Cultivated Compendium

Employees who are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgendered do not have any federal protection from being discriminated against by their employers. The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate is going to take up a bill that would bar employment discrimination against Americans who are LGBT. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act "would prohibit discrimination by nonreligious entities against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity," The Washington Post reported. The bill, however, has been introduced several times in past legislative sessions and not gotten anywhere.

The Detroit Free Press reports on Gov. Rick Snyder's historic testimony in a federal  court trial over whether Detroit qualifies for bankruptcy. Snyder testified that he "knew that he had the power to make Detroit’s bankruptcy filing contingent on protecting pensions — but he chose not to exercise it and impede efforts to fix the beleaguered city," the newspaper reports.

The Free Press also reports: "The Michigan Constitution protects public pensions as a 'contractual obligation' that cannot be 'diminished or impaired,' but federal bankruptcy law allows contracts to be severed."

Snyder is going to testify again today.

The Seventh Circuit's Judge Richard Posner has been getting a lot of criticism for allegedly expressing some sort of regret for writing the opinion upholding Indiana's voter identification law.

The line in Posner's new book that caused the stir was: "I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court) upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID—a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention."

Posner has been criticized for allegedly doing something that reflects adversely on his impartiality or that detracts from the dignity of the judicial office.

Now Posner writes in The New Republic that he was not expressing ardent regret for his opinion. Posner said he was just advancing the argument in his book "that in many cases judges can’t have any confidence in the soundness of their decisions if they do not have empirical data concerning the likely consequences of deciding the case one way rather than another."

The Economist opined that it was a good thing for Posner to be frank about a "mistake." While Posner is walking back any idea that he expressed that the voter ID case was wrongly decided, The Economist's upshot is still relevant: Posner deserves credit for intellectual honesty about the process of judging. "His reasoned reconsideration is a testament to his willingness to keep an open mind, to listen to counterarguments and to adapt his own view when the evidence warrants a switch," The Economist said today. "Would we prefer our judges narrow-minded, crusty and intransigent?"

Hawaii has started a marathon special legislative session over same-sex marriage in which 1,800 people are expected to testify and 4,000 pages of prepared testimony has been submitted, the Associated Press reports. One special issue for Hawaii is that it is no small thing for same-sex couples to travel to another state to get married elsewhere in the United States: Hawaii Attorney General David Louie testified "that traveling to another state that allows gay marriage is no small issue," the AP reports.

The national trend of litigation to challenge bans on same-sex marriage is continuing in the Lone Star State. Two couples in Texas have filed a federal lawsuit to challenge that state's ban on same-sex marriage, arguing the ban violates the federal constitution and the Texas state constitution, the San Antonio Express-News reports. “There is no rational basis, much less a compelling government purpose, for Texas to deny plaintiffs the same right to marry enjoyed by the majority of society,” the plaintiffs' complaint said, according to the newspaper.

The Washington Post reports on a study done by liberal group Center for American Progress of "seven state supreme court elections in which spending exceeded $3 million for the first time between 2000 and 2007. CAP then compared rulings in the five years before and after those elections." The group found a correlation between that increased campaign spending, including by outside groups, with an increase by pro-prosecution, anti-criminal defendant rulings by state supreme courts. "Judges are supposed to base decisions on the law and the facts before them, not what voters want," The Washington Post wrote. "But as campaign spending continues to grow, pressure to avoid rulings that would play poorly in a 30-second ad continues to mount."

There is a current debate in Connecticut on where to draw the line on access t0 law enforcement records like 911 tapes and crime-scene photos and the public's right to know in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. An attorney for most of the families of the Sandy Hook victims testified at a legislative task force that they do not want public disclosure of the 911 calls made because of the shooting, The Norwich Bulletin reports. While attorney Morgan Rueckert acknowledged the argument that the media has standards and does not always use the information accessed through right-t0-know requests, '"the reality is, every person now with a computer is an editor, a journalist and a publisher. The law needs to change to keep up and to stay in line with our peers."'

California has enacted a law to make it easier for the wrongfully convicted to get compensation for the time they spent imprisoned, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Under a prior statute, defendants who were let go had to prove their innocence before they could get compensated for their wrongful imprisonment. Only 11 of 132 people released from California prisons since 2000 because they were wrongfully convicted were able to get compensation through the prior system, according to the Union-Tribune.

A year after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, "thousands of people still trying to fix their soaked and surf-battered homes are being stymied by bureaucracy, insurance disputes and uncertainty over whether they can afford to rebuild," the Associated Press reported.

The Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate is weighing several changes to the state's five-year-old right-to-know law, according to a report from The Harrisburg Patriot-News.

The proposed changes include:

- making state-affiliated universities like Penn State subject to the law in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal;

- controlling the number of right-to-know requests from prisoners (although carving out a class of requestors could create bad precedent);

- making the Office of Open Records an independent agency;

- allowing local governments to deny allegedly "unduly burdensome" requests.