My original reporting on legal events and trends:
Reporting
Reporting
September 24th, 2013
Leading First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that if leaker Edward Snowden is ever brought into a criminal court in the United States, a lawyer for Snowden might very well persuade a jury that his disclosure of the level of surveillance conducted on the American citizenry was in the public interest.
"If Mr. Snowden comes home some day, we'll have some interesting cases involving him," Abrams said during a talk given at... Continue Reading
September 23rd, 2013
There is a presumptive right under the First Amendment to have access to civil contempt proceedings, the Second Circuit ruled today.
Circuit Court Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing also for Judges Susan L. Carney and Raymond J. Lohier Jr. on the civil contempt proceedings issue, said the U.S. District Judge Arthur D. Spatt of the Eastern District of New York erred when concluding the First Amendment right for the public to have access to a... Continue Reading
September 21st, 2013
Here is the piece I wrote for the Stamford Advocate about a local church starting an unconventional Sunday service at a local BBQ joint:
"Great barbecue can seem like a religious pastime in America.
But a local church is taking it to the next level by holding a Sunday service in the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que joint in Stamford.
This Sunday at 10 a.m., nondenominational Black Rock Congregational Church's Long Ridge branch... Continue Reading
September 12th, 2013
After a four-year process, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill today that would establish a federal shield law for reporters so that they would have a legal privilege to not have to reveal their confidential sources in most circumstances. The bill passed out of committee after months of uproar that the Justice Department monitored journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News and after another huge national-security leak was... Continue Reading
September 12th, 2013
On the agenda this morning for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is the federal shield law, otherwise known as the Free Flow of Information Act of 2013. There will be a live webcast of the meeting at 10 a.m.: http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=6225bf1b82d2592b...
Some in the media community say that the bill needs to be amended drastically because it would only shield journalists working for institutional players for... Continue Reading
September 11th, 2013
(The Legal Intelligencer- second of two-part series on The Future of Long-Term Care Litigation)
While health care headlines focus on the implementation of Obamacare's individual mandate and establishment of insurance exchanges, the landmark legislation also is going to affect long-term care for older Americans.
Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing facilities must have had compliance and ethics programs in place by March, but... Continue Reading
September 11th, 2013
The Legal Intelligencer
Amaris Elliott-Engel
(first of two-part series on The Future of Long-Term Care Litigation)
When Rhonda Hill Wilson started representing clients in the field of long-term care litigation, there was not a lot of interest in representing elder Pennsylvanians for the torts they might have been wronged by.
Damages were only thought of in an "economic sense," said Wilson, of the Law Offices of Rhonda... Continue Reading
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