Cultivated Compendium

Law firm hiring has improved from the doldrums of the Great Recession, but complete employment recovery for lawyers isn't likely for a long time yet, Crain's Detroit Business reports. Contracting law school classes should help the market too. The class of 2013 was the largest in the history of American legal education, but the cohort of law students has drop from 52,000 law school students entering programs in 2010 to 37,000 students entering this fall, Crain's also reports. 

Eugene Kontorovich, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy blog, comments that constitutional challenges to mandatory Ebola quarantines are unlikely to succeed. Lawyers for Kaci Hickox, a nurse forcibly quarantined by New Jersey after treating Ebola patients in West Africa, claimed she was deprived of her liberty in violation of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. But Kontorovich says "brief review of the cases suggests it extremely difficult to challenge such an action without a clear showing of medical unreasonableness, or discriminatory application. Indeed, I found no cases in which a quarantine has been lifted due process grounds (though there have been some successful challenges to conditions of quarantine)."

Hickox's quarantine was reversed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie today, USA Today reports. She will now be quarantined at her home.

The PEN American Center is calling on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how the press was treated by law enforcement covering the protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of Michael Brown, the St. Louis Business Journal reports. For example, police held reporters in areas away from the events they were covering and they flashed lights to hinder photographers. PEN American Center is asking the Justice Department "to issue new guidelines for U.S. police departments on respect for media freedoms, including the rights accorded to citizen journalists; take disciplinary measures against any officer responsible for violations; and establish a 'clear policy for the policing of public protests that emphasizes respect for the rights to assembly and freedom of the press,'" St. Business Journal further reports.

Even though a a federal judge has ruled the judicial election system in Marion County, Indiana, unconstitutional, the system won't be fixed anytime soon, the Indiana Lawyer reports: "Indianapolis voters will go to the polls Nov. 4 and elect 16 Marion Superior judges, but in truth there’s no contest because who will win already is decided. Eight Democrats and eight Republicans selected in their respective parties’ May primary elections appear on the ballot unopposed."

U.S. Chief District Judge Richard Young of the Southern District of Indiana ruled that the law governing the selection of judges in Marion County imposes a severe burden on the right to vote, the Indiana Lawyer reports. The judicial selection system in Marion County also "enabled slating, whereby judicial candidates who made five-figure donations to their county party organizations received ballot preference and the party’s stamp of approval during the primaries," the Indiana Lawyer also reports.

Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Professor Joel Schumm said it's likely that Marion County would adopt a merit selection system like other Indiana counties in which judges are appointed by a commission.

We're embarking on an era when everyday objects will be connected to the Internet, whether it's devices in our home or it's devices we wear. Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts notes that digital privacy already is pretty limited. How will things look when even more objects are connected to the Internet? The problem, he says, is that Internet-connected objects "will start to pull all sorts of people — even those who aren’t on the Internet in the first place — into connected databases through photo tagging and other sensor features." ACLU's Jay Stanley offers some hope, arguing that, as a society, we may be embarking on a new level of awareness about the importance of privacy.

The Federal Communications Commission has entered the realm of data security for the first time--with a $10 million fine no less, the Washington Post's Brian Fung reports. The fine was levied against "two telecom companies that allegedly stored personally identifiable customer data online without firewalls, encryption or password protection. The two companies, YourTel America and TerraCom, share the same owners and management. From September 2012 to April 2013, the FCC said, the companies collected information online from applicants to Lifeline, the government's telephone subsidy program for poor Americans."

The data was discovered by reporters for the Scripps Howard News Service doing a simple Google search, Fung also reports.

The Arizona Republic reports that flood of Central American migrants, including unaccompanied minors and families with children, has dropped down "back to being nearly invisible." The number of unaccompanied children apprehended by the Border Patrol feel by 77 percent from June.

Last spring, smugglers promoted the idea that children crossing the border before the end of June would get a free permit to stay in the United States, the Republic reports. But now the governments of the United States, Honduras, Guatemala and El Savador have mounted campaigns to warn that families and children will actually be deported.

A candidate to become president of the Navajo Nation has been disqualified from the ballot because he is not fluent in Navajo, the Associated Press' Felicia Fonseca reports. Chris Deschene is asking the Navajo Nation Council to pass legislation to make voters the sole decision-makers on whether a presidential candidate is fluent in the language.

The nation's Supreme Court dismissed Deschene's appeal for not including a copy of his disqualification order with his appeal, the AP further reports.

The New York Times' Michael Corkery reports that legislators in at least eight states have "voted to increase the fees or the interest rates that lenders can charge on certain personal loans used by millions of borrowers with subpar credit." There has been a lobbying push by the consumer loan industry, which argues that caps on interest rates have not kept pace with the costs of doing business. Efforts in North Carolina initially failed because of opposition from military leaders, but the industry was able to get the law amended when the commanding officers changed at some of the state's military bases and did not feel as strongly about the issue. The law changed from allowing lenders to charge 30 percent interest on loans up to $1,000 and 18 percent on a remaining balance of $6,500 to charging up to 30 percent on loans up to $4,000 and 24 percent on a remaining balance of $4,000.