After the election, Sarah Palin writes, she found herself “inundated with frivolous ethics complaints” that would require enormous time and energy to address.

Worse still, she writes, the media began to treat her in a tabloid fashion, rather than reporting actual news. Lawsuits and legal bills began to mount, and all in all her family began to take what she describes as a “beating.”

The irony is that she’d assumed that once the election was over, she would “go back to the job I loved. But what a difference ten weeks can make. Before my plane even touched down in Anchorage, shocking character assassinations of those I love had begun.”

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Palin’s Book: Lawsuits and Legal Bills - Washington Wire - WSJ



Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin prepares to launch a media tour to promote her new memoir "Going Rogue." As Jeff Glor reports, some media watchers are questioning her motives.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the father of a girl killed in an alleged drunk driving crash protested the possible watering down of Leandra's Law.

They held a rally outside Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's office in Downtown Manhattan.

The bill would make it a felony to drive drunk with children in the car.

The measure is stalled in Albany because the State Assembly wants accused drivers to face felony charges only if they have a blood alcohol content of point 0.18, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08.

Leandra's Law is named after 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who was killed last month in an alleged drunk driving crash.

The fight over a proposed same-sex marriage law here heated up this week as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said that if the law passed, the church would cut its social service programs that help residents with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, which has the mayor’s support and is expected to pass next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform same-sex weddings or make space available for them.

But officials from the archdiocese said they feared the law might require them to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples. As a result, they said, the archdiocese would have to abandon its contracts with the city if the law passed.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13marriage.html

Gosselin counter sues for $5 mil over child labor laws

Jon Gosselin has filed a counter law suit against TLC network, stating that they violated child labor laws when filming the reality TV show.

The suit is asking for $5 million plus in damages.

In the court filing, Gosselin wrote, "I do not believe we were paid a fair amount for the overreaching and overly restrictive contract. My family was initially paid $2,000 per episode for all ten members of my family and the use of my family home for filming."

Gosselin's attorney, Mark Jay Heller, has said that the network failed to get child work permits which outlines how long a child can work and how much they should be paid.

It asks exemptions for collectors, competitive shooters, wholesalers, and retailers. The law goes into effect Jan. 1.

New Jersey should create several exceptions to the one-handgun-a-month law that goes into effect Jan. 1, a state task force reported this week.

Gun collectors and competitive shooters should be able to obtain exemptions to buy more than one handgun every 30 days, and the law should make clear that it does not apply to acquisitions by wholesale and retail gun dealers and manufacturers, according to the initial report by the Governor's Firearms Advisory Task Force.

People inheriting handguns also should be able to obtain exemptions, the report recommended.

This just in: The WSJ’s Dionne Searcey has reported that former Louisiana congressman William Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years in prison Friday for bribery schemes that featured a freezer full of alleged bribe money stuffed in veggie burger boxes.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Va., handed down the sentence to Jefferson, 62, a Democrat whom voters ousted last year. He was convicted of bribery, money laundering and racketeering in schemes that prosecutors said he devised to enrich himself and his family. Click here for earlier LB coverage of the Jefferson saga; here for the Justice Department’s press release.

Prosecutors asked for at least 27 years for Jefferson, a sentence that likely would have amounted to a life sentence and one that defense attorneys called unprecedented. In seeking leniency defense attorneys pointed out that Jefferson had ascended from humble beginnings to “the nation’s finest educational institutions and its highest corridors of power.”

Defense attorneys, who hoped for less than 10 years for Jefferson, have said they would appeal.

Jefferson’s seven-week trial included video and audio tapes of him meeting with a federal informant at Washington D.C. hotel restaurants. Prosecutors said he used his congressional status to concoct schemes that would help pay college tuition for his daughters. Jefferson served on a trade subcommittee and is alleged to have shaken down businessmen who came to his office seeking help with African deals.

Defense attorneys portrayed Jefferson as possibly unethical but not a criminal and said he was a victim of an over-aggressive prosecution aimed at “bagging a congressman.” They said Jefferson was entrapped by investigators who wired the informant to try to nab him.

A federal jury on Thursday convicted the former manager of an Iowa kosher slaughterhouse, which was the site of a major immigration raid, on 86 of 91 financial fraud charges.

