DUI Arrests Statistic

Anyone who drinks and then drives is potentially making themselves liable for a Driving While Intoxicated arrest. A Blood Alcohol Content of 0.08% means that you are considered to be legally drunk. You can be pulled over by law enforcement, even if you are not involved in an accident, if you are exhibiting certain behaviors while driving. Weaving over the dividing line, driving off the road onto the shoulder, suddenly accelerating and slowing, going through a stop sign, and driving without lights at night can all get the attention of a police officer.
If you are pulled over, a breathalyzer test and other tests to determine sobriety will be administered, and if you are found to be intoxicated, you will be arrested for drunk driving. If you refuse to take any of the tests, which you are legally able to do, you will be considered to be drunk by default and you will probably experience a DWI arrest. This will result in immediate suspension or revocation of your driver's license. The severity of the arrest will also depend on whether this is a first or repeat offense.

DUI Arrests Statistic (Click to enlarge)

A law enforcement officer will nearly always ask if the person they have pulled over how many drinks they have had. Basically, whatever you answer, if there is alcohol on your breath, you will be arrested for DWI. You will probably be handcuffed, taken to a police station, and charged.
While a first DWI arrest will generally be treated more leniently than any subsequent arrests, the penalties will still affect your life in several important ways. Your license will instantly be suspended for 90 to 365 days. If you need a car to get to work, you might lose your job if no other means of transportation is available. Your auto insurance will either be cancelled or the premiums will skyrocket. The state may impound your car, also.
Usually, a first DWI offender will get probation instead of actual jail time. You will often have to perform community service and enter an alcohol treatment program. As a fine is always given in DWI arrest cases, you might also find that your monetary responsibility will be lessened if you agree to the above programs.
If you experience more than one DWI arrest, the penalties will become progressively more onerous. Not only might your car be impounded, sometimes the state will even auction off your car, which is one way of making sure that your chances of drunk driving are minimized. Being arrested more than once for drunk driving will almost ensure a prison term, heavy fine, and revocation of your license. You will also have the added attorney fees and court costs. If your drunk driving has caused injury or death, you will face very serious felony charges, possibly vehicular manslaughter or homicide.
It is in your own best interests, as well as the interests of anyone who might get in the way of your automobile, for you to take a cab home after a night on the town. The small expense of a taxi is really nothing when compared to all the attendant costs and miseries of a DWI arrest.
2008 - National DUI / Drunk Driving Statistics
•Official statistics for people who are arrested nationally for drunk driving / DUI (Driving under the Influence) not yet known
•10,684 fatal accidents nationally where at least one driver had a BAC of 0.8% or above
•11,773 people were killed nationally in accidents where at least one driver had a BAC of 0.8% or above
•2,072 people were killed nationally in accidents where at least one driver had a BAC between 0.01% and 0.07%
•13,846 total deaths were caused nationally where at least one driver had a BAC of 0.01% or above.

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We Need Cyber Law Research in Education

Cyber law in education is an issue that is ripe for scholarly research and analysis.  The importance of this topic is growing exponentially with the meteoric rise in social networking and other online forums which are becoming a primary source of interaction among school aged students. One result of these "virtual" relationships is a blurring of the lines of jurisdiction for disciplinary responsibility. At what point do a student's actions fall outside of the authority of his or her school? When the student uses school equipment on school grounds the analysis is very clear, but case law has created a continuum that defies any objective definition of where that jurisdiction ends. Similarly, at what point does a teacher or administrator's actions leave the authority of their employer and become protected by their right to privacy? The question of jurisdiction must be addressed before meaningful processes can be implemented to counteract the damage that online actions can have on the school system.
The harms that are caused at the hands of students through cyber actions include marring the reputation of teachers and administrators, harassing other students and threatening the security of testing and other educational information. Similarly, educators often cause harm through their own cyber actions by using online forums in an inappropriate manner to the detriment of their school or district. These actions may compromise the safety and morals of their students and affect the integrity of the educational system itself. Yet any restriction on these actions runs the risk of violating constitutional rights of free speech and privacy. Needless to say, there is a careful and ever-evolving balancing process that needs to be maintained in this area of law. And the decisions of our courts and enactments of our legislatures must be monitored and influenced by educators and education law experts.

