My occasional take on important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news:
Legal News
Legal News
September 20th, 2013
US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was at Stanford for Constitution Day, where she said this last term's "heady and hefty" decisions on same-sex marriage and voting rights and other matters brought sharp dissents. But, according to the Stanford Report, Ginsburg said: "What holds us together is that we revere the institution for which we work," Ginsburg said. "We know that we must maintain a... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
The Atlantic has a profound piece on Australian parents seeking to have their daughters with disabilities sterilized.
On one side, removing women's uteruses can ensure that they will not have children they can't care for and can improve their health in some situations. As one parent whose 31-year-old daughter has the mentality of a three-year-old described it to the magazine, "The hardest part for Sophie’s Sydney-based... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
A West Virginia judge has been charged by federal prosecutors with allegedly conspiring with a prosecutor, county commissioner and now-deceased sheriff to stop a confidential informant from talking with the FBI information about his drug deals with the sheriff, according to WSAZ News Channel 3, which covers news in West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky.
According to the news report: the informant was targeted by the sheriff after he tried... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
"The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has put forward an defence ingenious enough for Sherlock Holmes himself in a US copyright case that could redraw the boundaries of copyright law to recognise 'complex literary characters.'" the Guardian reports. The plaintiff is seeking to establish that the characters of Holmes and Watson are already in the public domain, but the estate argues that the characters remain protected until... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
The Wall Street Journal Digits Blog reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the level of trust that users of the social media network have in Facebook has diminished because of the NSA's surveillance. Zuckerberg was speaking at an event held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and sponsored by The Atlantic.
Zuckerberg also said that he has no plans to get into the news business as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is doing by acquiring The... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
The Washington Post reports the Securities and Exchange Commission split 3-2 along party lines to require publicly traded corporations with more than $1 billion in revenues or $75 million in publicly traded securities to disclose the rate of their chief executives' pay in relation to the pay of a valid statistical sample of their workforce around the globe. Proponents say the measure will give stockholders and investors more information to... Continue Reading
September 19th, 2013
A federal judge is leaning toward Aereo, the firm challenging copyright law's boundaries by providing individual subscribers retransmissions over the Internet of free broadcast TV through individually assigned antennas, and against a Hearst-owned station in a Boston federal case, the Boston Globe reports. Federal district courts in California and D.C. have ruled against Aereo's competitor, FilmOn X, but the Second Circuit ruled... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
You might think false confessions are impossible, but attorney Ronald Goldfarb argues that "an expert on false confessions pointed out that prisoners of war as well as common criminal suspects confess to crimes they didn’t commit after stressful, prolonged, deceitful interrogation." The solution? Record police interrogations. Assure better defense lawyers for criminal defendants. Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
The Des Moines Register reports that a competitor to Aereo, a firm pushing the boundaries of copyright law by transmitting free broadcast television over the Internet, has fought off a subpoena. The federal judge ruled that Aereo competitor "Syncbak will not have to provide competitor Aereo with investment-related documents and labeled Aereo’s efforts to acquire emails that reference the company a 'fishing expedition,'... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
Along with the development this week that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off a state dinner in Washington over the National Security Agency's alleged spying on her and a Brazilian energy company, Brazil also is considering new Internet laws, the Wall Street Journal's Digits Blog reports. One of the proposals would require Internet firms to store data about Brazilians in Brazil, the blog reports, to give "the Brazilian... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
Free Press' Josh Stearns argues the proposed federal shield law for journalists, the Free Flow of Information Act, which passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, "could be greatly strengthened and simplified by defining journalism as an act, a process that anyone can participate in, instead of a profession limited to a few practitioners." Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
Two Pennsylvania institutions--Penn State University and the Catholic Church-- were shown to have severe institutional problems of failing to protect children from sex abuse due to two criminal prosecutions. The guilty verdicts were reached the same night against ex-football coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually abusing multiple victims and against Monsignor William Lynn, the first Catholic Church official in the country to be convicted of a crime... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
One of the most notorious incidents of lawlessness the wake of Hurricane Katrina was the alleged murder of two men on a New Orleans bridge by police officers who arrived with guns blazing and who then allegedly covered up the killings. Now the convictions have been thrown out, in part, because of online comments federal prosecutors made on news articles on the New Orleans Times-Picayune web site, that paper reported. The judge in the case said... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
Here is some news from my hometown region: The Solicitor General plans to make arguments in a US Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of having prayers led mostly by Christian pastors before the start of town meetings in Greece, NY (Suburb of Rochester). The Obama administration argued in an amicus brief there is a long-standing tradition of legislative prayer in the United States and such prayer does not violate the... Continue Reading
September 18th, 2013
Immigration reform is another victim of the lack of bipartisan legislative action in Congress, and immigration-reform proponents have been pushing for President Obama to halt the 1,000 or so deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants taking place every day in case Congress does not enact immigration reforms. But the Washington Post reports the president says unilateral action on the deportatons is not possible. The Post also... Continue Reading
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