Introduction

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal,European Union,New Hampshire
• Pages: 0004
• Citation: Vol. 55 No. 2 Pg. 0004
• Publication year: 2015

INTRODUCTION Vol. 55, No. 2 Pg. 4 New Hampshire Bar Journal Fall, 2015

While this issue of Bar Journal was an open to any topics rather than being grouped around a theme, the passage of time figures in each of the four articles.

Kicking off the issue, Does the United States Need A Right to Be Forgotten, author Kimberly Peaslee examines the policy and practical implications of the United States adopting laws or establishing a scheme to enable old material - embarassing, obsolete, irrelevant or excessive - to be removed from the Internet. She examines the legal framework of the - right to be forgotten - that exists in the European Union and compares a couple of approaches under consideration in the US before offering her own conclusions.

Returning to the pages of the Bar Journal, Alexander deNesnera, associate medical director of New Hampshire Hospital, traces the evolution of the concept of maximum times for involuntary commitment laws for mental health treatment. DeNesnera has earlier written about the state's mental health laws from both historical and clinicians' perspective. This article more narrowly focuses on tracing how state law arrived at its current position, which prescribes a five-year maximum for either criminal or civil involuntary commitments, the longest in the country. Accompanying the article is a comment, solicited by the author, from retired NH Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Nadeau, whose decades on the bench included service on every level of the courts. Judge Nadeau notes the interplay of legislative action and judicial actions that has demonstrated how the judicial and legislative branches have shown deference to each other over a long period.

Again, on the theme of time, attorney Christopher Hawkins explores issues surrounding the statute of limitations in professional liability cases involving lawyers. In "Dormant Mistakes: The Statute of Limitations in Professional Negligence, he describes three concepts used to apply the statutes of limitations in lawyer malpractice cases due to the fact clients often are unaware of mistakes made in their cases until years later. While the statute of limitations begins accruing when the client discovers the error, different circumstances will affect how the statute of limitations is viewed. Three concepts - the discovery rule, fraudulent concealment, and the continuous representation rule -...