civil rights

Fusion's Daniel Rivero has an interesting profile on the attorneys who are taking on police brutality cases. Not only do they find the work rewarding but they also are finding the case work lucrative, Rivero reports.

An attorney at the National Bar Association's annual conference said there's been $300 million in legal fees generated from police-misconduct cases in the last five years.

Chicago attorney Antonio Romanucci told Rivero that more lawyers are looking at police brutality cases because there are more civilian recordings of police interactions. But Dallas-area attorney Daryl Washington told Fusion that the cases are '"a more specialized field than just your normal personal injury law, because you’re dealing with violations to the constitution, and these cases tend to be in federal court.'"

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that sex offenders can't be banned from living near parks and schools, The Boston Globe's Michael Levenson reports. The court said those restrictions are like the eras in American history in which American Indians were removed from their lands and Japanese Americans were interned during World War II: "'Except for the incarceration of persons under the criminal law and the civil commitment of mentally ill or dangerous persons, the days are long since past when whole communities of persons, such as Native Americans and Japanese-Americans, may be lawfully banished from our midst,' Justice Geraldine S. Hines wrote."

Daniel M. Filler, a Drexel University law professor, told Levenson that statewide rules restricting where sex offenders can live would pass constitutional muster. However, the problem is when muncipalities pass laws that force convicted sex offenders to move to another town.