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With all the legal dramas on TV, why aren't there any reality series starring attorneys? The Snark takes a shot at working up a concept for "Big Law Bites," but knows such a show is unlikely, noting, "Sometimes truth isn't stranger than fiction. It's just less interesting."
The California Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt the latest blow to the state's effort to execute a condemned inmate. The court unanimously refused to accommodate the state's timeline for executing Albert Greenwood Brown by suspending its own rules or speeding up its process for reviewing how the prison system adopted new execution regulations. The ruling comes after a federal judge stayed Brown's execution on different grounds.
An assistant Brooklyn district attorney has tested whether participating in "the ultimate job interview" on Donald Trump's reality show "The Apprentice" is compatible with being a prosecutor. Apparently, it isn't. Mahsa Saeidi-Azcuy's decision to resign this week renders moot the question of whether District Attorney Charles J. Hynes would be compelled to borrow Trump's trademark tagline: "You're fired."
Judge Vaughn Walker announced Wednesday he will step down as chief judge of the Northern District of California at the end of the year and will leave the court in February. After two decades on the federal bench, Walker said he wants to return to the private sector. That means if the landmark same-sex marriage case tried before him earlier this year is remanded, it would go to a different judge. The case, in which Walker found the state's gay-marriage ban unconstitutional, is set to be argued at the 9th Circuit in December.
A former partner at one of New Jersey's most prominent law firms is accused of paying $192,000 to a state senator in exchange for legislation and other favors intended to benefit the attorney's land-developer clients. An indictment announced this week charges that Eric Wisler, while a partner at DeCotiis, FitzPatrick & Cole, made regular payments from 2004 through 2006 to Sen. Wayne Bryant, D-Camden, in return for Bryant's influence in the Legislature.
The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to address the First Amendment implications of banning animal "crush videos" -- a response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April that struck down as overbroad the federal Depiction of Animal Cruelty Act of 1999. The high court majority suggested in its ruling that a narrower statute, one limited to crush videos, might pass constitutional muster. The legislation would criminalize the creation, sale, distribution, advertising, marketing and exchange of animal crush videos.
Chief Justice John Roberts has sold his shares of Pfizer Inc., a move that allows him to participate in two pending Supreme Court cases involving the pharmaceutical maker. In the past, Roberts has not taken part in cases involving Pfizer because he owned less than $15,000 of the company's stock. Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg offered no explanation for Roberts' decision to sell the stock now, but it appears likely that Justice Elena Kagan's need to sit out the two cases played a role in Roberts' timing.
The American Bar Association is under fire from attorneys who argue that the organization should stop charging fees for access to its ethics opinions. An outcry erupted this week among practitioners who said that the ABA has a responsibility to the profession and the public to make all ethics opinions available for free online. "Let the ABA sell something else," said Carolyn Elefant, a solo practitioner in Washington, D.C.
A group of state judges, judicial hopefuls and an anti-abortion organization have taken their challenge to a broad range of restrictions on campaign speech by judicial candidates to the U.S. Supreme Court. A longtime foe of those restrictions, James Bopp Jr. of Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom, in Terre Haute, Ind., has filed two petitions for review arguing that more than half a dozen clauses in Indiana and Wisconsin judicial codes violate the First and 14th Amendments.
A Brooklyn, N.Y., judge has ruled that even though the only evidence linking a defendant to a burglary -- DNA on a screwdriver recovered from inside a burglarized movie theater -- is "wholly circumstantial," it is nonetheless sufficient to support an indictment. Acting Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Mark Dwyer distinguished the case from a recent New York Appellate Division decision that reversed a conviction for which the only evidence was DNA from a cigarette butt found outside a burglarized house.
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