Cultivated Compendium is my personal website with the occasional link to my reporting and to important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news.
Welcome
News and Reporting
June 12th, 2014
The 11th Circuit ruled yesterday that it's unconstitutional for law enforcement to track cellphones without warrants, the Associated Press reports. The appeals court "determined people have an expectation of privacy in their movements and that the cell tower data was part of that. As such, obtaining the records without a search warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, the judges... Continue Reading
June 11th, 2014
President Barack Obama's administration is considering a plan that would require voting districts on tribal land have at least one polling site in a location chosen by the tribal governments, Reuters said. Continue Reading
June 11th, 2014
The Obama administration is going to start a program to provide lawyers for youths under the age of 16 facing deportation: 100 lawyers and paralegals will be funded with $2 million in grants, the New York Times reports. The surge in providing counsel reflects a "surge of unaccompanied children that has overwhelmed border officials as well the nation’s family and immigration court systems," the Times reports.
Advocates said... Continue Reading
June 11th, 2014
Microsoft is making the first-ever challenge to a domestic search warrant seeking a customer's email stored in an Irish data center, the New York Times' Steve Lohr reports. Microsoft argues that having to turn over the email “would violate international law and treaties, and reduce the privacy protection of everyone on the planet.” But U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara argues that Internet firms can't avoid search... Continue Reading
June 10th, 2014
Apple's partnership with Epic Systems, the dominant vendor of electronic health records, on a HealthKit platform for health apps and tracking devices will initially store around 60 different types of health data, Forbes contributor Zina Moukheiber writes. A conusmer using HealthKit has to give Apple permission to share biometrics with Epic's electronic health record system for patients, MyChart, in order to notify their clinicians... Continue Reading
June 10th, 2014
Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts reports on a Congressional hearing held last week on whether the first sale doctrine should apply to digital goods. Buyers of e-books or e-music can't resell those digital goods or leave them behind when they die because they are licensing the goods from companies like Amazon and Apple, Roberts writes. Congressional members were skeptical about creating a digital-based first sale doctrine, but expressed... Continue Reading
June 9th, 2014
Some of the leading plaintiffs attorneys in the country are lining up to sue over General Motors' handling of defective ignition switches, the Wall Street Journal's Ashby Jones reports. GM CEO Mary Barra said an internal report prepared by former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas "demonstrated a 'pattern of incompetence and neglect' in the auto maker's 11-year failure to recall cars equipped with a defective ignition... Continue Reading
June 9th, 2014
The Wall Street Journal's Ed Silverman reports on a rare ruling: brand-name drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline must face a Paxil lawsuit from a plaintiff who took the generic version of the drug.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that generic drugmakers can't be held liable for failing to warn consumers of the risk of their products because they have no authority to change the label approved by federal regulators for the brand-... Continue Reading
June 9th, 2014
Many in the burgeoning drone industry are frustrated by the Federal Aviation Administration's glacial pace in issuing new rules to regulate the use of these lightweight flying devices and regulators' application of old rules to ground the use of drones for newsgathering and other commercial purposes. Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts suggests the FAA should use a permit system like the one used for motor vehicles. The CEO of Airware... Continue Reading
June 7th, 2014
U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb struck down Wisconsin's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. “'Quite simply, this case is about liberty and equality, the two cornerstones of the rights protected by the United States Constitution,' U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in her Friday ruling," according to the Journal. Crabb also wrote that, "'If the state is... Continue Reading
June 5th, 2014
Connecticut enacted the strongest gun laws in the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Now 23 attorney generals from other states are joining a challenge to the constitutionality of those laws, the Connecticut Law Tribune's Jay Stapleton reports. The coalition of attorney generals filed a similar amicus brief to challenge New York's gun laws.
"The coalition claims Connecticut's gun law violates the... Continue Reading
June 4th, 2014
A federal judge in Idaho, while upholding the National Security Agency's surveillance program of telephone records because of legal precedent, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the surveillance is unconstitutional, the Wall Street Journal reported: Judge B. Lynn "Winmill said there is a 'looming gulf'' between a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that allowed the government to gather the phone records of a single suspect... Continue Reading
June 3rd, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of New York Times' reporter James Risen over a lower court ruling that he must identify his confidential source for a national security story, Risen's colleague Adam Liptak reports. Risen could face jail if he refuses to comply with the court order. While the Obama administration said in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that there is no evidentiary privilege for reporters not to... Continue Reading
June 2nd, 2014
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a draft rule to regulate the carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, the Wall Street Journal reports. The mandate would require plants to cut their emissions by 30 percent by 2030. EPA is taking comment on the measure as well as another measure that would result in an estimated reduction of carbon emissions by 24 percent in 2025. Continue Reading
June 2nd, 2014
The lodging indsutry, the lending industry and the taxi industry are all being affected by digital disruption from social media and mobile technologies that connect customers to their peers selling a previously untapped economic market. Here's a story I wrote for the Connecticut Law Tribune about this trend starting up with the Connecticut taxi industry:
An alliance of Connecticut taxicab companies is seeking to shut down two... Continue Reading
Pages
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
