Cultivated Compendium

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has taken up a sealed case to consider whether a lawyer for a nonprofit corporation can break her duty of confidentiality and disclose her concerns to the Attorney General's Office that charitable assets are being unlawfully diverted, The Legal Intelligencer's Lizzy McLellan reports. The anonymous petitioner said the public charity had a fiduciary duty to the public and the charity's lawyer was permitted to disclose the diversion of public charitable resources into private pockets to the attorney general.

Nonprofit practitioner Penina K. Lieber told The Legal that "'attorney-client privilege is not destroyed by the fact that you have a tax-exempt status,'" and the organization itself should approach the attorney general.

The Sixth Circuit has ruled that a congressman wasn't defamed when an anti-abortion advocacy group falsely tied his vote in support of Obamacare to supporting abortion, Courthouse News' Kevin Koeninger reports. Steven Driehaus, a pro-life Democrat, lost reelection, and he filed a complaint with the Ohio Election Commission, alleging that the Susan B. Anthony List group falsely advertised that his vote in support of Obamacare supported "taxpayer-funded abortion." Even if the SBA List's statements were actually false, the former politician couldn't prove that SBA List knew the statements were false or entertained serious doubts as to their truth, the Sixth Circuit ruled.

The current chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, a former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court and a former justice on the Montana Supreme Court have both come out against judicial elections in their states.

Kansas Chief Justice Lawton Nuss has come out against plans being considered by legislators to elect justices or have the governor appoint justices instead of keeping the state's 57-year-old merit selection system: "In Kansas, merit selection is a healthy competition that compares side by side the qualifications of numerous applicants. Their names and qualifications are made public, and the selection process itself is open for Kansans to see. Politics and its ever-increasing money play no role. But under the federal solution, only the name of the governor’s appointee is made known." He notes that voters get to directly play a role when voting on whether to retain justices.

In a piece published in the Montana Lawyer, former Montana Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson says that he has changed his mind about electing judges. The $1.63 million raised in the last election cycle for the Supreme Court shows that going forward judicial elections will be "characterized by huge expenditures of dark money, attack ads, misleading mail stuffers, and the involvement of out of state money and organizations," Nelson writes. He notes that the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling lifting limitations on campaign expenditures by PACs, unions and other groups encourages unqualified attorneys to run for seats on the judiciary because they can play to "out-of-state dark money folks." In addition to changing Montana's constitution to select judges through a merit selection system, Nelson would require attorneys to have a decade of experience practicing in Montana courts.

In a piece published in the Dallas Morning News in January, Wallace B. Jefferson, Texas' former chief justice, and Barbara Pariente, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, criticized the amount of special-interest funding being spent on judicial elections in the wake of the Citizens United ruling. They said judges should be selected by merit: "This method, used by 23 states to select their top judges, gives a nonpartisan commission the responsibility to evaluate the objective qualifications of judicial candidates and make recommendations to the governor for appointment. Some of these systems include retention elections, so that the voters can remove judges who have committed ethical improprieties."

Even though Internet providers are expected to challenge the new net neutrality rules in court, some companies may not go to court because they're seeking to get approval for their mergers, the Washington Post's Brian Fung reports. Comcast is trying to merge with Time Warner Cable, AT&T is trying to merge with DirecTV, and Verizon is trying to get approval for a deal with Frontier Communications.

The Appellate Division, First Department, has upheld the $8.5 billion settlement of claims against Bank of America for its involvement with the mortgage crisis, the New York Law Journal's Ben Bedell reports. The appellate panel reversed a lower court judge, who ruled that Bank of New York Mellon, which was the trustee for the pooled mortgage trusts, had abused its discretion in waiving claims that dissident investors said were worth $30 billion to $50 billion. Bank of New York Mellon agreed with the reasoning that investors should not try to force Bank of America to buy back mortgages it had modified.

A duel is being set up between the Utah Senate and the Utah House on how much to expand Medicaid, The Salt Lake Tribune's Kristen Moulton reports. A House committee voted down a plan backed by the governor and passed by the Senate. Instead, the House Business and Labor Committee passed a plan sponsored by the House majority leader that would cover 46,500 more people.

Federal Aviation Administration Michael Huerta testified in Congress Tuesday that his agency is seeking ways to speed up the approval process for commercial drones, Reuters reports. For example, the FAA is trying to address as a class similar applications from companies that are seeking exemptions from the current ban on commercial drone use. The FAA also finally released its proposed rules for integrating commercial drones into the American airspace last month, but the rulemaking could take nine months to three years to be finalized, Reuters also reports.

Earlier this month, regulations in Taiwan went into effect to give indigenous peoples intellectual property rights over their traditional cultural expression, including religious ceremonies and folk crafts, Focus Taiwan News Channel reports. For example, that Tao people on Orchid Island has applied to protect the "Flying Fish Festival, the launching ceremonies of Tao balangays, or 'big boats,' along with the various symbols and patterns on the boats, such as the fish-eye and human-shaped patterns." 

There are 530,000 indigenous people in Taiwan, making up 2 percent of that country's population.

The consensus about the latest Supreme Court case involving the Affordable Care Act is that the two key votes are Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The rest of the Supreme Court justices appeared to be split along ideological lines during oral arguments yesterday over whether the statutory language in the health law only allows federal subsidies to consumers who bought their health insurance through a state-run exchange, not the federal exchange.

The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports that Kennedy said there was a constitutional problem with the interpretation of Obamacare that states had to create their own exchanges or the federal government would "'send your insurance market into a death spiral'" by taking away their subsidies. That is coercive pressure that the federal government is not allowed to apply, Kennedy said. Barnes further reports that "Kennedy brought up the 'standard of constitutional avoidance.' That means that if there are two possible interpretations of a statute, judges should choose the one that is plainly constitutional instead of the one that raises constitutional questions."

Roberts, who was the swing vote in upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, did not ask any questions that provided insight into his leanings on the case, Barnes reports.

A ruling against the Obama administration would result in 7.5 million Americans losing their subsidies, Barnes also reports.

Colorado lawmakers have delayed a vote on legislation that would criminalize the use of drones and other surveillance technology to photograph or monitor people, the Associated Press reports. The legislation would make it a crime first-degree trespassing to take images of someone with a reasonable expectation of privacy. One legislator said the bill, as drafted, would be a "'teribbly sweeping criminalization of photography.'"

The sponsor asked for a delay in the vote on the bill in order to rework it.