Cultivated Compendium

The future of three of President Barack Obama's signature policies rest in the hands of federal judges: health care, immigration and climate change, the Washington Post's David Nakamura and Juliet Eilperin report. "'We’re getting used to getting sued,'” John Podesta, White House counselor, said last week.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen ruled Monday that the administration's deferred-deportation program should not move forward while a lawsuit brought by 26 states is pending; the judge found that the executive action on immigration doesn't comply with the rulemaking process of the Administrative Procedure Act.

On March 4, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case in which the plaintiffs argue that Obamacare does not authorize subsidies to low-income people buying healthcare insurance policies on the federally run insurance exchange. And in April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear cases challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.

The Florida Supreme Court stopped an execution scheduled this week because of questions over whether the state's lethal drug cocktail constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, Huffington Post's Kim Bellware reports. The execution has been halted pending the outcome in a U.S. Supreme Court case over whether a similar cocktail used in Oklahoma is unconstitutional.

Alstory Simon was freed after serving 15 years for a double murder after prosecutors questioned the evidence against him, Slate's Beth Ethier reports. Now Simon is suing a former journalism professor that once led an Innocence Project class at the Medill School of Journalism, his defense attorney and a private investigator. Simon alleges that the defendants conspired to get him to confess to a fatal shooting for which then-professor David Protess' students sought to exonerate another man.

Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder wants executives at Wall Street banks to face criminal charges, Bloomberg's Keri Geiger reports. Holder has asked U.S. attorneys involved in residential mortgage-backed securities cases to report in 90 days whether they can develop cases against individual bankers. The decision on whether action will be appropriate will be up to Loretta Lynch, the nominee to replace Holder, he said in a speech Tuesday.

After a Georgia state-court judge ruled that the state's law protecting speech related to government proceedings doesn't protect a TV station from a defamation lawsuit, many in the media bar are concerned that his ruling, if upheld, could threaten the freedom of press, The Daily Report's Kathleen Baydala Joyner reports. The TV station reported that the plaintiff faked having a Purple Heart to get a free military award license plate. A petition for certiorari is pending with the Georgia Supreme Court on whether the anti-SLAPP statute applies to the case.

Many plaintiffs suing their insurers over Superstorm Sandy are alleging that engineering reports were "as part of an effort to minimize insurance payments to flood victims in New York and New Jersey after the 2012 hurricane," The New York Times' David W. Chen reports. A hearing will be held Thursday, February 19, on the engineering reports.

The Lone Star State's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a county probate judge ruled today, Los Angeles Times' Lauren Raab reports. Travis County Probate Judge Guy Herman ruled that Texas' constitutional and statutory bans violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

A federal judge already overturned the bans last year.

The U.S. Supreme Court currently is considering the standard that should be applied to judge whether someone has stepped outside the bounds of the First Amendment and truly threatened others. Kevin Reed, a magistrate judge in Memphis, wrote in the Washington Post today that the justices should apply an objective standard, not a subjective standard, to true threats. If a subjective intent standard is applied, then prosecutors would have to prove that a defendant purposefully intended to threaten a victim, leaving them in the untenable position of trying to prove something that exists only in a defendant's mind, Reed says. "Abusers are keenly aware that victims never really know if their threats are serious or not," the judge concludes. "Ultimately, their objective is to keep victims guessing about whether they are in real danger. The Supreme Court should refuse to protect this manipulative behavior."

The 370 million indigenous people around the world are being increasingly displaced because large companies are pushing onto their traditional territories to extract resources and because of rising property values, Reuters' Chris Arsenault reports. The International Fund for Agriculture Development reports that "indigenous farming practices are under threat from unclear land ownership structures, climate change and growing mono-crop plantations, and traditional knowledge can help preserve biodiversity."

Last week, the Italian Court of Cassation ruled that there is nothing in that country's constitution to require that same-sex couples get marriage rights, The Washington Blade's Michael K. Lavers reports. But the court said that lesbian and gay Italians do have the right to a "'protective'" law to ensure they have the same rights as other unmarried couples.