Cultivated Compendium is my personal website with the occasional link to my reporting and to important, cutting-edge or interesting legal news.
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News and Reporting
March 16th, 2016
The U.S. military has proposed historic changes to its justice system in the wake of concerns about the sexual assault of service members, ProPublica's T. Christian Miller reports. However, the proposed reforms don't address the power of senior commanders to decide whether to press charges, select juries and to vacate court martial convictions.
The changes would include the issuance of sentencing guidelines for... Continue Reading
March 15th, 2016
Reuters' Julia Edwards reports that President Barack Obama is likely to pick one of two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. His selection has come down to Judge Sri Srinivasan, who, if confirmed, would be the first Asian American to serve on the nation's highest court, or Judge Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit.
The announcement is expected as... Continue Reading
March 15th, 2016
For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come out against doctors prescribing highly addictive opioid painkillers, The Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian and Lenny Bernstein report.
The nonbinding guidelines from the federal government recommend that doctors prescribe alternative courses of treatment before resorting to opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain. The guidelines have been developed in... Continue Reading
March 15th, 2016
President Barack Obama would sign a Freedom of Information Act reform bill that has passed the U.S. Senate, Politico's Josh Gerstein reports. The bill "calls for a centralized portal to request records from all government agencies and writes into the law a presumption of openness that the Obama Administration adopted by executive order when he took office in 2009," Gerstein reports. Freedom of information advocates have been... Continue Reading
March 2nd, 2016
An Alaska judge has ruled that state's governor had the authority to expand Medicaid, without legislative approval, to cover people between the ages of 19 and 64 who are not caring for dependent children, not disabled and not pregnant, and who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, The Associated Press' Becky Bohrer reports.
Legislators argued that the group is not a mandatory group to be covered... Continue Reading
March 2nd, 2016
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments earlier this week on whether former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille violated constitutional law when he ruled on a death penalty case in which he had been involved as a prosecutor, Philly.com's Jeremy Roebuck and Jonathan Tamari reports.
Castille, when he was the Philadelphia district attorney, authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty against ... Continue Reading
February 23rd, 2016
U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has ruled that citizens don't have a First Amendment right to film police officers "absent a challenge to their conduct," The Legal Intelligencer's Gina Passarella reports. The issue is one of first impression and involves citizens whose cellphones were confiscated after they were filming or photographing police activity. One woman was a legal... Continue Reading
February 22nd, 2016
The California Supreme Court has ruled that a homeowner who lost her home to foreclosure can challenge the defective transfer of ownership of her mortgage, The Intercept's David Dayen reports. The court held that "'a homeowner who has been foreclosed on by one with no right to do so has suffered an injurious invasion of his or her legal rights at the foreclosing entity’s hands."'
The homeowner'... Continue Reading
February 22nd, 2016
The Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled that judicial candidates can identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats, but identifying themselves as conservative or liberal "runs afoul of rules to keep politics out of judicial campaigns," The Associated Press' Bruce Schreiner reports.
The court majority further said that a judicial candidate's declaration that he or she is a liberal or a conservative violates the state... Continue Reading
February 22nd, 2016
The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that a law firm submitted too broad of a records request for data about residences where children were found to have elevated levels of lead in their bodies, the Associated Press' Andrew Welsh-Huggins reports.
The court ruled that Lipson O'Shea Legal Group's public records request was too specific and the Board of Health couldn't comply with the request without revealing the identity of the... Continue Reading
February 21st, 2016
How do you overcome the ax murderer taking care of Grandma problem?
Lawyer Peter H. “Tad” LeVan knows a thing or two about that.
A few weeks ago, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, sitting en banc, ruled that the state's ban on former convicts working in elder care was unconstitutional.
LeVan gave me a recent interview about this litigation. It started with a challenge to the law's constitutionality on an... Continue Reading
February 21st, 2016
Wyoming legislators have rejected the expansion of Medicaid to 20,000 low-income Wyomingites, The Wyoming Tribune Eagle's James Chilton reports. Most legislators continued their opposition to the expansion, but Sen. Tony Ross, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, changed his mind "having looked at the potential savings and compared them to the state’s massive looming budget shortfalls." However, not... Continue Reading
February 20th, 2016
The International Business Times' Cole Stangler reports that 31 states in the U.S. don't have any legal protections for LGBT employees from being fired by their bosses. And things aren't getting better. "Less than a year after same-sex couples won marriage rights at the Supreme Court, and as public opinion becomes increasingly gay-friendly, efforts to extend workplace discrimination laws to LGBT people are struggling... Continue Reading
February 20th, 2016
The Washington Post's Sari Horwitz has an in-depth profile of the impact of Kansas' voting identification law, which is disenfranchising citizens who don't have documents to prove they are citizens. One veteran was purged from voter rolls even though he served in the U.S. military, pays taxes and owns a home.
"There is a battle unfolding in Kansas over who can register to vote in the first place. Election-law experts say... Continue Reading
February 11th, 2016
A divided American Bar Association has passed a resolution to create model rules for states that want to license non-lawyers to provide legal services. On one hand, the measure would allow more states to follow the lead of Washington and Utah in allowing non-attorneys to help pro se litigants in some types of matters and in trying to close the access to justice gap. On the other hand, some lawyers, including the leaders of the ABA's Solo,... Continue Reading
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