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The Philadelphia Diversity Law Group Summer 1L Program, to be held in late July, will help introduce incoming students to what to expect at law school. But attorney Lois Kimbol, chair of the program, notes that lawyers can also stay alert for other opportunities to serve as mentors or advisers.
In an opinion that once again raises concerns about Georgia's shortage of funds for indigent capital defense, a divided state Supreme Court has sent a death penalty case back to the trial court to determine if a systemic breakdown in the state's public defender system deprived the defendant of counsel. Court records indicate that at least one of the defense attorneys has not been paid for the years he has spent on the case.
A federal judge in New Jersey declined last week to give final class certification to a suit by former Wal-Mart janitors over the labor practices of the world's largest retailer. The judge found that, because the 114 putative class members worked for a variety of contractors around the country, and not for Wal-Mart directly, they could not show they were "similarly situated" for class action purposes.
In finding the defendants not guilty on all counts, D.C. Superior Court
Judge Lynn Leibovitz said that, while prosecutors had provided
"powerful" evidence suggesting that one of the three either stabbed
Washington attorney Robert Wone or knows who did, the government failed
to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they intended to disrupt the
investigation into Wone's death. The judge said her focus on the
difference between "moral certainty" and "evidentiary certainty" is
probably "cold comfort" to those who loved Wone.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a lower court should not have dismissed a charge that an avowed white supremacist used his website to urge others to harm the foreman of a jury that convicted another white supremacist, Matthew Hale, of soliciting a federal judge's murder. The 7th Circuit said Monday that William White's Web post falls outside First Amendment protections.
A woman may be granted a civil order of protection against her "on-again, off-again" boyfriend for abusive behavior even though she has continued to live most of the time with her husband and daughter, a New York state appeals court has decided. A 2008 statute that "radically" expanded state law to apply to people in "intimate" relations with non-relatives was also designed to try to preserve family units whenever possible by protecting members from abuse, the panel ruled.
A federal appellate court has ruled against an adult entertainment company that sold streaming video from a Miami home where gay male models lived, finding the residence constituted a business and violated a city zoning ordinance. However, the case may not be lost for Miami-based Flava Works, operator of Cocodorm.com. The 11th Circuit sent the case back to a federal district court judge to consider constitutional claims.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation into Pequot Capital Management, the once-giant hedge fund, did not exactly go smoothly for the agency, and the saga reached a new low for the SEC on Tuesday: The agency has agreed to pay a former staff attorney, Gary Aguirre, $755,000 to settle his claims that the agency wrongly fired him in retaliation for his complaints that higher-ups were botching the Pequot case in 2005 and 2006.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new review of the convictions in the government corruption case against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and ex-HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy. The Court's brief order vacated the decision of the 11th Circuit, which had upheld their convictions, and ordered the lower court to review the appeals in light of a ruling that went against what is known as the "honest services" fraud law. Siegelman attorney Sam Heldman called the Court's decision Tuesday "a massive victory."
Plaintiffs challenging Proposition 8 may have found treasure in Monday's Supreme Court ruling on a San Francisco law school's discrimination policy. Lawyers for same-sex marriage proponents told the judge in the Prop 8 trial Tuesday that the majority in the high court ruling acknowledged that gays are a protected class. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who joined Justice Ruth Ginsburg's opinion in the case, is the crucial fifth vote that same-sex marriage plaintiffs are counting on, should the challenge to Prop 8 make it to D.C.
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