Program fee: $65 SLL members and CPCS staff, bar advocates and prosecutors; $85 all others.

CPCS approved for 3.5 hours of Post-Conviction, Criminal Trial and Youth Advocacy Division panels.

Attorney Stephen J. Carley, Worcester District Attorney’s Office
Hon. Elspeth B. Cypher, Massachusetts Appeals Court
Hon. Kenneth V. Desmond, Jr., Superior Court
Hon. Dana M. Gershengorn, Juvenile Court
Attorney Lynn S. Muster, Massachusetts Appeals Court




“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law (1897)

The law is not static. New cases and rules prompt new questions of first instance that arise at trial and are inevitably appealed. To use Holmes’ oft quoted imagery, law is not a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.” Good meteorologists look at the sky
and forecast the weather. Good lawyers and judges, Holmes said, study appellate cases and rules to predict what the courts will do.

This program will identify a selection of interesting and important new cases and rule changes that, in themselves, raise their own new issues that will arise at trial and on appeal. Topics include:

• Cell phone searches, most recently discussed by the USSC last term in Riley v. California, and by the SJC in late 2014 in Augustine.
• Closed courtroom issues, which started with Cohen (No. 1), as recently discussed in Morganti and LaChance.
• New changes to Mass.R.Crim.P. 12, in response to the SJC’s interpretation of the rule in Rodriguez and Dean-Ganek.
• Emerging emphasis on the rehabilitative goal of the Juvenile Court; best interests standard, which used to be prominent only in civil and delinquency cases, now is prominent in all types of cases, as exemplified in LL v. Commonwealth, and procedural powers of the judges in that court.
• New changes to eyewitness testimony, as most recently addressed in Gomes and the SJC-propounded preliminary instructions.

The panel will examine these and other emerging issues to help you anticipate where, to use Holmes’ phrase, The Path of the Law might lead.

Registrants for this program acknowledge that during the program their photographic or videographic images may be incidentally taken; registrants agree that the submission of their registrations for this program constitutes their written consent to the Social Law Library’s use of any such image in print and online materials solely for promotion of the Library’s noncommercial CLE seminars and other educational events and activities.

Same day registrations are $5.00 extra. Registration fees are non-refundable.