NPR; December 15, 2013

In 2008, attorney Kimberly Motley picked up and left her native Milwaukee, where she lived with her husband and two kids, and moved to Kabul. It wasn't just the first time she's been to a conflict zone, it was the first time she'd ever been out of the country.

"My kids were younger, and so they didn't totally understand what I was doing," Motley tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "My husband was extremely supportive. Anyone outside of that in my family just didn't really quite get it."

And, to be frank, says Motley, she wasn't entirely sure what she was doing either. She thought it'd be a good career move — work in Afghanistan for a year with the State Department, train lawyers there, learn and make some money, then return to her work as a public defender in the U.S.

But what she saw in Afghanistan shocked her. Motley remembers a prison tour in which prisoners were making tools. Looking around the room, she noticed how the prisoners far outnumbered the guards, and imagined how easily an attack might happen. "In addition ... there wasn't any running water, it was extremely cold because there wasn't any heat, any electricity, you hear coughing everywhere," she remembers. "It was a very eye-opening experience."

To read the complete article, please visit npr.org.

CNN; December 11, 2013

Criminal Defense Attorney Mark Geragos talks about the 'affluenza' defense that kept a teen D.U.I. offender out of prison.

Read more at cnn.com.

The New Yorker; December 10, 2014.  By Jeffrey Toobin, guest speaker at the Trial Lawyers Summit in South Beach, Florida, January 19-22, 2014.

It’s time for my annual legal year in review—a year in advance. Here’s what we’ll be discussing at the end of 2014.

1. God v. Same-Sex Marriage. The political and legal
momentum is very much with supporters of same-sex marriage. Opponents of
marriage equality—or, as they call themselves, supporters of
traditional marriage—are looking for new arguments, and they’ve fixed on
one involving religious liberty. The basic idea is that including gay
couples in the definition of marriage discriminates against those who believe only in heterosexual unions.

To read the complete article, please visit the newyorker.com.

CNN; December 2, 2013

Passengers aboard US Airways Flight 2846 were waiting on the tarmac at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport when their pilot came on the intercom.

"We've been notified about a health emergency aboard the aircraft," passenger Dean Davidson heard.

A few minutes later, Davidson saw a flight attendant walk toward another passenger sitting a few rows ahead of him. The flight attendant handed the slender middle-aged man a medical mask.

Emergency personnel boarded the plane a short time later and removed the man, Davidson said. A firefighter then came on the intercom and announced that the passenger had active tuberculosis and was contagious and that other passengers on the flight had been exposed. He advised them to contact their physicians immediately, Davidson said.

To read the complete article, please visit cnn.com.

New York Times; December 2, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — With blood oozing from deep lacerations, the two patients arrived at California Pacific Medical Center’s tidy emergency room. Deepika Singh, 26, had gashed her knee at a backyard barbecue. Orla Roche, a rambunctious toddler on vacation with her family, had tumbled from a couch, splitting open her forehead on a table.

On a quiet Saturday in May, nurses in blue scrubs quickly ushered the two patients into treatment rooms. The wounds were cleaned, numbed and mended in under an hour. “It was great — they had good DVDs, the staff couldn’t have been nicer,” said Emer Duffy, Orla’s mother.

Then the bills arrived. Ms. Singh’s three stitches cost $2,229.11. Orla’s forehead was sealed with a dab of skin glue for $1,696. “When I first saw the charge, I said, ‘What could possibly have cost that much?’ ” recalled Ms. Singh. “They billed for everything, every pill.”

To read the complete article, please click here: nytimes.com.

USA Today; December 2, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — An eight-year legal odyssey by a Malaysian university professor to clear her name from the U.S. government's no-fly list went to trial Monday in federal court in San Francisco.

Rahinah Ibrahim claims she was mistakenly placed on the list because of her national origin and Muslim faith. She has fought in court since her arrest at San Francisco International Airport in January 2005 to clear her name.

Several similar lawsuits are pending across the nation, but Ibrahim's legal challenge appears to be the first to go to trial.

Unlike a typical U.S. trial, where details important and mundane are disclosed in the name of justice, Ibrahim's legal challenge has run head-on into the U.S. government's state secret privilege that allows it to decline to disclose vital evidence if prosecutors can show a threat to national security.

