My occasional take on important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news:
Legal News
Legal News
December 9th, 2013
Sinclair Broadcast Group has agreed to buy eight TV stations from Allbritton Communications Co. for $985 million. But the Federal Communications Commission is questioning Sinclair's plan to use "sidecar companies" in order to purchase the TV stations and skirt the FCC rules "governing the number of stations a broadcaster can own in a particular market," The Wall Street Journal reports. The move by the regulator is... Continue Reading
December 9th, 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear oral arguments tomorrow about the cross-state feud over pollution, USA Today reports. At issue is the Environmental Protection Agency's rule that "as many as 28 upwind states, mostly in the Midwest and South, ... slash ozone and fine particle emissions for the benefit of their Middle Atlantic and Northeast neighbors," the newspaper reports.
According to USA Today, 24 states want the... Continue Reading
December 9th, 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court has taken a case involving the issue of when software is patentable, The Wall Street Journal reports. The tech world is divided on where to draw the line on when software can be patented and when it can't: "On one side lie technology giants such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc., and Intuit Inc., which largely believe the Patent & Trademark Office has issued too many software patents in recent years, and would... Continue Reading
December 7th, 2013
Research in Somalia shows that disaster relief should be focusing on resilience, or "building the capacity of a family or community to withstand shocks in a way that minimizes long-term developmental consequences." For example, the research showed that when women were empowered to be involved in household decision-making, resilience was improved: "Traditionally, Somali women don’t take a big role outside the household,... Continue Reading
December 7th, 2013
A best practice developed by the Innocence Project to ensure accurate eyewitness identification could be running afoul of the First Amendment. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports on local law enforcement's use of witness identifiation affidavits that direct witnesses to crime not to talk to the media; these affidavits were recommended to try to avoid wrongful convictions. Seth Miller, of the Innocence Project of Florida, told the... Continue Reading
December 7th, 2013
The Washington Post reports on the criticism that the International Criminal Court is facing in Africa: "The 11-year-old court of last resort was set up to take on some of the world’s most heinous crimes. But its choice of cases has frustrated African leaders, who say that comparable crimes elsewhere in the world are being ignored and that race is a factor in the decision-making. With Kenya’s president and deputy president on... Continue Reading
December 7th, 2013
A tighter state secrets law under consideration in Japan could be troubling for reporters pursuing stories on governmental wrongdoing Foreign Policy reports: "There used to be a saying among Washington bureaucrats: A great way to leak information is to pass it along to Tokyo. Once hailed as a 'spy's paradise' because of its weak state secrecy laws, Japan is trying to reform its reputation as an information sieve with a hotly... Continue Reading
December 6th, 2013
President Barack Obama promises that "I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA" in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, according to Politico. However, the president provided few details on what form that would take.
The president also said the NSA is reasonable in the amount of domestic surveillance it conducts in terms of "not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls... Continue Reading
December 6th, 2013
The Pennsyvlania Supreme Court has been asked to allow a Montgomery County clerk to once again issue licenses to same-sex couples, The Legal Intelligencer reports. The clerk, D. Bruce Hanes, argues that the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court should have considered the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's ban on same-sex marriage when it ordered him to stop issuing licenses, The Legal further reports. Continue Reading
December 6th, 2013
The Hosue of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation to curb so-called patent trolls, The Legal Times' blog reports. The legislation, if enacted, would change intellectual property law "with provisions to strengthen pleading requirements, require the litigation's loser to pay for high-cost patent fights and create new rules about discovery," BLT further reports.
The Senate is expected to make its own changes to... Continue Reading
December 5th, 2013
The digital divide isn't just about access to the Internet.
The Guardian reports that most Internet traffic on the cloud comes from the developed world: "an estimated 60% of such cloud traffic came from Europe and North America, followed by the Asia-Pacific region (33%). Latin America, the Middle East and Africa together accounted for only 5%." Similarly, the rule of law to protect privacy is more advanced in the developed... Continue Reading
December 5th, 2013
The Sixth Circuit has ruled that state-law tort claims against generic drugmakers are federally pre-empted, according to Squire Sanders' Sixth Circuit blog. The Sixth Circuit majority cited Supreme Court precedent: PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing and Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett. The majority also "reads those cases as broadly holding that state law failure-to-warn claims based on generic drugs are preempted by the FDA’s... Continue Reading
December 5th, 2013
U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby of the District of Utah heard oral arguments yesterday on a lawsuit challenging that state's ban on same-sex marriage, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Shelby said the constitutionality of the ban will turn on whether the copules are "seeking a new right or establishing access to an existing, fundamental right to state-sanctioned marriages," The Tribune further reports.
State attorneys... Continue Reading
December 5th, 2013
The Washington Post has another revelation on the basis of leaker Edward Snowden's materials: The National Security Agency is "gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world."
The Post further reports: "The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications... Continue Reading
December 4th, 2013
After a nearly year-long open-records fight, a prosecutor relented on his opposition to the Associated Press's request to get copies of the 911 calls made as Adam Lanza shot schoolchildren and school professionals within 11 minutes of entering Sandy Hook Elementary School. The calls were released today, according to the AP.
Teresa Rousseau, whose daughter Lauren was among the six educators killed and an editor at the Danbury News-... Continue Reading
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