Cultivated Compendium

West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Robin Davis has rejected a second request to recuse herself from nursing home cases, the Charleston Daily Mail's Andrea Lannom reports. The justice's recusal has been sought because a plaintiff's attorney in a nursing home case helped raise money for the justice's election campaign and purchased a private jet from the justice's husband for $1 million.

Davis said the contributions from the lawyer and his associates were less than one-half of one percent of contributions to her 2012 campaign and she wasn't aware of the price paid for the private jet because it was sold through a broker retained by her husband.

In the first nursing home case in which Davis' recusal was sought, a jury awarded $91.5 million; Davis, who wrote the majority opinion for the West Virginia Supreme Court, reduced the award to $38 million. A second nursing home case is pending before the Supreme Court over what documents are privileged from disclosure.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that health officials must provide more information about the citations given to facilities found to be lax in treating developmentally and mentally ill people, Sacramento Bee's Denny Walsh reports. The unanimous court ruled that the state Department of Public Health provided too little information in response to a public-records request about citations issued against the seven largest state-owned-and-operated treatment facilities, Walsh further reports. The DOH argued that another law required heavy redactions in order to protect the privacy of the patients, but the Supreme Court ruled that the state Long-Term Act was a special exception.

Next month, the US Supreme Court is going to hear a case over whether the Affordable Care Act authorizes the federal government to give subsidies to people who purchase health-insurance policies through the federally run insurance exchange. The argument against allowing the subsidies is that the law may have been drafted to only authorize subsidies given to people who buy their policies through state-run exchanges. If the justices rule in favor of that argument, Florida could lose $441.9 million in subsidies, Texas $247.5 million, North Carolina in $163.2 million and so on, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent blogs.

Sargent also notes that a number of states have argued that they had no notice that their decision not to set up their own exchanges would imperil the tax subsidies: "Thus, they argue, if the Supreme Court guts subsidies, it would impose a “dramatic” hidden punishment on them and their residents for their decision not to set up an exchange, despite the fact that they had no clear warning of the consequences of that decision. This raises serious Constitutional concerns, and as a result, the states argue, the Supreme Court should opt for the interpretation of the statute that doesn’t raise those concerns — the government’s interpretation that subsidies are universal."

Two of newly elected Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf's nominees for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court are under fire, one for allegedly forwarding a racially insensitive email, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Centre County Judge Thomas K. Kistler allegedly forwarded an email showing a black man and a black woman during a visit in a prison with the caption "Merry Christmas From the Johnsons." You can see the meme here. Kistler told the newspaper, "that if he did send the e-mail, it was not meant to mock black people but to convey that 'Christmas goes on, even for the people we put in jail.'"

Wolf's other nominee, Ken Gormley, a dean at the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, was the subject of a harassment complaint in 2006, the Inquirer reports.

Peter Suderman, writing on Reason's blog, piggybacks off the concerns that Dr. Jeffrey Singer made about the government mandate for electronic health records in the Wall Street Journal's op-ed section. Singer pointed to research that found that physicians think that electronic health records drive up healthcare costs because, among other reasons, of high implementation costs, which is particularly burdensome for small private practices. A bigger concern is that current health IT systems are not interoperable and don't operate across multiple provider networks, Suderman also notes.

The New York Court of Appeals has ruled that South Brooklyn Legal Services is not entitled to recover attorney fees from the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance under the New York Equal Access to Justice Act when it got a client's monthly shelter allowance restored to a higher amount, the New York Law Journal's Joel Stashenko reports.

The Equal Access to Justice Act "was intended to employ the 'catalyst' theory, under which litigants are to be rewarded with payment of attorney fees if their cases were the catalyst behind change in policy or correction of the complained-about action," Stashenko writes. The appellate court didn't reach the issue of whether the catalyst theory applies to the Equal Access to Justice Act, so one advocate said the theory does apply in the First Department because the Appellate Division, First Department, ruled in favor of the theory.

There are just a few states that doesn't mandate outpatient treatment for the "frequent fliers"--the people with serious mental illnesses who repeatedly are in local jails and hospitals, the Washington Post's Annys Shin reports. The Treatment Advocacy Center, released a report this week "on the outcomes of established mandatory outpatient treatment programs in New York City and Summit County, Ohio, where assisted outpatient treatment has been in place since the 1990s." Studies of those programs found that court-ordered outpatient treatment "reduced the incidence of psychiatric emergency crisis services, hospitalization, and criminal justice involvement," Shin reports.

A Washington state judge has ruled that a florist violated that state's consumer protection law when she refused to sell flowers for a same-sex marriage, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Joel Connelly reports. Benton County Superior Court Judge Alex Ekstrom said that, despite the florist's religious beliefs, "'in trade and commerce, and more particularly when seeking to prevent discrimination in public accommodations, the Courts have confirmed the power of the Legislative Branch to prohibit conduct it deems discriminatory even where the motivation for that conduct is grounded in religious belief.'"

According to an investigation by The Guardian, Richard Zuley, a detective on Chicago’s north side from 1977 to 2007 and who interrogated terrorism detainees at Guantanamo Bay, imported the type of harsh tactics used at America's holding center for terrorism suspects into his work as a police officer. The newspaper's Spencer Ackerman reports that Zuley allegedly "repeatedly engaged in methods of interrogation resulting in at least one wrongful conviction and subsequent cases more recently thrown into doubt following allegations of abuse." The Guardian alleges that Gitmo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi and domestic defendants "confessed untruthfully to try and stop the treatment by Zuley."

Three federal magistrate judges called off a hearing to explore whether damage reports were altered to justify denials of insurance claims related to Superstorm Sandy, the New York Law Journal's Andrew Keshner reports. The judges, who are presiding over the storm-related insurance litigation, did so after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was going to create a process for disputes about the integrity of engineering practices in claims coming through FEMA's "write your own" program, which allows insurers to write federal flood insurance policies. There are 1,323 cases challenging denials or alleged underpayments by wind and flood insurers, Keshner reports.