Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth recently ruled to temporarily block federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, citing a violation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a 1996 law that prohibits the destruction of human embryos. The ban has been temporarily lifted, but the court battle continues. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams, welcome Russell Korobkin, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and Author of Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology and Charles P. Kindregan Jr., professor of family law and assisted reproduction law at Suffolk University Law School, to explore this controversial debate, legislative, ethical and religious aspects of stem cell research and this recent legal rulings impact on scientific research.

In the New Yorker for September 27, 2010, Jeffrey Toobin has a very lengthy essay on Stephen Breyer, considering his position on the newly reshuffled Supreme Court. Breyer has a new book out, Making Our Democracy Work. According to the blurb at the publisher’s website, he surveys the history of the Supreme Court, looking at various times when the Court’s rulings have been flouted or ignored, and then discusses what he believes the Court did to create public trust in its authority and what it must to do maintain that trust. The link provided here to the publisher’s website also then leads on to an audio of Justice Breyer on NPR’s “Fresh Air” radio show, but does not include any reviews of the book (see one here, from the New York Times Sunday Book Review, by Jeff Shesol, who was a speech writer for President Clinton).

Read the rest of this entry »

The Federal Reserve has issued a Press Release stating that the “pace of the recovery … has slowed in recent months. … the pace of economic recovery is likely to be modest in the near term.” And then they tell you what the Fed’s Open Market Committee has voted to do about it, and who voted how. It’s all sort of confusing to read. So, for our benefit, Slate online magazine and NPR have cooked up a translation of the statement into plain English, with a nice toggle switch to flip back and forth between the official version and the Plain English. They had a bit of fun with it, which is good, because otherwise, it’s kind of anxiety-inducing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Globe Ideas section today features an interesting article on authors’ libraries being dispersed, both during the authors’ lifetimes, but most especially as part of estate settlement. Craig Fehrman writes, focusing largely on a recent case that came about most unusually. Annecy Liddell examined a used copy of a book at The Strand, a famous book store in Manhattan. As she paged through the book, she noticed that the previous owner had written his name in the front. Then she discovered that the owner had made marginal notes all through the book. She decided to buy the book anyway, and went home and looked up the previous owner on Wikipedia. She discovered that her book had been owned and annotated by a famous, though cultish novelist, David Markson, considered the most important experimental novelist in American fiction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nicole C. Engard reviews several open source tools she recommends not only for their usability and reliability, but also for the cost to value ratio when compared to mainstream applications outside our ever narrowing budget requirements .

Whoops! OOTJ nearly missed celebrating Constitution Day, 2010! Tip of the OOTJ hat to William Hein, actually, for their little e-mail alert! Here is the Federal Register Notice of Implementation of Constitution and Citizenship Day on September 17 each year, in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Suffolk Law Professor Victoria Dodd discusses her course and treatise in Education Law as well as the field generally. To learn more about Professor Dodd visit http://law.suffolk.edu/faculty/directories/faculty.cfm?InstructorID=16.

Thanks to my youngest brother, I have been introduced to praprosdokianisms, or paraprosdokians. We all actually have run across them; we just didn’t know the ten dollar word for these delightful little humor bits. Read the rest of this entry »

While many around the world were paying tribute to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, Pastor Terry Jones, from the Dove World Outreach Center, had announced that he would burn 200 copies of the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11 in a protest against Islam. Attorney and co-host J. Craig Williams joins Mark Potok, Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Dr. Charles C. Haynes, Director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum and senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, to look inside this controversy. They discuss the First Amendment, religion, Jones potential impact on national security, attitude toward the Muslim community and how other countries view America when it comes to religion.

The word on the street is that associates and young partners are very unhappy with the state of technology in their law firms. The results of a new survey of associate satisfaction tells us just how unhappy associates might be. Or might not be. In this episode, co-hosts Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell dive into the results of the 2010 American Lawyer Associates Survey, what the answers reveal about how associates view technology and technology spending at their firms, and the ramifications for firms delaying technology upgrades. After you listen, be sure to check out Tom & Dennis co-blog and book by the same name, The Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies.