Cultivated Compendium

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 creation) and to the archived version stored by Perma.cc," GigaOm also reports.

As GigaOm also noted, "link rot is a growing issue for both courts and academic journals, but one that is downplayed on the grounds that books and paper are the 'real' authorities while internet sources are ephemeral or, at best, unofficial. As the era of print recedes, however, this anti-digital bias looks more and more untenable."

My prior post on the findings that 50 percent of links in U.S. Supreme Court cases and 70 percent of links in some Harvard law journals are broken: http://www.cultivatedcompendium.com/news/link-rot-50-us-supreme-court-ca...

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."

The Lexington Herald-Leader has this good yarn about a Kentucky Supreme Court justice who denies seeking campaign donations from a lawyer facing investigations, as well as a fraud lawsuit, over allegations he steered clients to an administrative law judge at the Social Security Administration:

"In early 2012, Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Will T. Scott repeatedly drove to the Floyd County office of disability benefits lawyer Eric C. Conn, which is a chain of interconnected trailers along U.S. 23, fronted by a one-ton, 19-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln. Scott, who represents Eastern Kentucky on the high court, was on his way to raising $332,390 for a bruising re-election battle that fall. Conn was a multi-millionaire facing at least two federal investigations and a fraud lawsuit for allegedly rigging medical records and steering hundreds of his check-seeking clients to a judge who improperly approved their claims. A U.S. Senate committee spent five hours last week criticizing Conn's law practice at a nationally televised hearing. The men thought they could be useful to each other."

The lawyer ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for making straw donations to the justice's reelection campaign in the names of his employees, The Herald-Leader also reported.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak has this Sunday Review piece exploring how activist U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.'s court has been. There's a surprise in the findings. " If judicial activism is defined as the tendency to strike down laws, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is less activist than any court in the last 60 years," Liptak writes.

Foreign Affairs has this piece on several problems India is facing, including a lapdog press: "Restrictions have also been placed on civil rights; libel and defamation laws have become unsettlingly wide. Indeed, national newspapers and magazines, far from serving as a powerful fourth estate, are now commonly viewed as subservient to members of the government." Further, a governmental official floated the idea of governmental licensing of members of the media: "the minister of information and broadcasting recently put forward the idea that journalism, like law or medicine, should require an exam to assess competency. This would be an especially foreboding precedent: since Indira Gandhi evoked emergency laws in 1974, the media has generally been free to cast a critical eye on the government."

The New York Times reports on why the health-insurance exchanges have been so buggy: one factor was that the biggest contractor wasn't given specifications right away and only started writing software code this spring. Another factor was not rolling out a piece of the portal instead of the whole shebang at once. A third factor was that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor." Sources told the NYT that CMS did not have the capacity to take on that role.

The result: "Many users of the federal exchange were stuck at square one. A New York Times researcher, for instance, managed to register at 6 a.m. on Oct. 1. But despite more than 40 attempts over the next 11 days, she was never able to log in. Her last attempts led her to a blank screen."

The RAND Corporation, which was commissioned by the American Medical Association to identify the factors that influence physicians' professional satisfaction, found that those physicians surveyed do not want to go back to paper charting. But they are reporting several issues with the deployment of electronic health records: "Among the key findings of the study was how electronic health records have affected physician professional satisfaction. Those surveyed expressed concern that current electronic health record technology interferes with face-to-face discussions with patients, requires physicians to spend too much time performing clerical work and degrades the accuracy of medical records by encouraging template-generated notes. In addition, doctors worry that the technology has been more costly than expected and different types of electronic health records are unable to 'talk' to each other, preventing the transmission of patient medical information when it is needed."

The Seattle Times reports on the practice of locking people in the middle of mental-illness crises at emergency rooms because there are not enough beds available in the psychiatric system. The crux of this ground-breaking report: "'Psychiatric boarding,' as it is officially called, or 'warehousing,' as it is known to mental-health advocates, has long taken place on occasion in Washington, which ranks at the bottom of the country for psychiatric-treatment beds per capita. But now this once-rare, controversial practice has rapidly become routine here — traumatizing thousands of mentally ill residents, wreaking havoc on hospitals, and wasting millions of taxpayer dollars."

Lawyers for the Onondaga Nation are not very hopeful that their land claim will get accepted for review, much less get a positive ruling, from the U.S. Supreme Court after the justices ruled that the equitable doctrine of laches barred the land claim of the Oneida Nation, another Haudenosaunee/Iroquois tribe based in New York. However: the "Onondaga’s land rights lawsuit is framed differently from the Oneida and Cayuga cases. It brings environmental issues to the forefront for the first time, naming as defendants various corporations because of the destruction they caused to the land and water. The Onondaga claim crucially does not seek possession of the lands, taxing authority, eviction of the people who live on the land or any action other than acknowledgment that the lands were unlawfully taken from the Nation," Indian Country Today reported.