Click here for the AP story; here for the story from the Des Moines Register; here, here and here for earlier LB coverage.

Jurors returned the verdict against the manager, Sholom Rubashkin (pictured), 50, on its second day of deliberations after the nearly monthlong trial. Rubashkin faces a sentence that could total hundreds of years in prison and a second federal trial on 72 immigration charges. A sentencing date was not immediately set.

“We respect the jury’s hard work,” a lawyer for Rubashkin, Guy Cook, said after the decision. “It was a difficult case. We disagree with the verdict. There were many legal errors made by the prosecution in the trial of this case and following sentencing we will appeal.”

Last year, an immigration raid on the AgriProcessors plant resulted in the conviction of more about 300 workers, most from Guatemala, on document fraud charges.

The raid sent shockwaves through the tight knit Lubovitch community. Rubashkin and his father had decades ago traveled from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to Postville, Iowa, in order to turn a meat processing plant into a glatt kosher processing plant, complete with shochtim — or professional kosher slaughterers — and a rabbinical inspectorate.

But beyond the immigration-related charges, prosecutors claimed Rubashkin ordered employees to create fake invoices so he could collect advances on a revolving $35 million bank loan.

During the trial, Agriprocessors employees testified that Rubashkin had personally directed them to create false invoices to show First Bank, which is based in St. Louis, that the plant had more money flowing in than it really did.

Despite objections, Judge Linda Reade of Federal District Court in Sioux Falls, S.D., allowed former employees to testify that days before the raid in 2008, Rubashkin had scrambled to get new documents for his workers, at least 389 of whom were found to be illegal immigrants. The plant filed for bankruptcy months after the raid and has since been sold.

Cook, Rubashkin’s lawyer, said Rubashkin might have practiced business unethically but never committed a crime.

Photo: Jonathan D. Woods/Iowa City Gazette, via Associated Press

Back in February, the WSJ’s Supreme Court correspondent Jess Bravin penned a column for the WSJ’s Law Journal column on the legal principle of standing. Bravin explained why, as the title of the column put it, some lawsuits “don’t stand a chance in court.”

Exhibit A in Bravin’s story: a suit filed by a State Department employee who believed that Hillary Clinton was improperly appointed as Secretary of State (click through to Bravin’s story to read the constitutional theory behind the suit.) Because of that, he argued, Clinton is forcing him to violate the Constitution.

“I have absolutely no question as to her abilities,” said the plaintitff, David Rodearmel (pictured), at the time. But as a sworn Foreign Service officer, “I have a duty to bring up this constitutional question,” he said, adding, “I’m perfectly content to live with whatever the [court's] decision is.”

Bravin at the time wrote that the suit was “almost certainly doomed to failure,” because Rodearmel, Bravin surmised, lacked standing. That is, he lacked the ability to show that he had suffered “particularized harm,” to the degree necessary to serve as a plaintiff in a lawsuit.

Lo and behold, Bravin recently proved himself prescient. A special three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in D.C. late last month upheld the district court’s dismissal of Rodearmel’s lawsuit. Wrote the court, in a per curiam decision:

[N]owhere does Rodearmel allege that Clinton has given him any specific order or direction or taken any other action that may have aggrieved him. Because Rodearmel has failed to allege that Clinton has taken any action — much less an action that has aggrieved him — he does not come within the “zone of interests” protected . . . and therefore lacks prudential standing.

Undeterred, however, the organization supporting the suit, Judicial Watch, announced on Thursday it has filed a notice of appeal to the Supreme Court. Stated Judicial Watch, in a press release:

With respect to the issue of standing, Judicial Watch contends that Mr. Rodearmel “has demonstrated that he is being injured in his employment by being required to serve under, take direction from, and report to a constitutionally ineligible superior, Mrs. Clinton” and that he has “been placed in a position where he either must violate his oath of office or risk substantial, adverse consequences to his employment.”

The issue of standing has in recent months proved vexing to a number of lawsuits naming politicians as defendants, including suits alleging President Obama is not a “natural born citizen,” as well as suits alleging that John McCain also flunked the “natural-born citizen” test, and that the 12th Amendment barred Texas delegates to the 2000 Electoral College from voting for both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney because both resided in the same state.