The bullying laws that are springing up in local legislatures provide an excellent example of the issues at stake in this field. There is an important responsibility for governments to protect children from this new form of harassment. At the same time, however, in addition to the inevitable first amendment challenges, educators need to have a voice as to the practical limits on building level school personnel in implementing these new laws. These issues present a fascinating intersection of legal issues that will only become more relevant and topical in the decades to come.
Research and analysis will be important in normalizing policy in the field. Ultimately statutory enactments and case decisions will  provide the law on these subjects.  However, these statutes and decisions are by no means immutable.  Like any other area of law, they evolve and change over time.  And these shifting principles are all the more prevalent in a field of law that is in its infancy such as this one.  There are no long-standing seminal court decisions on the topic, nor is there any conventional wisdom with respect to a proper statutory framework.  Therefore, in this field more than any other that I can think of within education law, there is a need for scholarly research and publication to help organize and shape the developing legal trends.

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10 Vital iPad Applications for a Lawyer

The iPad promises to change the way lawyers practice the law. Here are 10 essential iPad apps that any lawyer should have.

1. iWork for iPad - $30 or $10 for each of the three apps - includes a word processor (Pages), a spreadsheet application (Numbers), and a presentation application (Keynote). This suite of applications will enable you to create fairly sophisticated documents, although it's probably a better for editing documents, rather than creating full-fledged contracts or agreements on the fly.
2. Evernote - Free - A fantastic program that you can download for your computer, your iPhone/iTouch, and your iPad. This program allows you to save ideas, things you see on the web (on any of those devices), record notes, ideas, and voice memos, and to then share these things across platforms. So if you're in court or in a meeting away from your computer, and you need to save a note, or a memo, it will synchronize with Evernote on your computer as well.
   
3. Aji Annotator - $4.99 - Many legal documents come in PDF format. Aji Annotate lets you mark-up, annotate, and add notes to PDF documents, which you can then save and re-share with other people/lawyers.
4. DocuSign - Varies - Until DocuSign comes up with a native application for its electronic signature service, you'll have to have internet connectivity and the ability to reach the DocuSign website, which the company says is fully compatible with the new iPad.
5. Air Sharing - Lite ($2.99) or Pro Version ($9.99) - Allows you to move files to your iPad (from your desktop) or to your iPhone or iTouch with ease. The early version for the iPad is getting reports of being buggy. The iPhone version which I've used works quite well.
6. Instapaper - $4.99 - Works like a charm on the iPhone, and will be even better on the iPad. This app allows you to "bookmark" various webpages, which you then synch with your iPad. Allows for off-line browsing. Slightly duplicative of Evernote, although Instapaper does this one thing really well, whereas Evernote has a broader range of capabilities.
7. DropBox - Free - DropBox allows you to share files via the "cloud" with multiple users on multiple different platforms. Obviously, highly confidential material needs to be treated with more care, and so this may not be appropriate for all documents you use. But for commonly used forms, standard agreements, standard documents, this is a good solution.
8. Desktop Connect - $11.99 - Desktop Connection allows you to use your iPad to interact with your desktop or laptop that you left back at your office. You need to have VNC or RDP installed on the desktop/laptop so that the iPad can see the screen. Also, the quality of the connection will govern how useful this application is. In other words, the worse the connection, the less useful this application will be in allowing you to interact with your office computer.
9. Dragon Dictation - Free - Dragon, the world's best transcription software developer - has brought Dragon Dictation to the iPad. And it's free! Dictate memos to yourself. Share them with yourself later at the office.
10. Memeo connect Reader - Free - If you use Google Docs as the home for some or all of your Word and Excel documents, then the problem becomes accessing those documents when you're not connected to the Internet. Memeo Connect Reader allows you to download those files so that you can work with them on your iPad.

With these 10 essential apps for lawyers, you'll be well on your way to using the iPad as more than a toy, and as a genuine tool to help you practice law more effectively.

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