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The controversial Second Amendment case that made headlines in July may be headed back to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia for an en banc review. The district’s attorney general has formally made a request for an en banc review of the decision holding the district’s restrictions on issuing concealed carry permits unconstitutional. The three judge panel that issued the ruling found that no level of scrutiny was even necessary to analyze the constitutionality of D....

Back in 2013, the FAA blissfully relaxed restrictions on when personal electronic devices (PEDs) could be used on airplanes. Prior to October 31, 2013, passengers had to wait until the plane was above 10,000 feet before using things like eBook readers and portable video game players. That all changed – because those rules weren’t grounded in reality – but the Association of Flight Attendants challenged the law. Last week, the D....

Petition for writ of mandate to have plaintiff reinstated to former position as a community college vice president denied, plus criminal, contracts & administrative law matters People v. Newton, B216215, concerned a challenge to the trial court’s finding true that defendant suffered two prior drug convictions in enhancing defendant’s sentence under section 11370.2(a), in a prosecution of defendant for drug related offenses. In affirming, the court held that the enhancement may be imposed even when execution of the sentence on the prior conviction was stayed under Penal Code section 654....

The storied NY law firm of Cravath Swain and Moore recently added the firm’s first Latina to its ranks of partners. It’s a career position that Damaris Hernandez probably did not envision when she first started her legal career. Her position is due thanks in part to the generosity and vision of Anthony and Beatrice Welters, founders of the AnBryce scholarship program that helped law students from backgrounds like Hernandez’s to reach their professional goals....

Much of law school is theoretical. Old cases used to explain general legal concepts shape a student’s understanding until the law student turns lawyer and gets a chance to practice. Here’s someone who decided to accelerate the process. Former beauty queen and law student Kumari Fulbright, has learned, albeit not too well, many legal concepts first hand. The Arizona law student made famous for her mugshot will see the concepts she learned in criminal law, evidence, remedies, and civil procedure come to life....

In a patent infringement action, district court order denying plaintiff’s motion for relief under Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b) is reversed where the joint stipulation between the parties was filed pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1) and therefore divested the court of jurisdiction to enter any subsequent orders. Read Garber v. Chicago Mercantile Exchange, No. 09-1047 Appellate InformationAppeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.Decided June 26, 2009 JudgesBefore MICHEL, Chief Judge, LOURIE and PROST, Circuit Judges....

Some lawyers get famous by getting into politics. Some lawyers get famous by representing other famous people, or as a result of high profile injuries. And, sometimes, prosecutors can find fame prosecuting the famous. Attorney Marcia Clark falls into that last camp, and if you didn’t know that, just pretend like you did, otherwise some of us are going to start feeling really old. Marcia has seen quite a bit of media attention over the last few years thanks to the recent shows about O....

Kyle D. Tucker graduated from Harvard Law School, but would have been a terrible lawyer. It’s not only that he murdered his mother, crushing her skull with a baseball bat and then burning her body in a fire pit. That pretty much sealed his fate as a horrible person. It’s that he confessed to the crime, and he wants to represent himself in his murder trial. Someplace in his tragic past, he didn’t get the basic concepts of criminal law and procedure....

Here’s the first “Bad Santa” story of the holiday season: A mall Santa has been accused of giving a little too much love to an elf. Herbert Jones was charged with groping an 18-year-old woman who played the elf, Reuters reports. Jones, 62, of Assonet, Massachusetts, has been released on $1,000 bail after pleading not guilty. He was ordered to stay away from the Hanover Mall, where the alleged incident occurred....

Very few people out there can earn a living off of poker–even if they dedicate 15 hours a day to computer play. But one New Mexico con-man thought that he could beat the odds, asking a judge to delay his sentencing so he could earn money to pay back his victims. His plan? Restitution by poker. Samuel McMaster Jr. pled guilty to 26 felony counts, including securities fraud and sale of a security by an unlicensed broker....

