Cultivated Compendium

While Ohio bans same-sex marriages, a judge has ruled that a valid same-sex marriage entered into in another state must be recognized on a death certificate. Ohio recognizes marriages from other states that it would not allow under its own law, the judge said, so same-sex marriages must be given the same comity and full-faith credit. “This is not a complicated case,” the judge wrote, according to the Gay People's Chronicle. “The issue is whether the state of Ohio can discriminate against same sex marriages lawfully solemnized out of state, when Ohio law has historically and unambiguously provided that the validity of a marriage is determined by whether it complies with the law of the jurisdiction where it was celebrated.”

 

Remember that scene in West Wing in which Toby Ziegler wanted to use his cell phone while in the air on a commercial passenger jet? Well, he still wouldn't be able to make a cell phone call, but he could read his e-book, listen to a podcast or watch a video. The New York Times reports an advisory panel to the Federal Aviation Authority is expected to make such a proposal soon. "The guidelines are expected to allow reading e-books or other publications, listening to podcasts, and watching videos, according to several of the panel’s members who requested anonymity because they could not comment on the recommendations," according to the report. "The ban on making phone calls, as well as sending and receiving e-mails and text messages or using Wi-Fi, is expected to remain in place, the panel members said."

The New York Times has a report on a putatative class action filed against a Nevada psychiatric center alleging it had the practice of putting patients with mental illness onto buses to San Francisco and other California locales with one-way tickets. “In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” San Franciso City Attorney Dennis Herrera told the New York Times and who is prosecuting the lawsuit. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”

 Attorney Terrence P. Dwyer writes that there is still a question left open by the U.S. Supreme Court "relating to the extent of government use of GPS technology without a warrant, specifically about requirements when there is no physical trespass upon personal property." He writes that some courts are more protective of cell site locator information while others are not (CSLI "can be sought in one of two ways — either as historical cell site data that seeks past locator information, or as prospective cell site data which seeks real time, present data"). He also writes that it is likely the courts, not legislatures will decide the parameters of our privacy regarding cell phones locational data as there has been very few bills introduced to govern this subject area.

Philadelphia CityPaper did an incredible job with this enterprise piece on the long-standing violence in Philadelphia's Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. There have been 150 shootings and 30 murders in the last decade involving just three corners in the northwest part of that neighborhood--all stemming from one killing in October 2003.  "The street-corner killings that take many young black lives in Philadelphia are often manifestations of more complicated stories that few outside the neighborhood bother to interpret. This is one of those stories," CityPaper reports.

Diane J. Humetewa, a Hopi citizen, the first American Indian to serve as a United States attorney, and who has been an appellate court judge for the Hopi Tribe Appellate Court, was nominated this week by President Barack Obama for a federal judgeship on the U.S. District Court for Arizona. If confirmed, Humetewa would be the first American Indian woman and only the third American Indian overall to serve in the federal judiciary, according to Indian Country Today Media Network. "Indian affairs experts had been pressuring the president to make another Native American federal judgeship appointment – several more, in fact – citing the large number of Indian law cases heard in federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court's tendency not to understand tribal law," Indian Country Today further reports.

CNN has this opinion piece from a Kathryn and Lawrence Ashe Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law professor on three ways to improve the United States Supreme Court:

1. end lifetime service

2. televise oral arguments

3. require nominees to "answer hard questions" during their confirmation hearings in the Senate.

 

Two separate cases have reached the U.S. Supreme Court seeking certiorari on the mandate that all health insurance cover contraception and other means of ending pregnancies. The Tenth Circuit sided with an employer opposing providing such coverage, while the Third Circuit sided against an employer, according to this clip from The Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes Catholicism. The stage is now set for a circuit split on the tension between women's reproductive rights and religious beliefs.

Echoing similar recent comments by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Elena Kagan told an audience in Kentucky that '"We disagree, but then we put things aside and come back the next day, fresh,'" the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. Kagan said she has even gone hunting for quail, pheasant and antelope and traveled out West with Justice Antonin Scalia, who is conservative in his jurisprudence while Kagan is liberal in her jurisprudence.
 

The New York Times has this interesting profile of JPMorgan's general counsel, Stephen M. Cutler, who has talked tough in the past on the importance of compliance with financial rules and regulations but on whose watch "JPMorgan had agreed to admit wrongdoing and pay nearly $1 billion in fines for its conduct in the 'London Whale' matter, in which the bank’s chief investment office lost more than $6 billion and bank officials misled regulators about the losses."