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Federal appeals court cites Penn State Law professor Anne McKenna


University Park, Pa. -- Penn State Law visiting assistant professor Anne McKenna was recently cited in an opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

In deciding the case Longhorn Service Company v. Perez, the federal appeals court referenced McKenna’s influential treatise co-authored with Clifford Fishman, Jones on Evidence: Civil & Criminal, 7th edition.

In Longhorn, a Texas-based oil company appealed a citation from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) concerning potential safety violations on an oil rig platform.

The company attempted to argue that the OSHA compliance officer who issued the citation was unqualified to claim that a fall from the platform could result in significant injury, but the court rejected that argument. The court cited McKenna’s work on Jones on Evidence for the legal principle that “expert testimony is unnecessary for matters of common knowledge.”

Fishman & McKenna’s work, Jones in Evidence, has been cited many times by numerous courts, including the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 11th, and District of Columbia Circuits.

A new hardbound volume of Jones on Evidence (Volume 6) will be forthcoming this winter, published by Thomson Reuters. Several hundred pages in length, it addresses in depth expert witness testimony in civil cases, and its publication coincides with the fact that McKenna will be teaching Evidence at Penn State Law this spring.

McKenna, an attorney with over 20 years of practice experience in cyber, privacy, electronic surveillance, and cellular law, joined the Penn State Law faculty this summer from the law firm of Silverman/Thompson/Slutkin/White, where she chaired the firm’s cyber law group.

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