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This section explores the history, application, and possible amendment of article 1915 of the Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure which concerns the partial judgment rendered on a case.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have issues--148 issues to be exact. Although the Rules use the term "issue" throughout their text, they do not use it in the same way each time. In some circumstances, the meaning of "issue" is made clear by surrounding context, minimizing any interpretive difficulty. But sometimes context does not clarify the term's meaning, creating interpretive challenges. This Article argues that the ambiguous term "issue" found in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 50 and 52 is best read to mean a "dispute of fact." This reading best comports with judicial interpretations of Rules 50 and 52, best fits their history and purpose, and best connects them with conceptually related rules of civil procedure. In order to eliminate the ambiguity of the term "issue"--and avoid future interpretive difficulties--Rules 50 and 52 should be amended to clarify their meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A deluge is coming. The Supreme Court's two most recent personal jurisdiction cases--Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District and Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railroad--have thrown this area of law into even more flux than before. Because of these cases' heavy emphasis on the fact-intensive nature of personal jurisdiction law, plaintiffs facing down motions to dismiss based on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(2) are going to start asking an obvious question: If the Supreme Court thinks facts are so important to personal jurisdiction, then should I try to get access to more facts? The result will be more requests to conduct jurisdictional discovery, and more courts having to figure out how to decide those requests. Despite the occasional aspersions cast upon it, jurisdictional discovery's newfound relevance is to be applauded. When used wisely, the practice can be more than just a useful tool for uncovering facts. It can also further hone the law of personal jurisdiction, rendering the doctrine more attune to the interests of all the parties involved. All that is needed is more guidance on how to use that tool. This Article provides such guidance. Examining hundreds of orders that decided jurisdictional discovery requests, this Article uncovers a coherent set of rationales that courts have tacitly relied upon when rendering these decisions. These rationales provide a principled and practical framework for deciding jurisdictional discovery requests, one that courts can use both to bring additional coherence to the practice and to field what is likely to be the flood of discovery requests to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this commentary on the judgment of the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) mentioned in the title is to present the relationship between the tax authority and the taxpayer seeking relief from a tax liability. The literature and court rulings, the most recent example of which is the SAC ruling under review, indicate that it is the taxpayer who bears the burden of proving that the prerequisites for granting tax relief are present, namely an important interest of the taxpayer or the public interest. The institution of the burden of proof, characteristic of civil proceedings, should not be transferred to tax proceedings, where it is the statutory duty of the tax authority to clarify all the circumstances of the case. This does not mean that the taxpayer should not point out to the tax authority all the circumstances supporting the granting of relief. However, this does not follow from the fact that the taxpayer, as the applicant, bears the burden (obligation) of proving the existence of the prerequisites. There are and should be no provisions in the Tax Code imposing such an obligation. The taxpayer should submit any evidence justifying the relief in compliance with the principle of cooperation between the taxpayer and the tax authority. This is one of the general principles of tax law found in the literature and court decisions and boils down to the fact that the taxpayer is obliged to cooperate with the authority in charge of the procedure for granting the tax relief requested by the taxpayer. This principle, like many other general principles of tax law, should be inscribed in the current Tax Code, as has long been advocated in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document contains case notes from the Franchise Law Journal, covering various franchise-related legal cases from April 2023 to June 2023. The cases discussed include JTH Tax, LLC v. Agnant, where a former tax-preparation franchisee successfully defeated the franchisor's motion for a preliminary injunction to enforce a non-compete agreement. Another case, Hyundai Subaru of Nashville, Inc. v. Hyundai Motor America, Inc., involved a car dealership defeating the manufacturer's motion to dismiss on claims including violation of the Automobile Dealer's Day in Court Act. In Lunt v. Frost Shades Franchising, LLC, a franchisee sued the franchisor for fraudulent misrepresentation and sought restitution and rescission of agreements. The court ruled on motions to compel arbitration and for a preliminary injunction, finding that the franchisor had a duty to disclose certain information and that the franchisee had suffered irreparable harm due to a non-compete provision. The court issued an injunction against enforcing the non-compete provision but denied the request to enjoin interference with the franchisee's competing business. In Cookie Dough Bliss Franchising, LLC v. Feed Your Soul Minnesota, LLC, the court denied the franchisor's request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the former franchisee from operating a competing business. The court found that the franchise agreement had been terminated by mutual agreement and that the franchisor was not entitled to injunctive relief. The court also determined that the non-compete provision was likely un [Extracted from the article]

This article, titled "Making Your Case in Tax Court: Advocacy Tips," summarizes a virtual CLE presentation by the ABA. The panelists, including judges and legal professionals, provided tips for litigants in Tax Court. The article emphasizes the importance of using briefing wisely, reaching out to others for help and advice, and stipulating facts and documents early in the pre-trial process. It also highlights the need for cooperation and common ground in Tax Court cases. [Extracted from the article]

The civil case judgment prediction (CCJP) task involves automatically determining whether the plea of a plaintiff should be supported by analyzing the given civil case materials. However, most existing studies usually rely on inadequate legal essential elements (e.g. , fact descriptions and pleas), and are specifically designed for single-cause scenarios. Consequently, these methods struggle to generalize effectively to real courts, where civil cases involve more complicated legal elements and numerous causes. To resolve the above limitations, we present a novel T opology-aware M ulti-task L earning framework, called TML. Concretely, TML adopts the transformer-family pre-trained language models (PLMs) as the backbone to capture the fine-grained semantic interactions among various legal elements. To exploit the structural information of the case, we collocate distinct special tokens for each legal element, and then extract the features of the case from different perspectives. Furthermore, to address multiple-cause scenarios, TML incorporates a multi-task learning paradigm to simultaneously predict multiple civil judicial subtasks (e.g. , civil causes, civil law articles and final judgment of pleas). To utilize topological dependencies among subtasks, three parameter-free retrievers are integrated to establish inter-task connections. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset, and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method. • TML adopts PTM to capture semantic interactions between various legal elements. • Assigning special tokens to elements makes TML aware of case structure information. • TML utilizes a multi-task learning paradigm to address multiple-cause situations. • Three parameter-free retrievers are devised to establish inter-task connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]