My occasional take on important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news:
Legal News
Legal News
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
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
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
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