Features
Divorce Lawyers' Obligation to Children
Do divorce lawyers have an obligation to disclose client confidences when it is in the best interests of the client's child to do so? The short answer of the rules of professional responsibility is 'no' because a 'yes' answer is deemed to be fundamentally inconsistent with the premises of the adversary system in which the divorce lawyer functions. The longer answer is that the rules encourage ' but do not require ' a divorce lawyer to counsel the client to authorize the disclosure because it is in the best interests of both parent and child.
Features
FERPA, Custody, and Access to Education Records
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (20 USC ' 1232g), more commonly referred to as FERPA, is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. FERPA applies to all schools that receive public funding. FERPA's terms contradict the commonly held belief that a non-custodial parent's right to a child's education record is defined only by the text of the stipulation of settlement or court order.
Features
Report Calls for Sweeping Changes At the FDA
In September, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a congressionally created entity dedicated to the study of policy matters pertaining to the public health, issued the results of the study of federal drug safety policy commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The resulting report, titled 'The Future of Drug Safety, Promoting and Protecting the Health of the Public' and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, has been widely anticipated in light of recent publicity surrounding Vioxx' and other drugs that, subsequent to FDA-approval, proved more dangerous than thought.
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