Massachusetts is one of the few states that has not adopted some version of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The rules of evidence in Massachusetts are not codified, meaning that evidentiary issues are governed by common law. In 1982, the Supreme Judicial Court ("SJC")...
Arbitration agreements often name a particular arbitral forum to conduct an arbitration, but what if, when a dispute arises, that arbitral forum no longer exists or is otherwise unavailable? In Inetianbor v. CashCall, Inc., 768 F.3d 1346, 1350 (11th Cir. 2014), the...
In Silverman v. Spiro, 438 Mass. 725 (2003), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that a judge can enter a qualified domestic relations order (QDRO) requiring a party in a domestic relations dispute to pay the other party's attorney's fees and costs...
In Drummey v. Town of Falmouth, the Massachusetts Appeals Court overturned a Superior Court ruling and held that the Town of Falmouth incorrectly failed to obtain a special use permit from the Falmouth zoning board of appeals in order to construct and install a wind...
In divorces, determining the value of real property (the marital home, for example) may become a key issue. While a seemingly simple concept, the term "value" may have several different meanings depending upon the context in which its used in litigation, and...
In a recent decision, Bliss Realty Trust v. Roos Company, LLC et al., Civil Action 2014-7562, Superior Court Judge Dennis Curran dissolved a lis pendens he had granted only months earlier after he learned that the party seeking the lis pendens failed to notify the...
In February, the Massachusetts Appeals Court clarified that the Land Court and Superior Court have exclusive jurisdiction over appeals of permits granted by cities and towns for large-scale development projects. See Skawski v. Greenfield Investors Property Dev., LLC,...
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ("SJC") has held that the provisions of the "Obsolete Mortgage" statute, Mass. Gen. L. c. 260, § 33, as amended in 2006, comport with the Massachusetts and United States Constitutions. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. v....
A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit has ruled that a 2012 amendment to the federal Electronic Funds Transfer Act ("EFTA"), which abolished the requirement that operators of automatic teller machines ("ATM") maintain exterior notices of fees, was not retroactive....
The Seventh Circuit recently ruled that a party was bound to an arbitration award despite not being a signatory to the agreement to arbitrate. The court based its decision on the doctrine of "direct benefits estoppel," ruling that, even though the plaintiff was a...
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