We’re all for the continued intersection of law and technology, but this is getting a little nuts: A court in Australia has ruled that a lawyer can serve legally binding documents to a couple via Facebook.

Lawyer Mark McCormack tried several times through home visits and email to serve process on a man and a woman who had defaulted on their home loan. Eventually, he looked up their profiles on Facebook, and sent them the lien notice as an attachment via the social networking site.

Granted, by the time McCormack got the documents approved by the court, the couple’s profiles had been removed from public view. Still, the ruling, coming out of no less than the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court, effectively sets precedent for the practice of using Facebook as a binding legal tool. If that trend heads across the ocean, Lord help us all.

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As they so often do, things got litigious when both the California Coastal Commission and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Navy in separate lawsuits to stop its use of sonar during 14 training exercises off the Southern California coast. Lucky for the whale-savers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which is known for siding on the path of the less mighty) agreed with them, and smacked the Navy with restrictions on its sub exercises.

Now enter the Supreme Court, which this week heard the case on appeal. As with just about every human endeavor that harms the environment, the sonar use necessitates a balancing act between our needs—in this case, for a military that’s sharp and ready for, say, a second Pearl Harbor—and the needs of everything else.

Unfortunately for the NRDC (and the whales), it looks like the scales are leaning towards us: At least three justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have said they’ll overturn the limits in the interests of national security.

The problem is that while we know sonar causes harm to whales, we really have no clue how much. And without clear evidence that Navy missions are causing each and every whale in the sea to throw itself on the beach in a ritual mass suicide, the Court won’t be inclined to put the kibosh on training missions that could strengthen our coastal defenses.

Still, Justice Breyer may be teetering on the brink of scary hyperbole with statements like this:

“The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment,” he said. “You go on a bombing mission — do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?”

Just wait ’til Greenpeace hears about that one.

Image: iStockphoto

A Russian judge has thrown out a 22-year-old advertising executive’s sexual harassment claim against her boss because “If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” according to the Telegraph U.K.

The plaintiff’s claim included allegations that her 47-year-old boss had demanded sex from every female employee and had locked her out of her office after she refused to have “intimate relations” with him. The judge didn’t toss out the case on the theory that these facts weren’t true, or even that they didn’t constitute sexual harassment. Rather, he ruled that such harassment was harmless—a view that has precedent in Russian courts, given that only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But the presumptive logic underlying the ruling—that sex harassment in the workplace could help grow the country’s population, which has been in decline to the point where the government has stepped in to pass child-bearing initiatives—is hardly good science, not to mention a poor legal precedent.

While workplace sex harassment in Russia is common to the point of being expected—a recent survey of professional Russian women found that a whopping 100 percent had been sexually harassed by their bosses, and 32 percent had had sex with their manager at least once—the judge is making several major assumptions about the link between more sex on the job and more Russian babies. Assuming a boss impregnates his secretary, either through semi-consensual sex as a result of harassment or from full-on rape, the odds are pretty high that the pregnancy will be unwanted, making the woman more likely to abort. Russia’s abortion rate is already sky-high—while the total population in 2006 was around 143 million, the total number of abortions that year was around 1.6 million (compare that to the mere 1.2 million abortions in the U.S. in 2005, despite a more-than-double population size).

Plus there’s the fact that, in the wake of the country’s economic collapse, it’s still pretty tough to support yourself, let alone a child, in Russia, which could help explain why women are putting up with such massive levels of on-the-job harassment in the first place. While getting assaulted by your boss may be the only way to pay the bills, it sure isn’t incentive to give birth to more Russian babies.

Image: iStockPhoto

CNN reports that party photos and pictures of defendants drinking or looking unrepentant have resulted in harsher sentences for people charged in drunk driving accidents, with prosecutors presenting the incriminating pictures as evidence that the defendant lacked remorse.

In one instance, a prosecutor showed the court a Powerpoint presentation of party photos that had been posted on Facebook by a 20-year-old defendant after he nearly killed another driver in a three-car collision. The pictures depicted him at a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.” The judge slammed him with a two-year jail sentence.

A girl charged in a fatal drunken driving crash also had photos from her MySpace page downloaded by prosecutors, who used them in their pre-sentencing report. The pictures, posted after the crash, showed her holding a beer bottle and wearing a “a belt bearing plastic shot glasses.” Her sentence was more than five years.

Given that there’s no reason prosecutors can’t or won’t mine these sites for character evidence, technology is in essence handing these defendants a noose to hang themselves with. Still, there’s the danger that a photo taken out of context can be disproportionately damning. In the 20-year-old’s case, he was remorseful enough to drop out of college and write apologies to the victim and her family. But the image of him sticking his tongue out at a party is far more likely to color a judge’s (or anyone’s) perception—a phenomenon that’s been proven by more than anecdotes.

Image: Flickr/libraryman

The drugs, which include Mirapex and Requip, are dopamine agonists, which mimic dopamine in the brain to boost the movement and coordination centers—and also stimulate the pleasure response by reinforcing certain behaviors. Unwitting patients who’ve taken the drugs have wound up with costly gambling habits, DUI arrests, and compulsive eating disorders, as well as even stranger effects—one man reportedly plays basketball for up to 36 hours at a time, while another compulsively fishes.

Given that more than 10 million prescriptions have been written for Mirapex alone, it’s not unlikely that we’ll see some serious fallout, be it motorists killed by a drunk driver on the drug, or an STD spike as a result of risky sexual practices (which are already on the rise among seniors, the demographic most likely to be taking meds for Parkinson’s and RLS).

As such, it’s worth it to start asking to what degree patients should be held legally responsible for their actions while taking the drug—and, perhaps even more importantly for lawyers, whether the drug companies can be held at all responsible for all that irresponsible boozing and sex.

The shot-down regulation, called the Clean Air Interstate Rule, was ironically the most aggressive move the Bush Administration has taken to clean up the air. It called for a drastic decrease in East Coast air pollution—up to a 70 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by 2025—by cleaning up coal-fired power plants in Midwestern states, and had even gained backing from a sizable number of power companies.

But alas, the court unanimously struck down the rule, holding that “[n]o amount of tinkering with the rule or revising of the explanations” would make it “acceptable.”

Their reasoning is that EPA’s regional cap system did not take state-specific emissions and reductions into enough consideration, and that the agency lacks the authority to force one state to “share the burden of reducing” another state’s pollution.

Fair points, but do these concerns really justify striking down the full text of a cornerstone regulation that had gained widespread support among environmentalists, congressmen, and power companies, some of which had already invested billions in reliance on the rule? Even the victors in the lawsuit were reportedly disappointed with the decision, and now lawmakers are back to square one in the long and expensive process of creating effective air pollution controls. While Bush may have done an impressive job of castrating the EPA, the court now appears to be neutering it as well.

Not that we’re putting down forensic evidence—for all its faults, it has worked courtroom miracles across the globe.

Surveillance
After taking full advantage of the post-Patriot Act world, the FBI may finally be getting a legal—and Congressional—smackdown for its cavalier attitude towards people’s desire not to be spied on.

Science as a Defense
Big Tobacco’s massive hit—a class action settlement to the tune of $206 billion—struck a nerve with other industries, at least one of which is already whipping up some “solid” science to help mount a defense when/should the class actions commence. If it works, look for plenty more privately funded research labs in the near future.

Drug Lawsuits
From price inflation to deceptive advertising to injury class actions, drugmakers are spending plenty of time—and money—in the courts these days. And as more Big Pharma companies see their patents expire and the generic brands swoop in, look for drug companies to start filing suit against each other.