Author: Ted Folkman

  • Case of the Day: Vita v. New England Baptist

    The case of the day is Vita v. New England Baptist Hospital (Mass. 2024). It’s not really a Letters Blogatory case, but it’s super interesting anyway. It involves the Massachusetts Wiretap Act, a law that forbids the secret recording of communications. I have served as arbitrator on cases that have raised claims under the Act……

  • Have We Learned from the Melians?

    The physicist Richard Feynman asked: If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? His answer: “All things are made of atoms.” What sentence about international politics packs the……

  • WordPress Does Some Business Litigation

    I’m a big fan of WordPress, the publishing software that underlies Letters Blogatory. I started using WordPress in 2011 and have used it to bring you thousands of posts and for you to send back thousands of comments. It’s not quite free—I have to pay for a server I use to run the program and……

  • Case of the Day: Skillz Platform v. Papaya Gaming

    The case of the day is Skillz Platform, Inc. v. Papaya Gaming, Ltd. (SDNY 2024). I’ve written a lot recently about the use of the Evidence Convention to take discovery from non-parties, so I thought I’d write about a case involving discovery from a party, where it’s 100% correct to look at the Aérospatiale analysis.……

  • What is the effect of an apostille on a forged document?

    Béligh Elbalti has an interesting report at Conflict of Laws about a Moroccan case involving the Apostille Convention. After a Moroccan man’s death, his heirs, apparently acting under Moroccan law, issued a “certificate of inheritance” identifying his heirs. They omitted his wife, who was a Spanish national, on the grounds that she was not a……