The Colorado parents who reported their 6-year-old son floated away aboard a helium balloon will plead guilty to some charges so that the family can stay together, the attorney for the boy's father said Thursday.
Richard Heene will plead guilty in the alleged Oct. 15 hoax to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, his attorney David Lane said. Mayumi Heene — a Japanese citizen who could have been deported if convicted of more serious charges — will plead guilty to false reporting to authorities, a misdemeanor, he said.

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Lawyer: Colo. balloon boy parents to plead guilty - Yahoo! News



FILE - In this Oct. 15, 2009 file photo, Falcon Heene, 6, front, is guided back to a news conference by his mother, Mayumi, outside the family's home in Fort Collins, Colo. The attorney for Richard Heene, who reported his son Falcon floated away in a helium balloon, says his client and the boy's mother Mayumi will both plead guilty to charges in the case. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

Stupak's amendment, which passed as part of the landmark bill and is credited with bringing along several anti-abortion Democrats (including U.S. Rep Dale Kildee, D-Flint), will make it more difficult for poor women to obtain abortions. The amendment in effect prevents insurance companies from participating in the bill's insurance exchanges -- where many low-income families and small businesses will go for their policies -- unless they exclude abortion coverage from any policy that might be purchased by someone who qualifies for a federal subsidy.

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Stupak's anti-abortion amendment tramples women and the law | freep.com | Detroit Free Press

Despite a father's desperate plea, a bill aimed at stiffening the penalties against drunk drivers has stalled in Albany. That bill is named after 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who was killed in a drunken driving crash in October. Her father is refusing to give up the fight.

For Lenny Rosado, it is a daily agony knowing he can only see his Leandra, in a picture at a memorial outside his door. She was killed when an accused drunken woman crashed a station wagon with 7 children on board.

Lenny is championing Leandra's Law, which would make it a felony to drive drunk with children in the vehicle. The New York Senate is on board, but the Assembly has watered down the bill.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver insists the Assembly bill is tougher than the Senate version because it requires ignition locks.

Public Counsel will offer the free service throughout Southern California and in more than 25 states, and will provide free legal representation in court as well as for administrative proceedings.

A Los Angeles-based law organization Wednesday launched a program to provide free legal assistance to veterans who hit bureaucratic roadblocks when filing claims for federal medical and mental health benefits.

Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm, will offer the free service throughout Southern California and, in partnership with other volunteer attorneys, in more than 25 states.

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Law group launches program to help veterans -- latimes.com

Profit at the 100 highest-grossing U.K. law firms fell 30 percent on average during the past year as deal work declined with the recession, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP survey.

Profits per partner at the top 10 U.K. firms averaged 872,000 pounds ($1.44 million), a 21 percent decrease, according to PwC. Partners at the second tier of law firms, ranked 11 to 25, brought in around 444,000 pounds and saw “the greatest average fall in U.K. income,” the accounting firm said.

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Profit Drops 30 Percent at U.K.?s Largest Law Firms (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

The opening line of an Intel press release out Thursday morning just about says it all:

Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices today announced a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes.

Wowza. Color us surprised. For a while there, the AMD/Intel antitrust situation had all the makings of a battle for the ages. In addition to big litigation between the two companies, AMD had also complained repeatedly to regulators both in the U.S. and overseas about allegedly anticompetitive behavior perpetrated by Intel. Such complaints helped EU and U.S. regulators put together their own big cases against Intel.

But now, according to the release, “AMD will also withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide.”

The terms, according to the release: AMD and Intel will obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement, and in exchange, Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement, and Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion.

As a result, AMD will drop all pending litigation including the case in U.S. District Court in Delaware and two cases pending in Japan.

In a joint statement the two companies commented, “While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.”

We’re not sure who the lawyers were who handled the settlment talks. But in the Delaware antitrust litigation, Intel was using lawyers from Gibson Dunn, among others, while AMD had used O’Melveny & Myers, among others.

We’ll continue to update you, LBers, on this development throughout the course of the day as news warrants.

A few weeks ago, we blogged about an NYT story about a rather perplexing situation developing out at Northwestern University.

Local prosecutors, wrote the NYT, had issued subpoenas for a trove of information about students in a Northwestern journalism class who had investigated the case of a man, Anthony McKinney, who had been convicted of murder in 1981. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear what the prosecutors were hoping to find in the students’ information.

