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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October 29th, 2014
There's been a strange twist in two Montana Supreme Court races, the Independent Record reports: U.S. Sen. Jon Tester has accused Stanford University and Darmouth College of "voter manipulation" for their role in a mailer sent regarding the Supreme Court races. The 2014 "Montana General Election Voter Information Guide" rated that four candidates as more liberal and more conservative and was sent by a Stanford... Continue Reading
October 29th, 2014
There's been a strange twist in two Montana Supreme Court races, the Independent Record reports: U.S. Sen. Jon Tester has accused Stanford University and Darmouth College of "voter manipulation" for their role in a mailer sent regarding the Supreme Court races. The 2014 "Montana General Election Voter Information Guide" rated that four candidates as more liberal and more conservative and was sent by a Stanford... Continue Reading
October 28th, 2014
It's been quite a week for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. First, Justice Seamus P. McCaffery resigned from the court after he was suspended by his fellow justices amid allegations that he sent pornographic emails, attempted to fix his wife's traffic ticket, allowed his wife to receive thousands and thousands of dollars in referral fees from law firms and may have "attempted to exert influence" in judicial court... Continue Reading
October 28th, 2014
ProPublica's Robert Faturechi reports on how a push by a dark-money group to oust some Kansas judges running for retention has exposed a gap in that state's campaign finance laws. The group Kansans for Justice is encouraging voters to reject the retention of Supreme Court Justices Eric Rosen and Lee Johnson: "Even though the group has all the hallmarks of a political committee – it is soliciting contributions, plans to... Continue Reading
October 28th, 2014
The National Law Journal's Amanda Bronstad provides an overview of ballot initiatives affecting the courts that voters will be deciding to accept or reject:
In California, voters will decide if the $250,000 statutory cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases should be annually adjusted for inflation. If approved, the cap would be raised to $1.1 million.
In Tennessee and Florida, there are initiatives to change those... Continue Reading
October 27th, 2014
Law firm hiring has improved from the doldrums of the Great Recession, but complete employment recovery for lawyers isn't likely for a long time yet, Crain's Detroit Business reports. Contracting law school classes should help the market too. The class of 2013 was the largest in the history of American legal education, but the cohort of law students has drop from 52,000 law school students entering programs in 2010 to 37... Continue Reading
October 27th, 2014
Eugene Kontorovich, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy blog, comments that constitutional challenges to mandatory Ebola quarantines are unlikely to succeed. Lawyers for Kaci Hickox, a nurse forcibly quarantined by New Jersey after treating Ebola patients in West Africa, claimed she was deprived of her liberty in violation of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. But Kontorovich says "brief review of the cases suggests it extremely... Continue Reading
October 27th, 2014
The PEN American Center is calling on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how the press was treated by law enforcement covering the protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of Michael Brown, the St. Louis Business Journal reports. For example, police held reporters in areas away from the events they were covering and they flashed lights to hinder photographers. PEN American Center is asking the Justice Department "... Continue Reading
October 26th, 2014
Even though a a federal judge has ruled the judicial election system in Marion County, Indiana, unconstitutional, the system won't be fixed anytime soon, the Indiana Lawyer reports: "Indianapolis voters will go to the polls Nov. 4 and elect 16 Marion Superior judges, but in truth there’s no contest because who will win already is decided. Eight Democrats and eight Republicans selected in their respective parties’ May... Continue Reading
October 25th, 2014
We're embarking on an era when everyday objects will be connected to the Internet, whether it's devices in our home or it's devices we wear. Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts notes that digital privacy already is pretty limited. How will things look when even more objects are connected to the Internet? The problem, he says, is that Internet-connected objects "will start to pull all sorts of people — even those who aren... Continue Reading
October 25th, 2014
The Federal Communications Commission has entered the realm of data security for the first time--with a $10 million fine no less, the Washington Post's Brian Fung reports. The fine was levied against "two telecom companies that allegedly stored personally identifiable customer data online without firewalls, encryption or password protection. The two companies, YourTel America and TerraCom, share the same owners and... Continue Reading
October 25th, 2014
What if hackers caused medical devices to malfunction? Disrupted healthcare services? Accessed patient information or electronic health record data? Those are examples of potential digital security pitfalls for the healthcare industry. Here's a piece I wrote for the National Law Journal about the need to develop industry standards for cybersecurity for medical devices and other health information technology:
A cybersecurity... Continue Reading
October 23rd, 2014
The Arizona Republic reports that flood of Central American migrants, including unaccompanied minors and families with children, has dropped down "back to being nearly invisible." The number of unaccompanied children apprehended by the Border Patrol feel by 77 percent from June.
Last spring, smugglers promoted the idea that children crossing the border before the end of June would get a free permit to stay in the United... Continue Reading
October 23rd, 2014
A candidate to become president of the Navajo Nation has been disqualified from the ballot because he is not fluent in Navajo, the Associated Press' Felicia Fonseca reports. Chris Deschene is asking the Navajo Nation Council to pass legislation to make voters the sole decision-makers on whether a presidential candidate is fluent in the language.
The nation's Supreme Court dismissed Deschene's appeal for not including a copy of... Continue Reading
October 23rd, 2014
The New York Times' Michael Corkery reports that legislators in at least eight states have "voted to increase the fees or the interest rates that lenders can charge on certain personal loans used by millions of borrowers with subpar credit." There has been a lobbying push by the consumer loan industry, which argues that caps on interest rates have not kept pace with the costs of doing business. Efforts in North Carolina initially... Continue Reading
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