Cultivated Compendium

Robert Edward Precht, opining in The Washington Post, said that China is posing a moral dilemma for the American Bar Association because of its recent crackdown on human rights lawyers. He criticizes the ABA for not impugning a recent crackdown on lawyers in China and for its vote against making a statement at the annual meeting in August against the crackdown. Opponents argued that Beijing might close the ABA office in China if the organization officially criticized the treatment of human rights lawyers. Precht says the ABA can change course and call "on the authorities to immediately release the wrongfully arrested activists and to make clear that they are not at risk of torture and other ill treatment. China’s beleaguered civil rights lawyers deserve no less."

Robert Edward Precht, opining in The Washington Post, said that China is posing a moral dilemma for the American Bar Association because of its recent crackdown on human rights lawyers. He criticizes the ABA for not impugning a recent crackdown on lawyers in China and for its vote against making a statement at the annual meeting in August against the crackdown. Opponents argued that Beijing might close the ABA office in China if the organization officially criticized the treatment of human rights lawyers. Precht says the ABA can change course and call "on the authorities to immediately release the wrongfully arrested activists and to make clear that they are not at risk of torture and other ill treatment. China’s beleaguered civil rights lawyers deserve no less."

Robert Edward Precht, opining in The Washington Post, said that China is posing a moral dilemma for the American Bar Association because of its recent crackdown on human rights lawyers. He criticizes the ABA for not impugning a recent crackdown on lawyers in China and for its vote against making a statement at the annual meeting in August against the crackdown. Opponents argued that Beijing might close the ABA office in China if the organization officially criticized the treatment of human rights lawyers. Precht says the ABA can change course and call "on the authorities to immediately release the wrongfully arrested activists and to make clear that they are not at risk of torture and other ill treatment. China’s beleaguered civil rights lawyers deserve no less."

A charter school law backed by Bill Gates was found to be unconstitutional by the Washington Supreme Court, The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss reports. The court, 6-3, ruled that the Washington state constitution only allows public-school funds to support "common schools," and charter schools can't be common schools because their boards are not elected by the public.

Strauss, citing the law review article, “The Legal Status of Charter Schools in State Statutory Law,” notes that charter schools have operations that are basically private, even though they have public funding. Some charter schools are run by private education management organizations, and some charter schools refuse to share information in response to public-information requests.

The Canada Supreme Court has ruled that Ecuadoreans can sue Chevron and its Canadian subsidiary within that country to enforece a $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador, The Globe and Mail's Sean Fine reports. Fine notes that the ruling weakens the corporate veil between a corporate parent and its subsidiary and "has major implications for Canadian multinational companies whose business activities raise environmental or human-rights concerns around the globe."

A coalition of media organizations have asked California Governor Jerry Brown to veto a bill that would make it illegal to fly drones less than 350 feet above private property "'without express permission of the person or entity with the legal authority to grant access or without legal authority,'" The Hill's David McCabe reports. The coalition said the law would impede newsgathering and violate the First Amendment.

The pharmaceutical industry is asking Congress to exempt drug patents from an administrative procedure that allows patent challenges without having to go to federal court, The Wall Street Journal's Joseph Walker reports. But the Congressional Budget Office has found that enacting the exemption would delay the entry of new generic medicines to the market and would cost federal healthcare programs $1.3 billion over 10 years.

Jacob S. Sherkow, an associate law professor at New York Law School, told the WSJ that challenges to technology patents have been successful through the administrative procedure, but most pharma cases haven't been decided yet.

The Vera Institue for Justice's Bruce Frederick, commenting on the Marshall Project, questions The New York Times' recent piece saying that murder rates are rising sharply in many U.S. cities and that less aggressive policing in the wake of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson has "'emboldened criminals.'"

He says that the New York Times' piece included 10 cities with populations ranging between 317,000 and 8 million, but there are 60 cities with populations in that range. Not all of the increases in homicides cited by the Times were statistically reliable. And increases in the number of homicides can "fall within the range of normal year-to-year flucutations" and "do not demonstrate a stable trend."

In conclusion, before arguing that there has been a pervasive increase in homicides, analysis needs to be conducted for several years, Frederick argues.
 

Fusion's Daniel Rivero has an interesting profile on the attorneys who are taking on police brutality cases. Not only do they find the work rewarding but they also are finding the case work lucrative, Rivero reports.

An attorney at the National Bar Association's annual conference said there's been $300 million in legal fees generated from police-misconduct cases in the last five years.

Chicago attorney Antonio Romanucci told Rivero that more lawyers are looking at police brutality cases because there are more civilian recordings of police interactions. But Dallas-area attorney Daryl Washington told Fusion that the cases are '"a more specialized field than just your normal personal injury law, because you’re dealing with violations to the constitution, and these cases tend to be in federal court.'"

Michigan is seeking a waiver from the Obama administration to expand Medicaid to another 600,000 low-income adults, the Associated Press reports. Unde the waiver request, "adults who have been enrolled for four years would have to buy private insurance through a government health exchange or pay higher copays and contribute more to health savings accounts."