The medical malpractice insurance system experienced a period of crisis in the early 1970s. High jury awards and an increased amount of litigation were cited as causing a substantial increase in malpractice premiums. These premiums covered doctors for claims arising from their treatment of patients. As a result, physicians were unable to afford the high price of premiums and many insurers discontinued malpractice insurance. After years of stability, the medical malpractice crisis has resurfaced. In an effort to reduce malpractice premiums, many states implemented legislative tort reform acts. The majority of these acts included caps on noneconomic damages. These caps place a limit on the amount of money an injured person can receive for pain and suffering as the result of medical malpractice. Tort reform bills, which include these caps, created controversy in the court system. Lawyers argue that these caps violate an injured person's constitutional rights, but the legislature believes that they are necessary to ensure access to health care. The Florida legislature recently passed a Medical Liability Bill in an attempt to alleviate the crisis. The bill includes a $500,000 cap on noneconomic damages. My research was designed to analyze the current malpractice crisis, review Florida's Medical Liability Bill, and examine the effect of damage caps on medical liability litigation. The purpose is to evaluate the effects of current tort reform legislation, assess the constitutionality of damage caps, and propose solutions to the medical malpractice crisis.

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The Constitution provides each United States citizen certain rights which cannot be abridged. Among them is the freedom to speak without fear of persecution or prosecution. While there are exceptions when the government finds interests paramount to free expression, on the whole this guarantee ensures that the no person will be punished for expressing his or her views. Another guarantee, implied through Constitutional language, is the right to privacy. To ensure privacy, the United States Congress and several state governments enacted laws that impose harsh penalties for those who secretly record others' private communications. Upon realizing that the true harm comes from the use or disclosure of intercepted material, governments punish those who make such use or disclosure. A problem arises when a person, who neither participated in nor encouraged an "illegal" interception of another's communication, discloses the interception under his or her right to speak freely. Which guarantee rules-the right to free speech, or the right to privacy? This paper centers on a case in which such a conflict arose. The purpose is to demonstrate that whatever positive impact there may exist in allowing the disclosure of certain communications through a First Amendment "clean hands" exception to current interception laws, that impact is outweighed by the need to guarantee that persons will not be subjected to unwanted intrusion into their private conversations for any reason.

From Congress's findings on Equal Opportunity for Individuals with Disabilities, "some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities, and this number is increasing as the population as a whole is growing older" (ADA of 1990). One primary purpose of the Americans with Disabilities Act is to erase the fear that because someone has a mental illness, he or she is a threat. Employers sometimes hesitate, though, to hire individuals with mental illnesses. The ADA, as it is currently written, generally provides an effective guideline for eliminating discrimination against persons with physical and mental disabilities. It requires employers to make reasonable accommodations to meet the needs of otherwise qualified employees, without imposing an undue hardship upon the companies. However, reasonable accommodations for mentally ill individuals in the workplace are not clearly defined. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the ADA and to make recommendations, based on case law and other sources, for changes to the ADA to better meet the needs of mentally ill employees in the United States.

In March 1989, R.J. went to Humana Hospital where he underwent an HIV test. The test indicated that he was HIV positive. Approximately 19 months later after · requesting a new test, R.J. found that he was not HIV- positive. R.J. suffered substantial emotional distress is a result of the false positive test result; he lived in fear for 19 months thinking he was HIV positive. R.J. was denied recovery. How is that possible? The defendants owed a duty to R.J.; that duty was not to inflict upon him any needless Emotional distress. That duty was breached when they incorrectly diagnosed him as being HIV positive. Their breach actually and proximately caused R.J. to suffer damages in the form of emotional distress. The reason for this inequitable result lies in the strict adherence and application of the illogical and outdated Impact Doctrine. The Impact doctrine requires that “before a plaintiff can recover damages for emotional distress caused by the negligence of another, the emotional distress suffered must flow from physical injuries the plaintiff sustained in an impact" The inconsistent application of this rule, along with changes in society and the advances in medicine and psychology, are evidence that the Impact Doctrine no longer serves a purpose in Florida The Florida Supreme Court should follow the trend of other states and liberalize recovery for negligent infliction of emotional distress and create alternative tests of proof for recovery.

The laws that make up what society calls copyright are aspects that govern all bodies of art, literature, and creative ideas throughout the world. While this fact is not in dispute, the way people apply the rules of law surrounding copyright is a notoriously hot topic. Copyright allows authors to retain rights to the work they create. Through these laws, authors can own their work seventy years after their death. This pulls into question the length of time works are withheld from the public domain. Initially the market for regulation dealing with copyright concerned copied materials only, which lasted for a period of fourteen years. Copyright now protects written work, music, films, sound recordings, paintings, and some computer programs and chips, just to name a few. The underlying question is how do we as a society allow these works to be released from their protected bonds and regenerate them back into the general population? With such new inventions as the World Wide Web and the increased use of the Internet, the future of copyright has been thrown a curve ball. As civilization become keen on sharing everything from mass media to personal files, law suddenly has to conform at lightning speed in order to keep up. It is here where the focus shifts to how copyright law influences this sharing in a negative way though its attempt to control the dealings of unsuspecting users. The purpose of this thesis is to try to shed some light on these subjects and provide an understanding of how copyright worked its way up to controversial subject matter it is today. From the research examined and data collected, recommendations regarding the future of copyright will be presented.

