Cultivated Compendium

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that New York's top financial regulator can tackle online lending businesses run by two American Indian tribes in Oklahoma and Michigan, the New York Times reports: "In their lawsuit, the tribes — the Otoe Missouria Tribe in Red Rock, Okla., and the Lac Vieux Desert Bank of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in Watersmeet, Mich. — argued that their sovereign status shielded them from the reach of New York State. The appeals court disagreed, outlining in a 33-page opinion that the borrowers reside in New York and received the loans, 'certainly without traveling to the reservation.”'

A small, elite group of law firms is handling a larger portion of the U.S. Supreme Court's docket, Tony Mauro reports in The American Lawyer: "In the term that ended in June, the justices decided a meager 67 argued cases, less than half the caseload they handled in 1990. Three firms argued seven cases each, and two argued in six—meaning that just five firms fielded lawyers in half of the court's cases."

The firms that handled seven cases were Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Goldstein & Russell.

The firms that handled six cases were Bancroft and Sidley Austin.

 

The Allentown Morning Call's Steve Esack has a startling exclusive about Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery: "Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery forwarded at least eight sexually explicit emails to an employee in the state attorney general's office who later shared them with more than a dozen others, emails reviewed by The Morning Call show. McCaffery is the first judicial figure whose name has surfaced in an unfolding controversy over state employees' sharing the emails that Attorney General Kathleen Kane's staff found in a review of the Jerry Sandusky grand jury investigation."

The emails first surfaced as part of right-to-know requests from the media, but Kane only released poritions of the media, Esack further reports.

According to Esack, Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille said earlier this week that a member of the judiciary could violate rules of conduct by sending pornographic emails on government-owned or personal computers. McCaffery's emails were allegedly sent from a personal account.

A coalition of newspapers, photographers and others are seeking to block enforcement of Arizona's law that criminalizes the "sale, publication or display of nude photos or sexual images without the subject’s consent," the National Law Journal reports. Michael Bamberger, a First Amendment lawyer and one of the counsel on the case, told NLJ "this is a supposed revenge-porn statute that does not require revenge. There is no intent requirement, and it covers far more than porn. That’s why it concerns booksellers, publishers, etc."

The U.S. Supreme Court is facing a circuit split on whether the federal government can provide tax subsidies to low-income workers to obtain health insurance on the federally-run insurance exchanges, SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has said no (but the en banc court is going to hear the case in December). The Fourth Circuit has said yes. U.S. District Judge Ronald A. White, who sits in Oklahoma, added to the list of 'no' rulings yesterday.

According to the New York Times, White's ruling appears to increase the likelihood that the Supreme Court will resolve the issue. SCOTUSBlog's Denniston reports that White "relied on what he found to be the clear language of the ACA on that point — that is, subsidies are only to be available on an exchange 'established by the state.'  It was not his option, the judge said, to read the entire health care law to find reasons to make sure that the subsidy system worked in all exchanges across the country, federal and state."

Now that the Pennsylvania Superior Court has thrown out a requirement that a former Supreme Court justice write apology letters to every judge in Pennsylvania on her picture showing her in handcuffs, prosecutors says that Joan Orie Melvin should be resentenced and face incarceration for using the resources of her chambers on her judicial campaigns, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. Melvin is appeaing her conviction to her former colleagues on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have allowed judges to inform juries when a prosecutor has intentionally withheld evidence, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, sponsor of the bill, said in a statement "we need this bill to stop the few prosecutors whose zeal for convictions lead them to cut corners on justice. We can’t wait decades to free the innocent while the true perpetrators run free.” Brown said he was vetoing the bill because it would intrude upon the judiciary's role in instructing juries.

New York's approval rate for parole applications has been sliced in half since 2005, falling from 52 percent to 24 percent between 2005 and 2013, City Limits' Bill Hughes wrote earlier this month.

Jim Murphy, a former county legislator in Schenectady County and a longtime volunteer with the New York chapter of CURE, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, said he has been plugging parole board statistics into spreadsheets and "he believes he will soon be able to show a pattern emerging that can predict which parole board commissioners are more or less likely to grant or deny parole. 'A good number of these people—not all of them—but a good number seem to be making their decisions based on the politics of the case,'" Murphy told City Limits.

Criminal justice advoces said that "crimes that receive a disproportionate amount of media attention are judged more harshly by parole boards than similar offenses that are off the public radar."

The landmark World Conference of Indigenous Peoples has been far from the limelight "during a frantic week in New York when world leaders gathered to discuss climate change and the security situation in Syria and Iraq," Radio Australia reports. Kalama Oka Aina Niheu, who is from Hawaii, told Radio Australia that the conference did not provide an avenue for indigenous peoples to voice their concerns about climate change and demilitarization because those issues were kept off that UN conference's agenda. The North American Indian Peoples caucus withdrew its support from the conference, she reports. As a result, she expressed a concern that the conference would be turned into an international version of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and "people who are going to be supported and uplifted in this process are going to be people who support extractive industries and who support mechanisms that actually disempower indigenous peoples," she said in the interview.

Lawyers for the Justice Department has moved to keep the public out of a court hearing on the practice of force feeding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, reports Politico's Josh Gerstein. Syrian Wa'el Dhiab has complained that the force-feeding procedures are too harsh.

The government's motion to seal the court hearing appears to be under seal too, Gerstein said. "'There is no reason to close the upcoming hearing, other than the government's intense desire to hide from public scrutiny the evidence we have managed to uncover over the past few months,' attorney Jon EIsenberg told POLITICO Saturday."