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 15th, 2013
An Eighth Circuit judge, who dissented in an American Indian's woman's appeal of her 10-year sentence for killing her baby, told a law school forum he supports her early release, The Grand Forks Herald reported. Judge Myron Bright, now 94, said the defendant would have gotten a lighter sentence if she was not on an American Indian reservation. The judge remarked "because of historical jurisdiction taken by federal courts in... Continue Reading
October 15th, 2013
A clerk in North Carolina will begin to accept same-sex marriage applications, but there's a caveat. He won't sign the applications unless he gets the permission of the state attorney general. And according to this Chicago Tribune article, the attorney general personally supports same-sex matrimony but will defend North Carolina's Defense of Marriage Act barring same-sex unions. Continue Reading
October 15th, 2013
Challenges to Michigan's state constitutional ban on giving any preference to race in the field of education will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court today. In an unusual circumstance, two sets of plaintiffs will make separate arguments in the court. Reuters reports: "One group opposed to the ban, from the University of Michigan, employs measured rhetoric, relies on more recent cases joined by conservative justices and tries... Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
The Recorder reports on a couple problems that arise out of large privacy class actions:
One, the classes are so large that, even though claimaints in class actions typically only are entitled to a small amount per person, they are too large to settle because they require settlement funds worth billions of dollars.
Two, the people whose privacy was invaded aren't known to the class-action lawyers and to the court and it requires... Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
A mother who drowned her three children in a bathtub may be entitled to receive part of their $350,000 estate because she was found not guilty by reason of mental disease, the Associated Press reported. Nassau County Surrogate Court Judge Edward McCarty must decide next month if she is entitled to a share of the proceeds from two lawsuits in which the children's fathers claimed social workers failed to properly monitor the woman and... Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
This weekend, I covered a Columbus Day celebration for Hearst's Stamford Advocate. I very much had the history of colonization and the destruction of the indigenous peoples' cultures that followed Christopher Columbus' voyages to North and South America on my mind before I went to the event. But even before I had to ask one question on this point, the folks I interviewed at the event brought it up that they'd like to separate... Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
Here's a more in-depth look at the site that "is creating etched-in-stone digital references for scholars and lawyers," GigaOm posted.
The Perma.cc site would solve the issue of broken links to the sources in scholarship by taking readers "to the Perma.cc site where they are presented with a page that has links both to the original web source (along with some information, including the date of the Perma.cc link’s... Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
Reuters reports on a trial opening this week in which Chevron is seeking injunctive relief against a plaintiff's lawyer and some of his clients: "Chevron Corp will try to convince a U.S. judge this week that a group of Ecuadorean villagers and their U.S. lawyer used bribery to win an $18 billion judgment against Chevron from a court in Ecuador, in the latest chapter in a long-running fight over pollution in the Amazon jungle." Continue Reading
October 14th, 2013
The Lexington Herald-Leader has this good yarn about a Kentucky Supreme Court justice who denies seeking campaign donations from a lawyer facing investigations, as well as a fraud lawsuit, over allegations he steered clients to an administrative law judge at the Social Security Administration:
"In early 2012, Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Will T. Scott repeatedly drove to the Floyd County office of disability benefits lawyer Eric C.... Continue Reading
October 13th, 2013
The New York Times' Adam Liptak has this Sunday Review piece exploring how activist U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.'s court has been. There's a surprise in the findings. " If judicial activism is defined as the tendency to strike down laws, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is less activist than any court in the last 60 years," Liptak writes. Continue Reading
October 13th, 2013
Foreign Affairs has this piece on several problems India is facing, including a lapdog press: "Restrictions have also been placed on civil rights; libel and defamation laws have become unsettlingly wide. Indeed, national newspapers and magazines, far from serving as a powerful fourth estate, are now commonly viewed as subservient to members of the government." Further, a governmental official floated the idea of governmental... Continue Reading
October 13th, 2013
The New York Times reports on why the health-insurance exchanges have been so buggy: one factor was that the biggest contractor wasn't given specifications right away and only started writing software code this spring. Another factor was not rolling out a piece of the portal instead of the whole shebang at once. A third factor was that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "assumed the role of project quarterback,... Continue Reading
October 13th, 2013
The RAND Corporation, which was commissioned by the American Medical Association to identify the factors that influence physicians' professional satisfaction, found that those physicians surveyed do not want to go back to paper charting. But they are reporting several issues with the deployment of electronic health records: "Among the key findings of the study was how electronic health records have affected physician professional... Continue Reading
October 13th, 2013
The Seattle Times reports on the practice of locking people in the middle of mental-illness crises at emergency rooms because there are not enough beds available in the psychiatric system. The crux of this ground-breaking report: "'Psychiatric boarding,' as it is officially called, or 'warehousing,' as it is known to mental-health advocates, has long taken place on occasion in Washington, which ranks at... Continue Reading
October 12th, 2013
Lawyers for the Onondaga Nation are not very hopeful that their land claim will get accepted for review, much less get a positive ruling, from the U.S. Supreme Court after the justices ruled that the equitable doctrine of laches barred the land claim of the Oneida Nation, another Haudenosaunee/Iroquois tribe based in New York. However: the "Onondaga’s land rights lawsuit is framed differently from the Oneida and... Continue Reading
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