But on Tuesday, the situation became a little clearer. Prosecutors alleged on Tuesday that the students paid two people to testify in McKinney’s case, with the hope of winning an exoneration. Click here for the WSJ story.

The claims marked the latest twist in a battle between the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern. Past student research has helped set free 11 wrongly convicted men since 1992, including five on death row.

The allegations Tuesday concern the 1978 murder of security guard Donald Lundahl in the southern suburb of Harvey. McKinney was found guilty of putting a shotgun in Lundahl’s face and firing. In 1982, McKinney was sentenced to life in prison.

Prosecutors allege the students paid a man $40 — which authorities claim he used to buy crack cocaine — in exchange for a videotaped confession to the murder. They also allege the students paid another man $50 to $100, though he didn’t provide any information.

Prosecutors declined to comment on whether any of the students would face criminal charges.

The students — and their Northwestern professor, David Protess — denied the allegations Tuesday, calling the state’s court filing part of a “smear campaign.”

“If my students had turned in a paper with that many factual errors in it, they would have gotten an F,” Protess said.

Protess and his students’ work have been highly influential. In one well-known case in 1999, Northwestern students uncovered evidence that helped free Anthony Porter, who at one point had been 50 hours away from being executed.

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, now serving time in federal prison on corruption charges, cited the group’s work in that case and others with helping persuade him to halt executions in the state in January 2000. He subsequently granted clemency to all death-row inmates before leaving office in January 2003.

The old saw goes like this: that lawyers are not risk-takers. That’s part of the reason, we suspect that, David Boies aside, we don’t hear too many tales of BigLaw lawyers ripping it up on the craps tables in Vegas.

But now, at long last, a little gambling operation that gives lawyers — or at least those who follow the Supreme Court — a leg up on all others. It’s, yes, FantasyScotus.net, the self-proclaimed premier Supreme Court fantasy league (and it might be the only, as far as we can tell).

Click here to check it out. The idea behind the site, which is the brainchild of recent George Mason law grad Josh Blackman, is simple: you pick the way you think the Supreme Court will rule on its docket. You’re awarded points for picking the outcome of the case (whether the court affirms or reverses the lower court); the split (9-0, 8-1, 7-2, 6-3, 5-4, 4-1-4, or fragmented); as well as the justices in the majority and the justices in the dissent. It’s $5 or $10 to join, but the fee is waived for students, law clerks and unemployed attorneys.

At the end of the term, all the points accumulated will be tallied, and a winner decreed.

Blackman, currently clerking in the Western District of Pennsylvania, says he thought of the idea in September, shortly after the Citizens United arguments. Says Blackman: “I thought, ‘what if Vegas handicapped this case? What would the odds be?’ I took the thought and ran with it.”

Blackman says his the fees will largely go to cover his costs, and that the point is not to make money. “That’s not at all why I’m doing it,” he says. “I think it’s just cool and gives some variety to my life.”

And what’s the prize? It’s not going to be cash. “I don’t think lawyers would be incentivized by cash. It’s going to be something else, like a golden gavel, maybe one of those Supreme Court bobbleheads.”

We have no idea, LBers, if this idea is going to flop or take off. But it sounded sorta fun to us. If you wind up giving it a whirl, and loving or loathing, let us hear about it.

Sterling Costs Consultants, established law costs draftsmen, are continuing their expansion with the opening of a second office in west London.

This new southern office location is the perfect partner for their main Warrington offices which will serve the north of the UK so providing a nationwide law cost drafting service.

Their law costs draftsmen have built business over a number of years mainly from client recommendations and are constantly striving to improve all areas of their service. With business continuing to grow throughout the country the result has been the requirement of a southern office further enhancing the progression of Sterling Costs.

Sterling Costs law costs draftsmen provide that vital link that can not only lead to a satisfactory recovery of legal costs as efficiently as possible, but can also release solicitors to do what they are best at: Servicing clients without the distractions. That’s why using Sterling Costs Consultants is the best way to optimize costs.

We blogged on Monday a story out of the Houston Chronicle about what was likely to happen to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 and wounding dozens of people last week at the Fort Hood military base. Click here, as well, for a WSJ story, from Dionne Searcey, Gary Fields and Nathan Koppel, picking up the thread.

