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
October 18th, 2013
Another settlement has been reached in the class action brought by the kids imprisoned in juvenile detention facilities after two Pennsylvania judges were given cash by the facilities' owners, The Scranton Times Leader reports. "Three companies behind the private, for-profit juvenile detention and treatment facilities at the heart of the scandal that sent two former Luzerne County judges to jail have reached a settlement with numerous... Continue Reading
October 17th, 2013
Washington state has an upcoming vote on a measure that would require the labeling of genetically modified foods. Now the Washington State Attorney General alleges that the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a major lobbying group for food manufacturers, violated campaign finance laws in its effort to oppose that measure, Reuters reports. The Attorney General alleges GMA has spent more than $7 million in its campaign against the proposed... Continue Reading
October 17th, 2013
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a challenge to a "patent troll" who says it invented podcasting, GigaOm reports. According to EFF's petition for inter partes review, patent owner Personal Audio says it invented podcasting in 1996, but EFF says "distributing episodes of media content on the Internet--had been known for at least three years at that point." Read the full petition here: https://www.eff.org/... Continue Reading
October 17th, 2013
A John Jay College of Criminal Justice study found that New York sober homes, or residences for poor drug and alcohol addicts, are often unsanitary, dangerous and accept kickbacks from outpatient drug treatment programs to require their residences to attend those treatment programs, ProPublica reported today.
ProPublica also notes: "The report estimates that as many as 10,000 New Yorkers currently reside in three-quarter [or sober]... Continue Reading
October 17th, 2013
The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: "Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials." The disclosure will be made after an internal debate... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
Every time I see Internet television streaming service FilmOn X CEO Alki David quoted, he comes across as crazy. But speaking at a New York Law School forum on the future of television over Skype from Greece at 4 a.m. in the morning, he seemed no crazier than any other intelligent eccentric unafraid to speak his mind.
David said he would strongly prefer the U.S. Supreme Court or an intermediate appellate court to settle the copyright-law... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
A federal judge did not rule today as expected on Michigan's bans on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption. Instead, the Detroit Free Press reports, the judge set a trial date in February. The judge also said in court that he must decide the issue as a matter of law. The challenge is to a constitutional amendment adopted by voters. This is an example of an area left untouched by the U.S. Supreme Court: do state-... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
The Washington Post editorializes that children, even teenagers, should not be held in the adult criminal justice system. Among other reasons, incarceration does little to prevent minors from committing crimes again, minors are the most likely to be sexually abused by other inmates, and "teenagers are not fully developed; studies have shown that their brains aren’t as capable of moral reasoning and impulse control as adults in their... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
A legislative task force appointed to give advice to elected representatives on the release of crime scene photos and emergency-call recordings heard testimony that "the news media needs access to as much information as possible -- even gruesome photos -- about Connecticut homicides in order to better inform the public," The Connecticut Post reported.
Meanwhile, a Connecticut legislator, whose district includes the town where the... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether to change the state's products liability law to allow for negligence principles. "The Third Restatement allows arguments on the foreseeability of a product's risk and requires a plaintiff to establish that an alternative, safer design was viable when the product was manufactured, effectively opening the door for defendants to insert issues of negligence into products... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
The Wrap reports that--despite a national injunction barring FilmOn X from streaming free broadcast TV programming on its Internet service everywhere but in the Second Circuit--the company went ahead and started streaming in the Boston area.
FilmOn X was going to ask for a further carve-out from the injunction issued by a District of Columbia federal judge because a Boston-area federal judge ruled that broadcasters were not entitled to a... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
A judge is expected to rule on a challenge to Michigan's same-sex marriage ban today, the Detroit Free Press reported. The challenge is to a constitutional amendment adopted by voters. This is an example of an area left untouched by the U.S. Supreme Court: do state-level bans on same-sex matrimony violate federal or state constitutional rights? Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
The trial judge who sentenced former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin to send apologies written on her photo to every other judge in Pennsylvania won't rule if she violated her probation for not sending those mea culpas just yet. The Associated Press reported the trial judge will wait until the intermediate appellate court rules. Orie Melvin's lawyers argued sending the apologies before her appeal... Continue Reading
October 16th, 2013
The Onondaga Nation's land-claim lawsuit ended after an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected. The circuit court had ruled the tribe had waited took long to seek redress for the loss of their territory in New York. The Syracuse Post-Standard reports the tribe may turn to international forums instead: "The nation said it will pursue the claim in international venues -- the United Nations or the Organization of American... Continue Reading
October 15th, 2013
The Washington Post reports on how the National Security Agency is sweeping up contacts lists in Americans' e-mail accounts and instant messaging accounts. For example, "during a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA... Continue Reading
Pages
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
