Cultivated Compendium

Alabama blogger Roger Shuler has been ordered to pay $3.5 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit, Alabama Media Group's Kent Faulk reports. The lawsuit was brought by a former campaign manager for Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange over Shuler's posts about an alleged affair between Strange and the campaign manager. He also alleged that Strange was the father of the campaign manager's son.

Shuler  already spent five months in jail before agreeing to remove his posts about the son of a former governor.

The California Indian Law Association has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to get more information about an alleged "confession of error" by former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katya that his office made misrepresentations to the U.S. Supreme Court in American Indian law cases, The Legal Times' Tony Mauro reports. Katyal made his remarks in a video for the Federal Bar Association's annual Indian law conference in 2011.

According to the association's complaint, Katyal made a "'confession of error' for the solicitor general's role in two Supreme Court cases that were setbacks for tribal sovereignty: United States v. Sandoval, a 1913 decision that limited tribal property rights in New Mexico, and the 1955 ruling in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, which rejected an Alaskan tribe's Fifth Amendment claim seeking compensation for timber taken on tribal lands," Mauro reports.

A confession of error could undermine those precedents, which have been cited hundreds of times in federal court, Mauro also reports.
 

The U.S. Court of the Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that Missouri can't limit the ability of insurance navigators in helping consumers sign up for coverage through the federally run online exchange, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Samantha Liss reports. Missouri legislators passed legislation barring navigators from providing advice to consumers about health plans sold outside of the federally-run exchange.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has struck down a ban in Michigan on outdoor charity collection bins, the Michigan Radio Newsroom's Virginia Gordon reports. The appellate court ruled that the ban likely violates the free speech rights of Planet Aid.

Homeowners who lost their properties to foreclosures are starting to bounce back and are qualifying for new mortgages, The Wall Street Journal's Annamaria Andriotis, Laura Kusisto and Joe Light report. More than 5 million families lost their homes to foreclosure between 2007 and 2014, but foreclosures and other negative credit events come off credit reports after about seven years. “'The dark shadow of the foreclosure crisis is finally beginning to fade,”' Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, a unit of Moody’s Corp, told the WSJ. '“That should be a positive for single-family housing and, by extension, for the broader economy.”'

The number of civil cases awaiting resolution in the federal courts for three years or more has exceeded 30,000 for the fifth time in the past decade, The Wall Street Journal's Joe Palazzolo reports. The number of cases pending is up nearly 20 percent from a decade ago.

The Eastern District for California has a particularly deep backlog, with the number of case filed per judge is almost twice the national average, Palazzolo reports. The backlog has grown because the number of judges hasn't kept pace with the region's population growth and a surge in prisoner lawsuits.

The Judicial Conference of the United States has asked for 68 new judgeships to be created by Congress, including six in California's Eastern District, Palazzolo reports.

The Obama administration's Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has taken vendors of electronic health records "to task for making it costly and cumbersome to share patient information and frustrating a $30 billion push to use digital records to improve quality and cut costs," The Wall Street Journal's Melinda Beck reports.

For example, vendors are requiring customers to use proprietary platforms and making it too expensive to switch systems. Even though nearly 80 percent of doctors and 60 percent of hospitals have converted from paper files to EHRs, only 20 to 30 percent of providers are able to share records with other providers, Beck reports.

ONC could decertify EHR systems that block data-sharing, but the report says that would unduly penalize customers, Beck reports.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has come out in favor of merit selection for judges on the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, Arkansas News' John Lyon reports. Hutchison said "'I am willing to give that some gubernatorial support, some gubernatorial initiative to help drive that re-examination to look at how we can better elect our judges and also have the people continue to be involved in that process.”'

Last year, a constitutional amendment to create merit selection for Supreme Court justices failed in a legislative session.

After Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday to allow that state's Supreme Court justices to vote on who should lead the court, the current chief justice has filed a lawsuit against the amendment, the Associated Press' Scott Bauer reports.

Before the amendment was approved, the most senior jurist on the Wisconsin Supreme Court filled the chief justice position. Shirley Abrahamson, a liberal member of the court, is expected to be removed as chief justice because there is a four-justice conservative majority.

Abrahamson is arguing that the change should not be applied until after her current term ends in four years or if she leaves before then because otherwise her rights to due process and equal protection would be violated, Bauer reports.

On Tuesday, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, considered to be one of the two most liberal justices along with Abrahamson, won reelection, Bauer also reports.

The New York Times' Mitch Smith reports that Tuesday's election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court could reshape that judicial body. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, member of the court's liberal minority, is up for election (Judge James Daley is Bradley's opponent and is supported by Republicans, while she is supported by Democrats), and voters are being asked to approve a constitutional amendment to change how the chief justice is selected. If the amendment is approved, the justices would vote on who should be chief, instead of having the longest-serving member lead the court. Current Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson is considered part of the liberal bloc.