Federal appeals court issued a ruling Friday that temporarily blocked parts of an Alabama law requiring schools to check the immigration status of students but let stand a provision that allows police to detain immigrants that are suspected of being in the country illegally.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been courting high-powered GOP lawyers with gusto, as the National Law Journal reported in this July story. On Friday, his efforts were rewarded by endorsements from former attorneys general William Barr (formerly of counsel at Kirkland & Ellis) and Michael Mukasey (now at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP), former deputy attorneys general George. . .

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We reported yesterday that U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff is questioning why he should approve the SEC's proposed $285 million settlement of fraud charges against Citi over a mortgage-bond deal. Our colleague, Neal Lipschutz, writes the following dispatch from Point of View, a Dow Jones Newswires column.

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A federal appeals court dealt a losing hand Friday to a New York State poker club. The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments that the activities of AK Tournament Play, a defunct recreational poker club in Wallkill, N.Y., isn't protected assembly under the First Amendment.



The poker club had alleged that the town unsuccessfully tried to condemn a portion of the commercial space it occupied in 2007 and and engaged in additional “threatening and coercive conduct.” The club, which at one point had 130 members, discontinued its activities after its membership dwindled following the town’s conduct, according to the lawsuit.

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A quick bit of news from California: David Tamman, the former Nixon Peabody partner accused by the SEC of falsifying documents on behalf of client NewPoint Financial Services, has filed a lawsuit against his old firm.The lawsuit, reports Casey Sullivan of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, says Tamman was was "thrown under the bus" by Nixon Peabody partners after representing NewPoint, which the SEC charged in 2010 with defrauding investors. [No link available] Newpoint is fighting the lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles. Law Blog has a call out to a lawyer for the company...

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Law Blog rounds up the morning's news.

Can’t put lipstick on an SEC inquiry: The WSJ has more on the regulator’s probe into whether Avon Products may have improperly disclosed market-sensitive information to financial analysts in the past two years. A subpoena the company received earlier this month asks for information about private conversations between company officials and analysts at Citigroup. Avon chief executive Andrea Jung declined to comment.

Computer-access case, revisited: The Ninth Circuit has agreed to reconsider a 2-1 ruling issued in April that critics said made criminals out of workers who checked sports scores or personal email at work if their employer had policies banning such use. Politico

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Chief Judge Alex Kozinski admonished judged and lawyers in another colorful opinion Thursday.

oward Bashman, on his How Appealing blog, found this gem of an opinion by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, and now, LBers, we present it to you.

It begins:

The case is indeed weird. But bear with us.

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Lawmakers in Wisconsin are about to experience a growing trend in America firsthand.



Guns would be allowed on the floor of the Assembly and in its viewing galleries, but it would be up to individual lawmakers whether they’d be permitted in their offices, the Journal-Sentinel reported. A decision has not yet been reached about the floor and galleries of the state Senate.

The issue arises out of a concealed carry law that takes effect next week, which allows citizens with a permit and the appropriate training to have concealed weapons, as the Hudson Star-Observer reports. It is at the discretion of individual businesses whether to allow firearms on their premises.

The Walker administration’s plan would allow guns in most areas of the Capitol, but not the state Supreme Court hearing room, the Journal-Sentinel noted. The state law – which makes Wisconsin the 49th state with a concealed carry rule – prohibits weapons in courthouses. (Only Illinois has no corresponding law.)

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U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff in Manhattan, who has a history of challenging SEC settlements has questioned last week's $285 million deal between the regulator and Citi over allegedly misleading mortgage-bond sales.

Last week, the SEC said it had reached a pact in which Citigroup would pay $285 million to end civil-fraud charges related to a $1 billion mortgage-bond deal. But on Thursday, Judge Rakoff raised a few questions and has set a hearing Nov. 9. to discuss the deal.

In 2009, Judge Rakoff rejected a settlement between Bank of America and the SEC over the bank’s disclosures before its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

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Avon Products' three-year internal investigation of possible bribery by its employees has turned external.



The internal probe has uncovered millions of dollars of questionable payments to officials in China, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India and Japan that may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the WSJ reported in May.

The company said Thursday the Securities and Exchange Commission is formally investigating for possible FCPA violations.

Avon said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it was advised that “a formal order of investigation” was issued by the SEC relating to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act matters.”

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If you're interested finding the city in this country where your lawyer's salary can do the most damage, the National Association for Law Placement has a new index that's worth a glance.



Dallas ranked first in buying power, with a median salary of $150,000. Based on cost-of-living data, an associate in Dallas who makes $67,870 would have the same buying power as their counterpart in New York, NALP said.

What about, say, New York and D.C.? An associate working below the beltway has a strong advantage, if money is the sole criterion, the data show. You would have to hack off $57,000 from the D.C. associate’s median salary of $160,000 to bring down their buying power to that of a New York associate.

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Law Blog rounds up the morning's news.

Built with convictions: At the Southern Desert Correctional Center, inmates restore “very cool vintage cars” — a ’56 Jaguar, a ’48 Rolls Royce and a Studebaker pickup, for instance — in what may be the penal system’s most unusual workshop.

Massey, day 3: Massey Energy Co. security chief Hughie Elbert Stover was convicted Wednesday of obstructing a federal criminal investigation, and lying to federal investigators in connection with the probe into the 2010 explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 miners. The case was the first to come from the disaster.

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It's been a heady day, what with the Gupta indictment and PETA once again equating animals (this time, Killer Whales) with slaves. So let's wind down with some intellectual property news involving the world's most esteemed maker of red-soled women's shoes, Christian Louboutin.The French shoemaker gained a powerful ally yesterday in his trademark infringement case against Yves Saint Laurent. Why does he need help in the first place? Well, a federal judge in August denied Louboutin's bid for a preliminary injunction that would have prevented YSL from selling the red-soled shoes from its 2011 resort collection. . .

