Losing a case does not necessarily mean the process was unfair. Learn the difference between an unfavorable court result and problems involving procedure, evidence, impartiality, legal error, and due process.
Court-ordered community service is supposed to require actual service. But documented schemes have sold certificates claiming defendants completed hours they never worked, turning a sentencing requirement into a piece of paper.
A federal jury found that an insurance executive and marketing CEO built a massive ACA enrollment fraud scheme by targeting homeless, unemployed and vulnerable people, generating at least $180 million in federal subsidies.
Some of the most consequential lawsuits never reach a jury. From dismissal and summary judgment to jurisdictional rulings and settlements, major cases show how litigation can be decided long before trial.
Why do courts follow earlier decisions? Learn how precedent and stare decisis promote consistency, when prior decisions are binding, and why courts sometimes overturn established precedent.
A hidden confession, disputed scientific testimony, a recorded police interview and thousands of cell-phone location records show how a single piece of evidence can transform a court case.
DNA can identify more than the person who provided it. Genetic genealogy can use biological relationships to generate investigative leads, raising lasting questions about crime solving, family privacy and genetic data.
The person who knows the most about a case may never testify. Death, disappearance, privilege, the Fifth Amendment and strategic decisions can leave jurors deciding what happened without hearing from a crucial witness.
Deleting a text, photo, email or file does not always destroy it. Copies, backups, cloud systems, recipients and forensic recovery can allow supposedly deleted evidence to reappear months or years later.
Photos, email, social media, cloud files and online accounts can survive long after their owner dies. The law increasingly has to decide who may access, preserve or control a person's digital life.
Social media posts can survive for years through screenshots, account records and other copies. When a lawsuit, criminal case or other dispute begins, an old post can become evidence with consequences its author never anticipated.
A confident eyewitness can be extraordinarily persuasive to a jury. But when that confidence developed—and what happened after the witness first saw the suspect—can matter as much as how certain the witness appears in court.
AI can now create convincing photographs, recordings and voices depicting events that never happened. Deepfakes are forcing courts to reconsider how digital evidence can be authenticated and trusted.
AI can produce images, music, writing and software in seconds, but copyright law was built around human creators. Courts and the Copyright Office are defining where human authorship ends and machine generation begins.
A forgotten recording, newly found document, DNA result or unexpected witness can surface after a verdict and challenge what everyone thought was settled. But new evidence does not automatically reopen a closed case.
A witness can look directly at a defendant and sincerely say, “That's the person I saw,” yet still be mistaken. Decades of wrongful-conviction cases have changed what courts know about eyewitness memory and certainty.
Two cameras can record the same event and make it look completely different. Angle, timing, sound, missing seconds and perspective can turn video evidence into the beginning of a courtroom dispute rather than the end of one.
Hours of surveillance footage can matter less than a few decisive seconds. A brief recording can contradict a witness, establish a timeline, reveal what happened before an encounter, or completely change how a case is understood.