Video of a Tennessee man breaking into joyous dancing after making his last alimony payment to his former spouse has generated over 400,000 views since being uploaded to YouTube. Memphis resident Ed Smith marked the occasion of making his final spousal support payment to his former wife at a local bank with an array of dance moves all caught on video, reports the New York Daily News. Why was Smith so excited about making his final payment?...

A homeless drifter in Arizona was sentenced to two years in jail for skinning a cat and wearing the cat’s innards around his neck. Twenty-five-year-old Russell Christopher Hofstad said he had nowhere to go and had nothing to eat following his release from jail. So the homeless man broke into a warehouse and stabbed a poor cat with a stick. Hofstad skinned and gutted the cat and wore the cat’s tail and intestines around his neck on a rope, reports Reuters....

Here’s a free tip for drivers involved in DWI accidents: A toy truck does not a getaway car make. That’s silly advice, you say? Everyone knows that, you say? Well Jamie Jeanette Craft of Jonesboro, Arkansas, apparently didn’t know it when she tried to flee the scene of an alleged DWI crash. Or perhaps she did know but just couldn’t remember it at the time. Either way, she was busted when police quickly caught up with her....

You would think that, after decades of classification as an illegal Schedule I narcotic, marijuana plants would be pretty easily identifiable to law enforcement personnel. But it took three assault rifle-toting Buffalo Township police officers four hours to distinguish between some Cannabaceae, the cultivation of which is a felony under Pennsylvania state pot laws, and Malvaceae, the cultivation of which will result in some nice, trumpet-shaped flowers with five or more petals ranging from white, pink, and yellow to red, orange, peach, or even purple....

The Sayreville War Memorial High School football players implicated in the team’s hazing scandal will be tried as juveniles. Prosecutors announced on Monday that they have decided to try the seven Sayreville players charged with crimes in family court, reports The Star-Ledger. Prosecutors had been considering moving the criminal cases against the players to the adult criminal justice system using New Jersey’s judicial waiver rules. What does this decision mean for the players charged in connection with the hazing?...

From the feel-good files, here’s a special story about the most cheer-filled day in law school – graduation. Ieshia Champs is graduating magna cum laude from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. But that’s not it. The thing is Champs did it while raising five children. There is way more to the story, however, and everybody is cheering for her. “Sweeping the Internet” USA Today, CBS, and countless media picked up the story, but it was already “sweeping the internet....

Advanced Magnetic Closures, Inc. v. Rome Fastener Corp., No. 09-1102, concerned a patent infringement suit, related to patents for disclosing a magnetic snap fastener commonly used in women’s handbags. In affirming in part, the court held that the district court was correct in holding the ‘773 patent unenforceable as the plaintiff and its president attempted to defraud the PTO. The court also held that the district court did not err in finding that this case was an exceptional case under 35 U....

If you’re a lawyer who hasn’t heard of Justice Don Willett, Texas’s Twitter Laureate, then more likely than not, you’re not on Twitter. And, if you’re not on Twitter and are still thinking that the name sounds familiar, it is: Justice Willett was just nominated to the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Trump. And while Justice Willett has a rather different approach to Twitter than President Trump, it appears that the nomination has caused him to go radio silent on the social media platform....

Who, exactly, is the U.S. government, whom do they serve, and who will represent their interests in court? Those questions are brought into sharp relief when discussing Obamacare – or the Affordable Care Act – a landmark piece of legislation passed by Congress under the previous president, much to the chagrin of many in the Republican party. While the vast amount of Americans are pretty pleased with the expansion in health insurance coverage, Republican lawmakers have continued to attack the ACA, and the new Republican president has made sure his administration will not defend the law in court....

In the United States, we normally have a clear separation of powers: the legislative branch makes the laws, the judicial branch interprets them, and the executive branch enforces them. But every now and then, when one branch isn’t around to help, another has to step in. Or, in this case, run down. Absent any help from a court bailiff or sheriff’s officers, Judge R.W. Buzzard leapt from behind his bench during a court hearing, ripped off his judicial robe, and chased after two handcuffed inmates as they tried to make their escape....