Ibrahim's lawyer is barred by court orders and national security provisions from delving too deeply into the inner-workings of the government administration of its suspected lists of terrorists.

To read the complete article, please click here: usatoday.com.

New York Times; December 2, 2013

Chimpanzees are not people, no matter how they are dressed up for commercials, but perhaps they are close enough that they deserve some of the same rights humans have.

That is what an animal rights group claimed on Monday when it filed a classic writ of habeas corpus, that revered staple of American and English law and tired cliché of detective fiction — not for a human being held unlawfully, but for Tommy, a chimpanzee in Gloversville, N.Y.

This is no stunt. The Nonhuman Rights Project has been working on this legal strategy for years, sifting through decisions in all 50 states to find one that is strong on what is called common law, and one that recognizes animals as legal persons for the purpose of being the beneficiary of a trust.

To read the complete article, please visit nytimes.com.

News Inferno; November 26, 2013

Recently, the maker of LG Electronics’ Smart TV admitted to collecting information on consumers’ viewing habits, apparently without consumer knowledge.

LG’s new line of Smart TVs collect viewer data to customize the advertising seen on their screens, according to Law Technology News. A blogger figured out what LG was doing by running a traffic analysis with his LG Smart TV and found that his viewing information was being sent to LG’s servers via his routers. The blogger posted information on his site showing and explaining that the TV works like a computer, collecting information in much the same way that cookies do.

The blogger, IT consultant Jason Huntley, found that his LG Smart TV continued to collect data despite his having activated the television’s privacy settings to stop that from occurring, according to Digital Trends. After conducting analysis of the data sent from his TV to LG’s servers, Huntley discovered that “viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off,” he wrote on his blog. “This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off.”

To read the complete article, please click here: newsinferno.com.

Lawyersandsettlements.com; December 2, 2013

Atlanta, GA: It was bad enough that the Alabama widow lost her home to a fire. However, things went from bad to worse after HSBC Finance Corp. and Assurant Inc. are alleged to have zoomed in with a Force-Place Insurance policy on what remained of her burned-out home.

The woman filed a Force-placed insurance lawsuit, in an attempt to make it right.

Forced-Place Insurance is just that - insurance that is placed on a property by the holder of the mortgage. This is done for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the homeowner has let insurance lapse or has under-insured the property. Were a homeowner to own outright his or her own property, then insurance is at the complete discretion of the owner. However, when a property is mortgaged, the lender obviously requires that the property is protected against fire or other damage.

The problem that critics have with lender insurance of this kind is that forced-place insurance terms are often far more expensive and onerous than standard insurance products. There have also been allegations that lenders maintain cozy relationships with insurers, with kickbacks and other perks that benefit the participants but cost the homeowner substantial dollars.

To read the complete article, please click here: lawyersandsettlements.com.

Lawyersandsettlements.com; December 2, 2013

Sacramento, CA: Although California is an employment at-will state, California labor laws don’t give employers carte blanche to treat their employees unfairly. Wrongful termination is a violation of the California labor code.

Kimberly realizes that verbal abuse may not be reason enough to file a California wrongful termination lawsuit, but she is thankful for the opportunity to speak out about her former managers at Staples. They dropped the f-bomb and even the c-word on her too many times.

Clearly, Kimberly was a valuable employee at this particular Staples store: she was hired in May 2011 as a cashier and became full-time inventory lead for the entire store within a few months. As well, she started at $8.75 per hour, then got a raise to $9.25, and a few months before she was fired, Kimberly was given another raise to $10 per hour.

“I ran the store without a GM for several months so I had a really good track record and I did extra work with no pay increase; you do it for the team,” she says. And she often worked 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. shifts doing inventory without overtime compensation.

To read the complete article, please click here: lawyersandsettlements.com.

CNN; December 1, 2013

A Florida woman who was sentenced to 20 years for firing a gun to scare off her allegedly abusive husband has been released from prison as she awaits a new trial, her attorney said.

Marissa Alexander was released Wednesday night, attorney Bruce Zimet said.

Last month, an appellate court ordered a new trial for Alexander. The case will be retried because the jury had incorrect directions, the court ruled.

Alexander's case gained the attention of civil rights leaders, who say nobody was hurt and the sentence for the mother of three was too harsh.

To read the complete article, please click here: CNN.com.