Court Rules - THE RIDGEWOOD BLOG.

file photo by Boyd Loving

By S.P. Sullivan | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 14, 2017 at 10:23 AM, updated April 14, 2017 at 4:51 PM

TRENTON — The New Jersey State Police does not have to reimburse state troopers for toll fares during their commute to and from work, an appeals court has ruled in a dispute between the state and the troopers’ union.

The two-judge panel found on Thursday that an arbitrator was mistaken in declaring the practice “an established term and condition of employment.”

For years, the operators of the state’s major toll roads, the New Jersey
Turnpike Authority and the South Jersey Transportation Authority, allowed troopers and other state employees to pass through their toll booths in personal vehicles free of charge.

But in 2010, Gov. Chris Christie called for an end to free rides for non-emergency vehicles. Soon after, a report from the state comptroller also flagged the practice in a report identifying $43 million in waste within the Turnpike Authority.

https://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/04/nj_troopers_have_to_pay_their_own_tolls_court_rule.html

Parents May Be Liable for What Their Kids Post on Facebook, Court Rules

Parents can be held liable for what their kids post on Facebook FB -1.17%, a Georgia appellate court ruled in a decision that lawyers said marked a legal precedent on the issue of parental responsibility over their children’s online activity.

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of a seventh-grade student may be negligent for failing to get their son to delete a fake Facebook profile that allegedly defamed a female classmate.

The trouble started in 2011 when, with the help of another student, the boy constructed a Facebook profile pretending to be the girl. He used a “Fat Face” app to make her look obese and posted profane and sexually explicit comments on the page depicting her as racist and promiscuous, according to court documents.

When the girl found out about it, she told her parents who then complained to the school’s principal. The school punished the boy with two days of in-school suspension and alerted his parents, who grounded him for a week.

But for the next 11 months, according to the appeals court opinion, the page stayed up. It wasn’t deleted until Facebook deactivated the account at the urging of the girl’s parents, the opinion said. The girl’s lawyer says the child’s parents didn’t immediately confront the boy’s parents because their school refused to identify the culprit for confidentiality reasons.

https://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/10/15/parents-may-be-liable-for-what-their-kids-post-on-facebook-court-rules/