My occasional take on important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news:
Legal News
Legal News
December 2nd, 2013
Last week, ProPublica founder and executive chairman Paul Steiger received the Burton Benjamin Memorial award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In his remarks, Steiger said that President Barack Obama's administration has been the most dangerous president for the First Amendment since President Richard Nixon: "For the starkest comparison, I urge any of you who haven’t already done so to read last month’s report,... Continue Reading
December 2nd, 2013
Drones are and up-and-coming technology as evidenced by Amazon's plan to use drones to deliver orders. While the Federal Aviation Administration has not started regulating drones yet, states have started regulating them, according to The Hartford Courtant. But The Courant reports that Connecticut and three other states are the only ones in the country with laws that are completely silent on drones. Continue Reading
December 2nd, 2013
Gigaom reports on a petition filed by several major media companies, including The New York Times, Politico and Bloomberg, against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision that the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School does not have standing to seek access to the court's decisions authorizing the National Security Agency to collect millions of phone and e-mail records. Among other arguments, Gigaom... Continue Reading
December 2nd, 2013
Almost two-thirds of Croatian voters approved a change to their constitution to define marriage as a "union of a man and woman," Voice of America reports. The move was initiated by Roman Catholic groups and "90 percent of the population of 4.4 million say they are Catholic," according to Voice of America. Turnout was 37 percent, Voice of America also reports. Continue Reading
December 1st, 2013
The Texas Supreme Court heard oral argument on whether a blogger who has criticized an Ohio-based company should be unmasked by court order, the Associated Press reported. The blogger's attorney argued that Texas courts don't have personal jurisdiction over the blogger, while the company's attorney argues that Texas does have jurisdiction because its CEO owns a home in Houston and the company has its largest Texas office in Houston... Continue Reading
December 1st, 2013
The flip side of the national movement to establish same-sex marriage in the United States is the right to dissolve same-sex unions. The Associated Press reports on how estranged couples in "nonrecognition states would have to move back to the state where they were married and establish residency in order to get divorced — an option that can be unworkable in many cases."
James Esseks, director of the Lesbian, Gay,... Continue Reading
December 1st, 2013
The Concord Monitor reports that the "federal stimulus bill passed in 2008 contained billions of dollars in funding for medical providers to adopt electronic health records." The carrot: the financial incentives to adopt electronic health records. The stick: if healthcare providers do not achieve "meaningful use" in their electronic records, they face deductions from their Medicare payments.
However,... Continue Reading
December 1st, 2013
I wrote a profile for The Stamford Advocate of Courtney Nelthropp, who left a successful career at IBM to start his own business as the owner of a printing services franchise. Most importantly, Nelthropp has changed the landscape of Stamford, Connecticut's public housing by chairing Charter Oak Communities' board for the last dozen years and leading the authority in taking down its old high-rise housing in favor of state... Continue Reading
December 1st, 2013
A federal judge rejected a same-sex couple's lawsuit seeking to establish the right to marry in Louisiana on the grounds that the court does not have jurisdiction over the case, The Washington Blade reports. Only Louisiana Attorney General James Caldwell was named as a defendant and his office has not denied plaintiffs the recognition of their marriage, The Blade reports. The plaintiffs intend to refile their case.
"... Continue Reading
November 30th, 2013
The Washington Post has an editorial arguing that some progress has finally been made on closing Guantanamo. The Post writes that the Senate voted this month "to preserve language in the pending National Defense Authorization Act that would ease restrictions on repatriating Guantanamo detainees and allow their transfer to the United States for trial, detention or medical treatment." However, The Post reports that the defense bill is... Continue Reading
November 30th, 2013
Fair Trials International argues that international police work is improperly influenced by political motives, The Washington Post reports. Fair Trials International said that Interpol is used by members, including Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela, to pursue political ends. FTI cites a case in which a Russian environmental activist was arrested in Spain even though he was accepted as a political refugee in Finland; Pyotr... Continue Reading
November 29th, 2013
The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that Senate Republicans can still block some of President Obama's judicial nominees despite the elimination of filibusters for most such nominations. Obama's nominees to federal appellate courts can still be blocked because "it left unchanged the Senate’s 'blue slip' custom, which allows senators to block nominees to judgeships associated with their... Continue Reading
November 28th, 2013
The Washington Post reports on the harsh sentences that 21 Islamist women and girls were given for protesting a court decision "that came a day after police beat and terrorized prominent female activists in a crackdown on secular demonstrators under a tough new anti-protest law." They were protesting to demand the reinstatement of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was ousted by the Egyptian... Continue Reading
November 28th, 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a case this week on how inherited individual retirement accounts should be treated in bankruptcies, Reuters reports. The Seventh Circuit ruled that creditors could access an IRA inherited by the owners of a failed pizza shop because the IRA ceased to be retirement funds when inherited. However, the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have held that IRAs don't cease to be retirement funds when... Continue Reading
November 28th, 2013
New York University law professor Burt Neuborne thinks it's a good thing that the U.S. Senate has decided to go nuclear on the filibuster, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's not because Neuborne wants to see more of President Obama's judicial nominees on the bench. It's because he thinks having "the modern filibuster morphed into a de facto super-majority voting rule" made the votes cast by senators mathematically... Continue Reading
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