Posts

Some people will go to great lengths to pass a drug test. For example, Kevin Manuel Duron, 18, was arrested after he entered an elementary school campus and allegedly offered to pay a third-grader for his urine. According to the Daily Breeze, he was charged with two misdemeanors for entering a Manhattan Beach school campus to collect urine from boys in the restroom. The Breeze reports that, school officials confronted Duron and he told them he was on campus to give his little brother lunch money....

Relatives of a living man who was legally declared dead have been told they must pay back the benefits they received from his “death.” Donald Miller Jr. was declared legally dead in 1994 and again in 2013, but the 62-year-old Ohio resident is still very much alive. According to The Courier of Findlay, once the Social Security Administration learned of Miller’s not-so-dead status, it demanded repayment of death benefits paid to his children, totaling more than $47,000....

A New Jersey judge dismissed domestic violence charges against former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, following his completion of a pretrial intervention program. The charges stemmed from a brutal attack on his wife Janay in an Atlantic City casino elevator in February 2014. Graphic video of the incident surfaced last September. Pretrial Interception Pretrial intervention programs, also known as diversion or deferred adjudication, are fairly common for low-level offenses. Normally, the person charged must complete some combination of fines, community service, or treatment program in exchange for having criminal charges dropped....

Anti-sports betting laws have often seemed inconsistent. Why can I wager on a game in Las Vegas, but not in Los Angeles? Betting on baseball is cool on one side of Lake Tahoe, but not the other? A federal gambling statute provided a loophole for Nevada that it denied other states, and some of those states, mainly New Jersey, weren’t too happy about that disparate treatment. And the Supreme Court agreed, striking down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act and paving the way for states to decide whether they want to legalize sports betting....

Would you let someone punch you in the face for $5? And, if you did, do you think you’d die from that one hit? Tiffany Startz’s trial is for just that - the one-punch death of rapper John Powell, 25, spurred on by a $5 bet. Startz, 21, was attending a party in commemoration of a woman who had killed herself. Another party-goer, Jimmy Mounts, 27, started a party game - $5 to anyone who would let Startz punch them in the face, reports the Chicago Tribune....

Lt. John Pike. Just days ago he was a regular cop at the University of California, Davis. Now? He’s the subject of an Internet meme. Pike got the nickname the UC Davis “pepper spray cop” on Friday when video surfaced of a protest in the university’s quad. Clad in riot gear, Pike walks down a line of protesters, casually dousing them with pepper spray. Whether in solidarity with the Occupy protesters, or amusement at police antics, images of Lt....

Okay, so it’s a fictional TV show about a fictional amusement park with fictional characters. But it’s a really cool show, and one that has the tendency to make lawyers yell at the screen. Even in a fictional world where characters are told there are no laws, viewers may wonder how legal liability might play out in real life. Well, HBO knows their audience well. A quick Google search will bring you to a Westworld website designed to make the TV show look real....

How’s the legal market doing? Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession released a report Tuesday entitled “Report on the State of the Legal Market” in conjunction with Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor. (FindLaw is also part of Thomson Reuters.) To put it bluntly, things aren’t good for the old guard. The traditional law firm model seems to be working for the toniest of the tony firms, but that’s only because they make so much money....

Summer is coming to an end, you just got back from backpacking across Europe and Asia and you’re getting ready for your first year of law school. With so much going on, the last thing on your mind is what you should wear to law school. Which is precisely why you should be thinking about it now. On the first day, when the alarm goes off the last thing you want to do is start rummaging through your closet figuring out what to wear....

A song so popular it spawned a hilarious guitar store backlash may have been stolen, according to a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania. The heirs of Randy Craig Wolfe, a.k.a. Randy California, claim he wrote the iconic opening riff to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and are seeking damages, profits from the song, and some money set aside for musical instruments for needy children. The case is going to trial in a couple weeks, so here’s what you need to know about the battle for one of the biggest songs in rock history....

