Cultivated Compendium

Government officials in Ferguson, Mo, want to charge "nearly 10 times the costs of some of their own employees' salaries" before they will release records about the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, the Associated Press reports. The records could be released without charge under Missouri's Sunshine Act if officials determined that the materials were in the public interest, the AP reports. The AP notes that "price-gouging for government files is one way that local, state and federal agencies have responded to requests for potentially embarrassing information they may not want released."

The Legal Intelligencer's P.J. D'Annunzio and Hank Grezlak report on the latest judicial corruption scandal in Philadelphia: "The recent guilty plea of a Philadelphia Municipal Court judge to case-fixing charges and the suspension of two other judges, all occurring with the Philadelphia Traffic Court scandal still fresh in the public's mind, has seriously damaged the reputation of the Philadelphia judicial system, members of the legal community said."

Former Municipal Court Judge Joseph C. Waters Jr. has plead guilty to fixing cases for donors who contributed to his campaigns. Other Municipal Court judges allegedly are under federal investigation and the U.S. Attorney's Office is predicted to look at the entire court system.

The Federal Circuit, which has exclusive appellate jurisdiction over patents, has made patent law more favorable to patentholders, leading to a surge in litigation, Vox's Timothy B. Lee reports. The U.S. Supreme Court has been scrutinizing the intermediate appellate court more frequently, reviewing a record six rulings last term, Lee further reports: "In a new essay, University of California, Hastings law professor Robin Feldman writes about the Supreme Court's increasingly blunt efforts to force the Federal Circuit to respect the high court's own precedents, which generally place stricter limits on patent rights ... In all of [six] cases [from last term], Feldman told me, "the Supreme Court soundly and unanimously rejected the Federal Circuit's logic." For example, the Supreme Court struck down a software patent in CLS Bank v. Alice.

The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock reports the White House is preparing a policy to require federal agencies to publicly disclose where they fly drones domestically and what they do with the "torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance": "The presidential executive order would force the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to reveal more details about the size and surveillance capabilities of their growing drone fleets — information that until now has been largely kept under wraps." Whitlock notes that little is known about the scope of domestic drone use by the federal government.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a two lawsuits against companies in Michigan and Florida for allegedy discriminating against transgender employees, the Los Angeles Times reports: "Both lawsuits cite violations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which offers protections against sexual discrimination, in a move that marks the first time the federal government has used the law to protect transgender workers against private companies, according to the EEOC."

Two years ago, the EEOC ruled for the first time that discrimination against transgender employees is covered by the Civil Rights Act, the LA Times further reports.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, "the largest ride-sharing services are now facing a legal threat from regulators on their home turf, a new setback in their race to upend the multibillion-dollar taxi industry. The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles on Thursday accused Sidecar Inc. of violating California business law and threatened an injunction on its service following a joint investigation." Uber and Lyft also received similar letters. The issue with Sidecar is that it allegedly is misleading consumers about the thoroughness of its background checks on drivers' criminal records and driving records.

The Federal Aviation Administration's new $5 billion, air traffic control system does not take drones into account despite a legislative mandate from Congress, reports Adam Clark Estes in Gizmodo: "'We didn't understand the magnitude to which (drones) would be an oncoming tidal wave, something that must be dealt with, and quickly,' said Ed Bolton, the agency's assistant administrator for NextGen. But—and this is a big 'but'—Congress specifically ordered the FAA to take drones into account." Hardware and software for the new system have been installed without providing any support for regulating and monitoring drone traffic, and it may be too late to turn course, Estes adds.

"What a difference a year makes," writes Colum Lynch in Foreign Policy. In light of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's recent uptick in activity, including the beheadings of several Western journalists, "discussions about surveillance ... no longer fixate on the NSA's massive electronic spying that contractor Edward Snowden revealed when he leaked the spy agency's internal documents." Law professor Steve Vladeck told Foreign Policy that the effort to reform surveillance has been "'totally overtaken by ISIS.'"

Lynch was writing before the U.S. Security Council adopted a U.S. drafted-resolution to more widely suppress the travel and other activity of suspected jihadists. But his point was made even more strongly by the measure's enactment. Human Rights Watch's Andrea Prascow told Levant that the resolution does not detail how alleged jihadists and terrorists will be afforded due process regarding their right to travel.

The U.S. Supreme Court will be meeting in conference Monday to consider whether to take up the issue of same-sex marriage, writes U.S. News and World Report's Tierney Sneed: "The petitions come from four separate decisions out of three different U.S. Courts of Appeal on cases emanating from five different states."

Garrett Epps, a constitutional law professor, said the Supreme Court isn't likely to take up the issue until a circuit court of appeals upholds a ban on same-sex marriage, leading to a split among intermediate federal appellate courts.

Also at issue is whether bans should be rejected on equal protection or due process grounds: "Bans in Utah and Oklahoma, both overturned in separate decisions by the 10th Circuit, were decided on the basis of due process, meaning that denying gay couples the ability to wed deprives them of their fundamental right to marry. The 7th Circuit decision finding Indiana’s and Wisconsin’s same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional did so on the grounds of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, with the unanimous panel arguing that same-sex marriage bans discriminate against one’s sexual orientation. If the Supreme Court decides on a case that invokes the equal protection clause, how it interprets the 14th Amendment could affect judicial rulings on other questions of LGBT rights and discrimination."

The federal government will pay the Navajo Nation $554 million to settle claims that it mismanaged funds and natural resources on the Navajo reservation, according to the Wall Street Journal's Dan Frosch. It's highest-ever such settlement in a case about land the federal government held in trust for an American Indian tribe, according to the WSJ. The Obama administration has paid out more than $1 billion "during the past several years to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of tribes who have made similar claims regarding the chronic mismanagement of trust land and resources by the federal government," the WSJ further reports.