Cultivated Compendium

The Connecticut Supreme Court has rejected a prior restraint case involving legal newspaper Connecticut Law Tribune, CLT's Thomas B. Scheffey reports. The court said the case had become legally moot because the trial judge retracted his order barring the Law Tribune from publishing a story with details from a juvenile court record. However, the newspaper appealed seeking "a ruling that this prior restraint violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and its counterparts in the Connecticut Constitution. The mother [of two children placed in foster care because of a rancorous divorce] sought a ruling that the confidentiality interests of the children trumped the constitutional free speech provisions," Scheffey reports.

SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports on oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday about a civil rights doctrine that rejects discrimination in housing even if it is not intentional, so long as it has a "disparate impact" on minorities: "At issue in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project is how far Congress went in 1968 in banning racial discrimination in home sales or rentals: did it only ban intentional bias, or did it also outlaw housing policies that simply have a negative effect on minorities?"

The Fair Housing Act, a key law in prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, was passed in 1968 shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

Justice Antonin Scalia was on both sides of the issue during the oral arguments, reflecting the overall split in the bench on the issue, Denniston reports.

Fair housing advocates are concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its five-member conservative majority, took up the case even though there is not a split between the circuit court of appeals in applying the disparate impact doctrine in fair housing cases. Elizabeth Julian, president of the Inclusive Communities Project and the former Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at HUD, told ProPublica "the end of disparate impact policies and cases ... would severely hamper advocates’ ability to go after systemic housing discrimination in a nation where the segregation of black Americans has barely budged in many cities and where it is growing for Latinos."

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments today about a key civil rights doctrine in fair housing law: the disparate impact doctrine, which allows litigants to show that a policy is discriminatory by showing the results disproporionately affect one group of people, even if the discrimination isn't intentional, the Wall Street Journal's Robbie Whelan and Jess Bravin reports. At issue is the pattern of Dallas real-estate developers building the vast majority of government-subsidized housing in poor minority communities, not in wealthier, predominantly white communities. The Supreme Court will hear if the current system of tax subsidies violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and promotes racial segregation.

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss blogged that the case is not just one that fair-housing advocates should watch but that public-education advocates should watch too  "'because the segregation of low-income minority schools undermines efforts to narrow achievement gaps between middle class and low-income minority students.'"

The WSJ notes that two other cases involving the disparate impact doctrine were settled before the U.S. Supreme Court could hear them.

Reuters' Lawrence Hurley reports that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to be closely divided over a Florida judge's challenge to a law that bars judicial candidates from soliciting campaign contributions. Notably, the case was heard just about five years after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the Citizens United opinion, is likely to be the swing vote, Hurley reports. The liberal justices appeared to favor keeping a law that tries to safeguard the judiciary from political influence, while the conservative justices appeared to favor the First Amendment interests tamped down by the law.

 

The IRS has recently released rules to address aggressive debt collection from poor patients by nonprofit hospitals, ProPublica reports. The rules, required by the Affordable Care Act, will require nonprofit hospitals to "post their financial assistance policies on their websites and offer a written, 'plain language summary' of them to patients when they're in the hospital. If patients don't apply for assistance or pay their bills, then the hospitals are required to send at least one more summary of the policy, along with mentioning it on billing statements. And if hospitals plan to sue patients over unpaid bills, they must attempt to verbally tell the patients about their policies, as well as send notices that they are planning to sue and that the patients may qualify for financial assistance."

After dozens of schoolkids were killed by the Taliban, Pakistan has changed its constitution to allow military courts to try militants, the New York Times reports: "Among analysts and legal experts, the military courts have raised a slew of worries about the erosion of fundamental rights, the sidelining of the civilian judiciary and the prospect of soldiers’ wielding untrammeled power in a country with a long history of military takeovers." The courts, however, had wide support, even among opponents to military rule.  "Legal, political and militancy experts warn that these courts are not a panacea for terrorism, and that Pakistanis may be making a grave mistake in treating the rule of law as a negotiable commodity," especially considering the support for militancy in Pakistani society.

Does the right to free speech and free thought end where someone else's freedom of thought and freedom of speech start?

The issue is not an academic one with the killing of several Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists in Paris and with a liberal Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, 1,000 lashes, and a 1 million Saudi riyal fine (roughly $266,000) for insulting Islam, Foreign Policy's Michael Wahid Hanna reports. The Organization of the Islamic Conference has promoted the notion of defamation of religion as a cognizable legal concept, Hanna reports, but "international human rights law remains quite clear on the impermissibility of such discriminatory measures." However, laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation are not rare: "In 2011, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly half the countries in the world have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, or defamation," Hanna further reports.

He argues that blasphemy laws are problematic because they chill free thought and inquiry and because authoriarian counties use such laws to suppress minority rights and punish nonconfirmity.

The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press' Tom Isler reports on two lawsuits that have been brought in Missouri and New York to challenge secrecy over the grand juries that ultimately chose not to indict police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. "The two cases illustrate how strong the secrecy protections are for grand juries and how difficult it can be for the public to have any meaningful oversight of the process to guard against potential abuse," Isler notes. He hopes the courts rule in favor of the lawsuits seeking more transparency so the public can have a "a richer picture of the two grand jury investigations that sparked protests worldwide."

The New York legislature is considering bills to restrict the use of drones by law enforcement, the Tenth Amendment Center reports: "Introduced on Jan. 7, Senate Bill 411 (SB411) by Sen. Gordon Denlinger (R-Syosset) and Assembly Bill 1247 (A01247) would ban law enforcement from using a drone in a criminal investigation with a few exceptions, and would prohibit any 'person, entity, or state agency' from using a drone for surveillance anyplace a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy unless they meet specific requirements."

The Colorado Senate is also considering limits for drones, the Associated Press' Kristen Wyatt reports. The bill also would require law enforcement to have warrants before using drones.

Maine is considering a bill that would go even farther, the Tenth Amendment Center also reports. The bill would place a moratorium on all drone use until July 1, 2017, except for emergency situations. After that, law enforcement agencies would need a court order or a warrant to be able to use drones. The law also would create a private right of action for violations of the law.

Even though Kentucky bans same-sex marriage, Jefferson Family Court Judge Joseph O'Reilly granted a divorce to a same-sex couple married in Massachusetts, The Courier-Journal's Andrew Wolfson reports: "O'Reilly said that barring same-sex couples to divorce here violates the state constitutional guarantee that all people should be treated as equals."