distinguished its decision from the holding in Harper v. Harper, a 1981 case in which the court held that the wifes pre-separation custody and child support claims should have been dismissed. The Baumann decision raises some interesting questions about the limits of the trial courts ability to enter orders protecting the interests of children when those interests conflict with the rights of parents.
Imagine the police bursting into your home in the middle of the night, waking you and your family from peaceful sleep. As the police enter your home unannounced, they rummage through all of your office files and sift through the information stored on your computer. You demand to see a search warrant as the police officers access all of your most personal and confidential information. One officer harshly replies that they do not need a warrant. You are left perplexed: that goes against everything you ever learned about the Fourth Amendment. You can only wonder why the police are allowed to search your home and seize your files without any sort of probable cause or search warrant. You wonder why the police feel entitled to intrude into your deepest expectation of privacy. How can they commit this end-run around the Fourth Amendment?
The Campbell Law Review is published three times per year by students of the Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law at Campbell University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Campbell Law Review began publication in 1979 for the purpose of serving the legal community with scholarly articles, notes, comments and other reviews of legal topics. The Campbell Law Review fulfills this service by placing special emphasis on issues from North Carolina and other states in the Southeast, as well as issues concerning national legislation and Constitutional questions from all circuits and the Supreme Court.