“It’s really going to be a long road, even if he’s convicted and receives the death penalty,” said Michelle Lindo McCluer, director of the National Institute of Military Justice at American University’s Washington College of Law, to the WSJ.

On Tuesday, thanks to reporting from the WSJ reporters Stephanie Simon, Miguel Bastillo and Ann Davis, we learned a little bit more about the lawyer who will plead Hasan’s case. His name: John Galligan.

According to the story (link not yet available), Galligan (pictured), a retired Army colonel, has handled the defense in several high-profile military cases and has a national reputation for successfully defending soldiers being tried on serious charges.

Indeed, Galligan has gone on the offensive already, telling television reporters on Tuesday that he fears it will impossible for Hasan to get a fair trial at Fort Hood because of the intense publicity generated by the shootings. He said he had met with his new client for about a half-hour on Monday in a military hospital in San Antonio. He also told Good Morning America on Tuesday that hequestion his client’s mental competence, telling ABC News that one of the first things any lawyer would want to determine is whether there is a “mental responsibility issue present.”

As we noted on the blog Monday, Hasan will likely be charged in military court and could face the death penalty. If he does go to trial, Hasan will have at his side a veteran military defense lawyer who has persuaded juries in several high-profile cases to grant his clients leniency.

In 2005, for instance, Galligan represented military police reservist Willie Brand on charges of assaulting and maiming a shackled prisoner in Afghanistan. Brand admitted beating the prisoner, who later died of complications from his injuries, and a military jury convicted him. Prosecutors sought a lengthy prison term.

But Galligan called Mr. Brand “a hero” who was only doing what he had been trained to do. That argument carried the day; the jury did not order Brand jailed or discharged, but simply reduced his rank to private.

Galligan “is very, very highly respected,” with a national reputation as a premier defense lawyer for soldiers charged with serious crimes, said Geoffrey Corn, a professor of military law at South Texas College of Law.

A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the University of Puerto Rico Law School, Galligan has served as military prosecutor, defense lawyer and judge at various times in his career. He retired from the Army in 2001 and now works out of a private office in Belton, Tex., a small town about 25 miles east of Fort Hood.

Photo: AP

This just in: a jury in Brooklyn has found the defendants in the Bear Stearns case, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, not guilty on all charges.

The former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, were on trial for various fraud counts, essentially accused of lying to their investors about the health of two funds as they were collapsing in 2007.

The trial didn’t go altogether smoothly for the government. More than one government witness strayed from the script, and ended up providing testimony that wasn’t exactly damaging to the defendants’ cases. The judge on the case, Frederick Block, ruled the jury couldn’t consider one of the prosecution’s emails, as well.

Jury deliberations began Monday morning.

How would Justice Scalia have voted on Brown v. Board of Education?

The NYT’s Adam Liptak asks that straightforward question in an intriguing little story out Tuesday.

According to Liptak, Scalia doesn’t readily enjoy talking about the hypothetical concerning the famed 1954 case that banned segregation in public schools. The decision is hard to square with Justice Scalia’s commitment to originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that says judges must apply the original understanding of the constitutional text. LIptak writes that the weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted the 14th Amendment did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.

The question came up at the University of Arizona last month in what was billed as a conversation between Justice Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer. Breyer asked Scalia about the case, but didn’t exactly get a straightforward answer from Scalia. Writes Liptak on Scalia’s answer:

“As for Brown v. Board of Education, I think I would have” — and then he changed directions. He said he would have voted with the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case Brown overruled.

But Plessy, decided in 1896, concerned the segregation of passengers on railroads. That is an easier case for originalists. For starters, railroads were long considered common carriers required to serve all customers equally.

In a 2005 profile in The New Yorker, Justice Scalia said he would have voted with the majority in Brown. But he did not explain why. Liptak writes that Scalia seemed to suggest that Brown reached the right result as a policy matter but that it was not compelled by the Constitution.

Still, in Arizona, Scalia was a fervent defender of the originalist approach. “Don’t make up your mind on this significant question between originalism and playing it by ear on the basis of whether, now and then, the latter approach might give you a result you like,” Justice Scalia said.

“The test is over the long run does it require the society to adhere to those principles contained in the Constitution or does it lead to a society that is essentially governed by nine justices’ version of what equal protection ought to mean?”