Two advocacy groups suing the Los Angeles Police Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department for access to data from automated license plate readers have won a chance to argue before the California Supreme Court.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation took the two departments to court in 2013 in an attempt to get one week’s worth of data that shows how officers use the technology.
Federal Appeals Court questions state senator’s order to remove a dissident from the Senate Building.
Salvador Reza, a member of a community group focused on protecting migrant workers, attended an Arizona Senate session during a legislative hearing on a controversial immigration-related bill. Reza and some of his supporters were seated in an overflow room, and both supporters and opponents of the measure applauded and booed during the hearing. Near the end of the hearing, Sen. Russell Pearce, the Senate president, claimed the noise from the overflow room was interfering with the hearing. An officer was sent to silence the audience, but Reza refused. When the officer threatened to arrest the disrupters, they clapped louder. This was repeated when the sergeant-at-arms entered the overflow room. When the hearing concluded, Pearce asked an officer to identify the noisy protestors and ordered that they be denied future access to the building.
A delighted Michael Jordan said “it was never about the money” after a federal jury ordered the owners of the defunct supermarket chain Dominick’s to pay him $8.9 million for using his identity without permission in an advertisement.
Beaming outside the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse moments after the verdict was announced, the basketball legend added that he would give the award to charities in Chicago. “It was all just about protecting my name and my likeness,” he said.
A federal judge said that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s unique email arrangement violated government policy and prodded the department to talk with the FBI to determine what documents can be recovered from the computer server and flash drives used to store her emails.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan was surprised that the State Department hadn’t made that request and poked at the administration’s claim that the FBI needed to be left alone to conduct its investigation. He gave the agencies 30 days to figure out whether emails can be recovered.
Will a recent Supreme Court decision involving signs unleash more speech than Americans can handle? In a recent New York Times article on what reporter Adam Liptak (rightly) refers to as “the sleeper case of the last Supreme Court term,” Liptak spoke with Robert Post, First Amendment scholar and dean of Yale Law School, and Floyd Abrams, constitutional lawyer and free-speech advocate, about Reed v. Town of Gilbert. In Reed, the Court invalidated a town sign code that treated signs promoting church services more harshly than signs promoting other messages, and made plain that such content-based restrictions on speech must undergo strict judicial scrutiny. Abrams praised the decision; Dean Post, according to Liptak, predicted that it will “endanger “all sorts of laws,” “roll consumer protection back to the 19th century,” and “destabilize First Amendment law.”
Google has been ordered by European authorities to remove links to news stories about the fact that Google was ordered by European authorities to remove links to news stories.
The Michigan Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court’s ruling that compels the Michigan State University Police Department to release public records involving MSU athletes to ESPN.
ESPN filed a public records request in September 2014 seeking incident reports involving Spartan football and men’s basketball players from 2009-2014. The university released certain records but removed the names and identifying information about suspects, victims and witnesses, citing privacy laws.
After nearly four decades as a lawyer and 30 years teaching would-be lawyers, and after writing a leading textbook on constitutional law and helping establish a law school, and after standing before the justices five times on behalf of his clients, Erwin Chemerinsky has fallen out of love with the Supreme Court.
Hard.
His break-up note runs for 342 pages and is called “The Case Against the Supreme Court.” The book makes its regretful message clear at the very beginning:
“We should realize that this is an emperor that truly has no clothes. For too long, we have treated the Court is if they are the high priests of the law, or at least as if they are the smartest and best lawyers in society.”
Americans should be more concerned about their privacy being invaded by the spread of drones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an Oklahoma City audience.
Speaking before a group of faculty members and students at Oklahoma City University’s law school on Sept. 11, Justice Sotomayor said “frightening” changes in surveillance technology should encourage citizens to take a more active role in the privacy debate. She said she’s particularly troubled by the potential for commercial and government drones to compromise personal privacy.
In one of the most high-profile criminal trials in Colorado history, the state is seeking the death penalty against suspected Aurora theater shooter James Holmes.
That should be reason enough for cameras to be allowed in the courtroom — to record every statement and allow scrutiny of the process that could result in the state putting someone to death.
The Press and The Bench 