My occasional take on important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news:
Legal News
Legal News
June 15th, 2014
If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the theory that share prices reflect all publicly available information and that there is a fraud on the market when corporations misrepresent the truth publicly, major companies in the banking, pharmaceutical and casino industries would benefit, Reuters reports.
At least during oral argument, it seemed that the justices weren't in favor of completely overthrowing the fraud on the market... Continue Reading
June 14th, 2014
ProPublica's Julia Angwin reported this week on how marketers' tracking of customers is getting more intrusive: "Online marketers are increasingly seeking to track users offline, as well, by collecting data about people's offline habits—such as recent purchases, where you live, how many kids you have, and what kind of car you drive."
Angwin goes on to explain how it works: after sharing your e-mail address with a... Continue Reading
June 13th, 2014
Law professor Ingrid Wuerth, writing in Lawfare, says that the U.S. Supreme Court showed in its recent ruling in Bond v. United States that Chief Justice Roberts' court is showing less deference to the executive branch in interpreting foreign relations matters.
At issue was a woman's conviction under an international chemical-weapons treaty when she put an arsenic-based poison on the mailbox of her husband's... Continue Reading
June 13th, 2014
David Zvenyach, GC to the Council of the District of Columbia, is using an application written in JavaScript to crawl the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions to find changes made without notice to the public, Gigaom reports.
The New York Times' Adam Liptak recently reported on how the justices are surreptiously changing their opinions after they have been issued, sometimes replacing language with something entirely different.
Changes... Continue Reading
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
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
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