In recent years there has been a tendency for people throughout the sports world to talk about the possibilities of a number of young athletes becoming professional athletes right out of high school. This subject is one of great interest. This timely subject is extremely important because of the perceived influx of young teenage athletes entering the professional ranks. With the media covering the stories of such individuals as Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Freddy Adu, and the suit brought against the National Football League by Maurice Clarett, this has developed into a hot button subject with multiple points of view, all of which will be explored in my research project. My intention in pursuing this research is to examine the pros and cons of both enacting minimum age requirements in professional sports and the social implications of following through with either option. There are a number of points of view and opinions on this subject and deservedly so, because the decisions that the professional leagues make will have far reaching implications for generations to come for the athletes themselves, their families, colleges, universities, and even the economy. When discussing a controversial subject such as this one, it is important to be aware that the debate begins much earlier than at that moment when a teenage athlete decides to make the jump from high school or even junior athletics into the professional leagues; it begins the moment a young athlete shows superior talent. This project will examine in depth the aspects of the arguments both for and against age requirements in sports.

This thesis will explore the activist direction the U.S. Supreme Court has taken in relation to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution with respect to Colorado's Amendment 2. The effects of such activism in the case of Romer v. Evans, the case in which Amendment 2 was constitutionally challenged for excluding homosexuals from existing anti-discrimination laws, include circumventing democracy and the improper assertion of constitutional conflict with respect to the inclusion of homosexuals in our equal protection laws. Historically, judicial activism has played a large role in interpreting the extent of equal protection to everyone under the law. Since Brown v. Board of Education, the judiciary has actively interpreted equal protection to include its own social theories and justices. As a result, equal protection has been stretched far beyond what the framers had intended. The U.S. Supreme Court's activist decision in Romer not only extended the interpretation of equal protection, but exhibited an abuse of judicial review. The issue of gay rights is clearly a social one and social issues, because of their inherent moral nature, are theoretically best decided democratically. Within the last decade, and more particularly within the last year, we have seen more social issues, like gay rights, that have been decided by voter initiative overturned by activist courts. This judicial intervention of voter referendum essentially erodes our democratic system. The Romer decision is a clear example of an activist court prohibiting the citizens of a state to control the actions of their government. The U.S. Supreme Court conceivably abused judicial review in this case and unjustifiably asserted voter referendum, the most democratic act, as unconstitutional. The issue of whether Colorado's Amendment 2 violated the Equal Protection Clause is clearly determined through the consideration of the original intent of the framers and strictly construing the constitution and its accompanying civil rights laws. Since homosexuals are not a federally protected class and the State of Colorado is not constitutionally or federally required to protect such a class, no constitutional conflict exists in the provisions set forth in Amendment 2. Affording this class protection is an extension unwarranted by the theory of equal protection laws, and is adverse to Bowers v. Hardwick. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down Colorado's Amendment 2 is a perfect example of "stretching" of the equal protection to unauthorized limits. The interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause by an activist court can sometimes be a precarious one and the consequences can be profound. Although the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Romer created no new rights for homosexuals and fell short of declaring them a "suspect class," it erroneously elevated a rather small, yet recently politically powerful class of people to the same level as that of racial minorities, women, and religious groups. Thus, begging the question of whether sexual orientation should be included in those enumerated civil rights classes we know so well. When examining the inherent uncontrollable nature of the current enumerated categories together with the fact that science is still divided on whether homosexuality is a controlled behavior concludes that presently, homosexuals should not be included in the federal civil rights categories. Therefore, such a cultural debate is best reserved for the states and their communities. The issue of whether homosexuals should be entitled to special protective legislation is one that is plagued by morality, and like other moral issues, such as abortion, has become very controversial. The main objective of this thesis is to view the Supreme Court's decision in Romer v. Evans from a very restrainist standpoint as opposed to an activist standpoint. This thesis will attempt to wade through the moral influences of this issue and analyze the case of Romer v. Evans from a strict constructionist point of view.

The group of technologies known as the Internet has transformed information gathering and sharing in a way never imagined previously. Because of some of the controversial content on the Internet, public university libraries grapple with Internet access issues because of governing university policies, governmental legislation and other types of regulation. The primary purpose of making information available for the furtherance of research and ideas is the cornerstone of the university library's purpose. The First Amendment provides protection against the limitations of government imposed on modes of communication. This protection applies to the Internet as well. The legal system struggles with balancing the modalities of constraint (powers), versus the modalities of protection (rights), when applying the First Amendment to the Internet and access restriction issues. Currently, little case law exists to solidify a unified stance on this technological ''new kid on the block," with issues concerning access in the public library system, or in the university library realm. Just as there are those that would restrict the reading of various printed publications or the viewing of provocative works of art, the restriction of access to the Internet at the university level could well be construed as a twenty-first century form of censorship. The purpose of this study is to investigate the application of the First Amendment to the Internet in relation to access restrictions in university libraries. Further, the access restriction methods employed by the libraries are examined and critiqued, as well as the development and expansion of the Internet as a primary research tool. If the First · Amendment was created for the protection of speech, the protection extends to access of that speech.

Owning property, starting a business, and owning your own home are things considered to be part of the American dream. Our country was founded upon certain rights, which allow ownership of homes and small businesses. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the interests of private property owners from the seizure of their land, except where the property is needed to satisfy a public use, and they are provided with just compensation for their loss. The 2005 United States Supreme Court case decision in Keio v. City of New London eliminated private property owner's protection under the Constitution. The Supreme Court's decision allows for the public taking of private property which is then transferred to another private party for the economic development of a city. The court determined that the redevelopment of the city which provided an increase in jobs and in tax revenue for the city, is a public use under the Fifth Amendment. As a result of the decision in Keio, the floodgates to hundreds of similar cases across the county are open. Throughout the United States, local governments are attempting to seize land needed for economic gain and redevelopment through eminent domain. Thousands of private residences, businesses, churches, and other community buildings are being seized and transferred to other private owners who will benefit from this seizure and transfer. The courts are moving away from the words actually written in the Constitution, "for public use" and instead accepting a looser interpretation of a public benefit as a result of a huge governmental and corporate gain, to meet the requirements set forth in the Fifth Amendment.