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The former president of Florida-based Terra Telecommunications Corp. was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in prison, the longest term ever handed down for violations of the FCPA.



Joel Esquenazi, the former president of Florida-based Terra Telecommunications Corp., was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in prison, the longest term ever handed down for violations of the FCPA, which bars bribery of foreign officials.

Esquenazi was convicted in August for his role in a scheme to bribe officials at Haiti’s state-owned telecom company. According to the Justice Department, he authorized nearly $1 million in illegal payments to Haitian officials, in a bid to secure better rates on minutes for his company, among other advantages.

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The Justice Department will have to prove that Gupta received some benefit in return for the information he allegedly gave Rajaratnam, but it need not have been direct or financial in nature.

Jonathan S. Sack, a partner at Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer PC, said the Justice Department will have to prove that Gupta received some benefit in return for the information but that it need not have been direct or financial in nature. He pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in Dirks v. SEC in which it held:

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SDNY and the SEC just blasted out a six-count indictment and a civil complaint, respectively, accusing Rajat Gupta of engaging in an insider trading scheme with Raj Rajaratnam. While Law Blog picks through them, have a look for yourself.

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If one were to make a short -- very short -- list of New York white-collar defense lawyers one might want to call when faced with, say, extremely high-profile insider-trading charges, who would it include?

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Former Goldman director and McKinsey chief Rajat K. Gupta surrendered this morning to the FBI on insider trading charges.



Gupta, (pictured right) who for decades was the face of business success, surrendered to the FBI on criminal charges of leaking inside information to Galleon Group hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, people familiar with the matter tell the Journal.

Since late 2009, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged 55 individuals with insider trading, resulting in 51 convictions or guilty pleas. As our colleague Michael Rothfeld reports, authorities are in hot pursuit of what would be, by far, their biggest catch yet.

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Over at WSJ's Corruption Currents, we wrote a quick post today on forfeiture complaints filed by the Justice Department against a mansion and assorted playthings belonging to Equatorial Guinea’s agriculture minister, who U.S. prosecutors say amassed a fortune through theft of his country’s resource wealth. The minister, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, is the son of Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who came to power in the Middle African country of about 668,000 in a 1979 coup. A spokesman for the government and the minister said they were "deeply concerned" about the civil suit but that there has been no wrongdoing. . .

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Darla Stillwell and Robin Briggs were stopped by Marysville Police in May, 2009 while driving through downtown Marysville, California. The stated reason for the stop was that the rear license plate on their pick up truck was blocked by the bumper.

When one of the officers spoke to Briggs, the officer noticed Briggs’ eyes were glassy and his pupils were fixed and not reacting to light. Briggs explained that he had taken methadone earlier in the day.

Another officer then arrived at the scene with a police narcotic detection dog, Tommy. That officer then asked Briggs if he could take a look inside the truck. Briggs said no.

The officer handling Tommy then asked Briggs if his dog could check the exterior of the truck and Briggs consented.

Tommy was trained, qualified and current in his annual qualification to detect the odors of cocaine base, cocaine powder, methamphetamines, marijuana and heroin.

Tommy was then led around Briggs’ truck. As he got to the rear of the truck, he jumped up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the side of the truck. He then sniffed at a small backpack in the bed of the truck. Tommy then sat down and gave his handler the signal that he smelled something in the pick up truck.

The handler then looked into the backpack and found chemical bottles, a 500 milliliter glass beaker, a metal can of xylene, denatured alcohol and several white pills that officers believed might contain ephedrine. The handler did not find cocaine base, cocaine powder, methamphetamines, marijuana or heroin, however, the officer recognized the materials as parts of a meth lab.

The officer then obtained a search warrant to search Briggs’ and Stillwell’s residence, where they found numerous additional items used in a meth lab, as well as a syringe filled with heroin.

Briggs and Stillwell moved to suppress all evidence obtained from Tommy’s signal that he smelled something of interest based on the prosecution failing to establish Tommy was a reliable narcotics detection dog and that the dog’s signal did not establish probable cause for the warrantless search of the backpack. The trial court denied the motion.

Defendants appealed to the Third Appellate District. In People v Stillwell (2011 DJDAR 11132), the Court affirmed the trial court’s ruling. In ruling on the reliability of Tommy, the Court pointed out that the backpack was never tested for the presence of those drugs that Tommy was qualified to detect, so such drugs actually may have been present. Moreover, even if there were an error by Tommy in signaling for narcotics that actually were not there, “a single error does not make Tommy unreliable.”

As to Tommy’s signal to his handler establishing probable cause to search, the Court took a different angle, explaining that because the backpack was in an automobile, the automobile exception to the warrant requirement applied and the warrantless search was not unconstitutional.

If you are charged in with possession of illegal drugs, do not trust your defense to an inexperienced lawyer who may not understand the current state of the law. Greg Hill is an attorney in Torrance, California. He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (B.S., 1987), Boston University graduate (M.B.A., 1994) and Loyola Law School graduate (J.D., 1998). Greg Hill & Associates represents clients in Torrance, Long Beach and the surrounding areas in federal drug matters, as well as DUI, domestic violence and restraining orders, among other crimes. Visit the firm’s website at Torrance Criminal Defense Lawyer - Long Beach, California Criminal Attorney - San Pedro Crime Lawyer or the firm’s Facebook page at Greg Hill & Associates - Legal/Law - Torrance, CA | Facebook.