The D.C. Circuit decided four petitions for review of agency decisions, one civil procedure matter, one criminal case and one ERISA matter. Elliott v. US Dept. of Agric., No. 07-5385, was an action under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture to disclose blueprints to buildings located on an agricultural research campus. The court of appeals affirmed summary judgment for defendant, holding that the information sought constituted matters “related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency” under FOIA Exemption 2....

In July, a California woman filed a lawsuit against Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, claiming his black dog charged at her and her yellow lab, knocked her into traffic, and caused physical, mental, and emotional pain, worry, and anxiety. Last week, Trebek filed his response, answering the plaintiff’s bark with plenty of legal bite. Trebek denied any liability for the woman’s injuries, and instead claimed she “placed herself in a position of danger … and thereby assumed all the risks....

This is not a script for a disaster movie; it’s just a script for disaster. According to the California Judicial Council’s Court Facilities Advisory Committee, scores of courthouses pose a high or very high risk of falling apart in an earthquake. More than 140 courts are seismically unsafe, the committee reported. Glendale Superior and Municipal Courthouse is the least safe, according to the report, followed by Alameda County Administration Building, which houses civil courts....

In an action alleging that the arbitration provisions of the State Contract Act were unconstitutional, dismissal of the complaint is affirmed where those provisions provided assurance that an arbitrator who ultimately presides over a public works arbitration hearing will be neutral and acceptable to both parties. Read Coffman Specialties, Inc. v. Dept. of Transp., No. D053134 Appellate Information Filed August 19, 2009 Judges Opinion by Judge Haller Counsel For Appellant:...

A pregnant teenager illegally entered the United States and sought an abortion. But federal authorities in Texas detained her and denied her access to abortion services. Two months later – and 15 weeks pregnant – a federal appeals court has granted her plea. “Surely the mere act of entry into the United States without documentation does not mean that an immigrant’s body is no longer her or his own,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote in Garza v....

This may not be news to you, or to us, but unpaid internships are illegal in nearly all cases. If you are working for a firm, and they are deriving a benefit from your work, you need to be paid. The ABA, however, sought clarification from the Department of Labor on one narrow set of circumstances: internships with for-profit firms where the intern handles pro bono matters exclusively. Here are the major takeaways from the DOL’s full response:...

Less than a year after Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told daily fantasy sites DraftKings and FanDuel he wanted New Yorkers’ losing bets back, and less than six months after the state legislature approved a bill that would legalize and regulate daily fantasy sites, the state of New York and the two major daily fantasy players have settled a lawsuit for $12 million. But this lawsuit wasn’t about violations of the Empire State’s gambling and gaming laws – it was about misleading ads DraftKings and FanDuel were running....

Gaujacq v. EDF, Inc., 08-7097, involved a gender discrimination action under Title VII. The court of appeals affirmed summary judgment for defendant in part, holding that 1) no reasonable jury could find that the nondiscriminatory business reasons given by defendant to explain company actions relating to appellant’s employment were a pretext for gender-based discrimination; and 2) the district court correctly found that any differential in pay between appellant and a coworker was based on factors other than sex....

Former WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Chamique Holdsclaw was arrested after being accused of assaulting her ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Lacy. Holdsclaw, one of the greatest female basketball players of all time, allegedly shot a gun into Lacy’s car and used a baseball bat to break her car windows, reports Fox News. Lacy currently plays for the WNBA’s Tulsa Shock. She and Holdsclaw both played for the Atlanta Dream in 2009....

When someone votes by mail or submits a provisional ballot, they sign the ballot as well as an affidavit. Election officials will compare those signatures to see if they match, and, if not, reject the ballot. The problem is that voters are left with little recourse if their ballot is rejected. New Hampshire’s signature mismatch law was ruled unconstitutional just a few months ago. And this week, among a recount for both its governorship and one senate seat, a Florida judge ruled that state residents who had ballots rejected have until tomorrow (Saturday) to validate those ballots....