Cultivated Compendium

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, Indian Country Today Media Network's Rick Kearns reports. The law allows American Indians to repatriate ancestral remains, burial objects and other sacred ceremonial objects from the archives of museums.

There may be as many as one million indigenous ancestral remains and cultural objects internationally, the director of the Association on American Indian Affairs’ (AAIA) International Repatriation Project estimates. The right to ancestral remains and cultural objects also has been recognized by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
 

Virginia Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe once again suggested Virginia expand Medicaid in his latest budget proposal, but House Republican leaders immediately rejected the plan, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. The plan would have used a tax on hospital revenues to generate Virginia's share of the costs of the expansion.

An Arkansas legislative task force has backed Gov. Asa Hutchinson's efforts to get federal waivers from some rules for Medicaid, The Times Record's John Lyon reports.

Hutchinson wants waivers like requiring people with incomes of 100 to 138 percent of the federal poverty level to pay premiums and referring "unemployed, able-bodied beneficiaries" to work training before he would agree to maintain the Medicaid expansion that provides health insurance to more low-income Arkansas citizens.

The current Medicaid waiver that allows federal dollars to subsidize private health insurance is going to expire at the end of 2016.

Koch Industries, the funding powerhouse behind many conservative causes, and President Barack Obama's administration are continuing to push for criminal reform, The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reports. Both sides have agreed that a proposed change to white-collar prosecutions should be jettisoned if it will imperil sentencing reform in Congress.

The change would require prosecutors to prove that defendants "'knew or had reason to believe the conduct was unlawful'" in cases like corporate pollution or food tainting.

But the change to the mens rea standard is not in the Senate version of the sentencing-reform bill, and Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden said having mens rea reform would not impede the Koch brothers supporting the package.

The U.S. Supreme Court, 6-3, has rejected another class action. This time, the majority of the court ruled this week that a class action cannot proceed against DirecTV over early-termination fees because those fees have to handled by private arbitration, The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, struck down a California law that makes class-action bans in contracts unenforceable.

Barnes further notes the ruling continues the trend of strengthening the authority of companies to channel consumer complaints into arbitration.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed a bill that would have required government agencies to obey a 90-day limit to appeal court decisions in favor of people requesting information under New York's Freedom of Information Law, The New York Times' Jesse McKinley reports. However, the governor issued an executive order that essentially reversed his veto of the bill, setting a 60-day window for a legal response by government agencies except for "'extremely complex matters or extraordinary circumstances outside agency control.'"

Cuomo also vetoed a bill that would have allowed courts to order legal fees in favor of people who request information

Delaware Attorney General Matt Denn is close to issuing guidelines that would suggest that police interrogations--from start to finish-- be recorded, The News Journal's Jessica Masulli Reyes reports. The reason for the move is because advocates say recording interrogations helps avoid false confessions.

Advocates also said the guidelines should be made mandatory by stating prosecutors wouldn't use statements obtained from non-recorded interrogations. Denn said law enforcement would be incentivized to follow the guidelines because "'adhering to this policy increases the odds we could successfully prosecute a case."'

James Beck, a defense lawyer with Reed Smith, blogged on Friday about the first time that an appellate court has held that a claim that a brand-name manufacturer were negligent in the design of its drugs has been preempted because it would be impossible for the drug company to comply both with federal regulations and state tort law.

It's the first appellate authority to recognize impossibility preemption of a design defect case against a brand-name manufacturer since the U.S. Supreme Court issud its ruling in Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett two years ago, Beck says.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that it would have been impossible for Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals to come up with an alternative design for one of its birth control patches either before it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration or after it was approved. The appeals court also rejected the argument that Ortho could have complied with state tort law by never starting to sell its birth control patch.

Small-scale breaches of patients' medical privacy are going unpunished because officials at the federal office for Civil Rights focus on voluntary compliance as the remedy, ProPublica's Charles Ornstein reports. Many people also cannot turn to their own lawsuits for redress. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act doesn't allow for a private cause of action, and states vary on how much protection tort law provides for medical privacy.

Indiana courts have ruled that healthcare providers are liable for employees who snoop in medical records, but courts in Ohio, Minnesota and New York, as well as other states, have rejected those types of claims, Ornstein reports.

Small-scale breaches of medical privacy can cause the most harm, Ornstein reports. For example, an employee at a New Jersey hospital disclosed that an 11-year-old boy had attempted suicde. The revelation caused him to be bullied at his school, Ornstein reports. In another example, a dental assistant had a former friend post on Facebook that she had the STD human papillomavirus.

The historic climate change deal by 196 governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions almost wasn't because of one misplaced word, Politico's Andrew Restuccia reports.

On Saturday, lawyers for President Barack Obama's administration found that the text of the agreement had been changed from saying that wealthier countries "should" set economy-wide targets for cutting greenhouse gases to "shall" set such targets. As Restuccia notes, "in the lingo of U.N. climate agreements, 'shall' implies legal obligation and 'should' does not." If the draft stayed with the "shall" obligaton, the accord would have had to go to the Republican-controlled Senate for approval--and probable, inevitable defeat. The concern was that reopening the text would swamp the entire effort, Restuccia reports, but the French hosts of the climate-change summit agreed to change the wording amid a package of technical revisions.