Cultivated Compendium is my personal website with the occasional link to my reporting and to important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news.
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News and Reporting
June 24th, 2015
Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down that state's ban on doctors prescribing abortion-inducing pills to patients via video teleconferencing, the Associated Press reports. Iowa was the first state to allow doctors to dispense abortion-inducing medications through telemedicine.
The court ruled that it placed an undue burden on a woman's right to get an abortion. The Iowa Board of Medicine enacted a rule requiring a doctor be... Continue Reading
June 23rd, 2015
The Securities and Exchange Commission is defending its use of in-house courts to handle enforcement of financial regulations, The Wall Street Journal's Jean Eaglesham reports: "The SEC accused several defendants of 'judge shopping' by trying to get a case heard in a particular court and in another instance asked one of its own judges to submit a formal statement about whether he has ever felt pressure to favor the agency.... Continue Reading
June 23rd, 2015
The Rhode Island Supreme Court has ruled that attorneys can't ghostwrite court filings for pro se litigants unless they sign the documents and disclose how much they assisted with the documents, Nicole Benjamin blogs for JDSupra Business Advisor.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court addressed this issue of first impression regarding three attorneys who ghostwrote pleadings on behalf of pro se defendants in three separate debt collection cases... Continue Reading
June 21st, 2015
Theresa Amato, writing in an op-ed in The New York Times, questions why the demand of Americans for legal services for life-altering civil matters can't be met by all the lawyers who are unemployed (The U.S. ranks 65th for accessibility of its civil justice, she notes).
The reason that unemployed lawyers can't plunge in right away to address the civil justice gap is because 86 percent of lawyers have six-figure debts, she... Continue Reading
June 21st, 2015
A federal judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has determined that an expert isn't required to present an opposing view to the government on the newly minted USA Freedom Act if the legal conclusion is "obvious," The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima reports. This was the first time a judge examined when the USA Freedom Act requires that technical experts be appointed in a case involving a novel... Continue Reading
June 21st, 2015
A federal judge has ruled that Minnesota's civil-confinement program for sex offenders violates the constitution, The Star Tribune's Chris Serres reports. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank opined the civil-commitment program "'is a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without [legal] safeguards.'"
One issue is that there are no periodic... Continue Reading
June 20th, 2015
Investors of modest means are now going to be able to take a chance on startups the way that venture capitalists and angel investors can, The New York Times' Stacy Cowley reports. Companies seeking to raise up to $50 million--even though they are not yet publicly traded--will be able to advertise to investors online and through social media. Under the old regulations, companies that didn't want to have to file reports with the... Continue Reading
June 20th, 2015
The American Civil Liberties Union is planning a major political advocacy program, including pursuing ballot intiatives to try to enact criminal justice reform and protections for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, the Washington Post's James Hohmann reports. The ACLU will pick three states with high incarceration rates and then sponsor ballot initiatives with the goal of driving sentencing reform. The ACLU also has raised $5 million... Continue Reading
June 20th, 2015
JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, US Bank, Santander and EverBank are facing new restrictions on their mortgage-lending businesses for failing to clean up their foreclosure practices, The Washington Post's Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reports. The restrictions were announced this week by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The banks are being barred from servicing loans for which they handle payments on behalf of other... Continue Reading
June 18th, 2015
Federal Aviation Administration officials testified this week that they expect to finalize rules for commercial drone flights within the year, which is much faster than previous forecasts of the rules being finalized by the end of 2016 or the start of 2017, Reuters' David Morgan reports. He notes that American firms have been pressuring the FAA regulators to get the drone rules off the ground because of lost revenue. Continue Reading
June 17th, 2015
A divided West Virginia Supreme Court has reversed a court decision ordering a pit bull be put down, The Herald-Dispatch's Curtis Johnson reports. Pit bull Tinkerbell bit a boy as he was passing by, and the boy required 14 stiches on his face.
The trial judge found that one bite was sufficient evidence to deem Tinkerbell vicious. But the Supreme Court, 3-2, found that one bite did not meet the state code definition for dogs that display... Continue Reading
June 17th, 2015
The Legal Intelligencer's Lizzy McLellan has a piece analyzing the legal problems posed by wearable technology: "Lawyers in the technology space agreed that new capabilities provided by wearable devices like Google Glass and GoPro cameras, as well as nonwearable but portable devices, like smartphones and tablets, have created some questions of criminal and civil law that have yet to be answered, or are answered inconsistently in... Continue Reading
June 17th, 2015
MedicalResearch.com has an interview with Eric T. Roberts and Darrell Gaskin, who reported on their research finding that the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid is going to require 2,100 more primary care providers, especially in low-income areas. The good news is they think "that this need for additional providers is manageable, particularly if Congress fully funds key primary care workforce training programs, such... Continue Reading
June 16th, 2015
Here's a piece I wrote for the Connecticut Law Tribune about a lawyer's law school debt:
Law school students learn how to argue over contracts. But that doesn't necessarily mean they can litigate their way out of a contract to pay their law school loans. One Branford-based attorney is facing this reality after a federal judge ruled that, more than two decades after receiving his law degree, he owes the federal government more... Continue Reading
June 14th, 2015
The Marshall Project's Beth Schwartzapfel has written a piece questioning the use of bite mark evidence in criminal cases. Bite mark comparison, which aims to match a bite wound on a victim with a suspect's teeth, is misleading, Schwartzapfel reports.
Fourteen men have been exonerated after being convicted of crime on the basis of bite mark analysis. The National Academy of Science has found that the field of "... Continue Reading
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