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
January 5th, 2014
The D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that President Obama's Justice Department can keep secret a memo that established "the legal basis for telephone companies to hand over customers’ calling records to the government without a subpoena or court order, even when there is no emergency," The New York Times reports. The memo was deemed to be subject to the executive branch's internal deliberations privilege. Continue Reading
January 5th, 2014
The Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has issued final safe-harbor regulations for payments and business practices related to electronic health records. Some of these payments and practices would otherwise implicate the federal anti-kickback statute. EHR Intelligence reports that federal regulators have extended the safe harbor until Dec. 31, 2021, with three goals: to incentivize the adoption of EHRs,... Continue Reading
January 5th, 2014
As health-care expands in an effort to cover all Americans, the Medicaid expansion could mean that more people over the age of 55 will face liens being placed on their assets for their care, according to a report in BenefitsPro. "Washington and many other states, including California, Florida and New York, interpret the [federal] regulations to mean that they should use liens to try to recover any money spent by Medicaid on any care for... Continue Reading
January 4th, 2014
My piece for Philadelphia City Paper:
On Tuesday, the city released a notice of its intention to contract with Alva & Associates to start a for-profit law firm from scratch to represent criminal defendants and family-court defendants when the Defender Association of Philadelphia, Community Legal Services or the Support Center for Child Advocates is already representing another person in the case.
Daniel-Paul Alva, founder of the four... Continue Reading
January 3rd, 2014
While women have made some progress in the partner ranks at large law firms, women are lagging at the associate level, The Washington Post reported earlier this week: "Women make up 20.2 percent of partners at major law firms — up from 19.9 percent in 2012 — but the percentage of women associates dipped slightly from 45.1 to 44.8 percent over the same period, according to a report released this month by the National... Continue Reading
January 3rd, 2014
Despite the many lawsuits pending to strike at state-level bans on same-sex marriage--and success in some of those lawsuits, the Associated Press reports that the 30-plus mini-Defense of Marriage Act laws aren't going anywhere just quite yet. "'The thing that I would not do is confidently predict that now all of these ‘mini’ DOMAs are going to be declared unconstitutional. That would be a mistake,' ... ... Continue Reading
January 3rd, 2014
The Atlantic has this piece arguing that continuing to rely upon the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Smith v. Maryland to justify the NSA's mass surveillance of phone calls in the USA no longer makes sense. The case involved the use of a pen register to investigate a burglar-stalker who allegedly made obscene phone calls to a crime victim, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "a search only occurs when a citizen has a... Continue Reading
January 2nd, 2014
Last month, I wrote a piece for the Connecticut Law Tribune about the lack of legal doctrine to govern cyber warfare--and what a UConn professor and law student are doing about it:
Forget Terminator-style cyborgs sent back in time on an assassination mission.
Cyber warfare is here, but the form it takes doesn't involve lethal robots. It's things like Stuxnet, a computer "worm" that is believed to have been created in... Continue Reading
January 1st, 2014
The Washington Post reports that 2.1 million people have signed up for health-insurance policies, about half through the federal exchange and about half through the state exchanges. Federal officials are also confident the 2.1 million figure means more Americans, rather than fewer, now have health-care coverage starting Wednesday since it 'certainly outpaces anyone who may have lost a plan' this year," The Post... Continue Reading
January 1st, 2014
The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports that the murky role of Penn State's general counsel during grand jury proceedings could affect the efforts of prosecutors to hold three university administrators accountable for their actions regarding convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. "If three ex-Penn State administrators facing charges stemming from failing to properly deal with reports of child sexual abuse by Jerry... Continue Reading
January 1st, 2014
The Wall Street Journal reports that more judges are speaking publicly beyond their opinions and court proceedings, including U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf of Nebraska starting a blog. "The old taboo seemed to take a hit this past year. Judges and legal experts point to several reasons judges may be speaking more freely now: A Supreme Court whose justices are frequently in the public eye, a desire among judges to defend... Continue Reading
December 28th, 2013
Matthew H. Birkhold, a visiting scholar at the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, writes for Bloomberg that it was a double-edged sword for the Annenberg Foundation to purchase 24 sacred American Indian objects that were auctioned off by a Paris auction house. The foundation plans to return the objects to the Hopi and the San Carlos Apache tribes. Even though the foundation denounced the sale of cultural property, it legitimized commerce in... Continue Reading
December 27th, 2013
Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief who has been asked by the international membership organization to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, said that international action led to the end of apartheid in South Africa and that it can again lead to the end of massive surveillance of online activity, The Guardian reports. The experience of international action on apartheid "inspires me to go on and address the... Continue Reading
December 27th, 2013
A federal judge in New York has issued a conflicting ruling with that of a federal judge in D.C. over the legality of the National Security Agency's surveillance of nearly every phone call made in America, CNN reports: "In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley said the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was legal. The program was revealed in classified leaks by former NSA... Continue Reading
December 27th, 2013
Monsignor William Lynn, the first Catholic Church officially to be criminal convicted for the sexual abuse done to youth that he had responsibility for (but did not directly abuse), won his appeal, Zack Needles, my former colleague at The Legal Intelligencer, reports: "Lynn's lawyers had argued following his conviction that the trial judge had refused to address the defense argument that a pre-amended version of Pennsylvania's law... Continue Reading
Pages
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
