The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, recently decided a fraud case holding that a person may commit federal fraud and face imprisonment for breaching a broadly-defined fiduciary duty to a contractual business partner. This holding arises under the “honest services” fraud statute, presuming the breaching party also has a specific intent to […]
READ MORECalifornia Attorney General Releases Medical Marijuana “Guidelines”
The California Attorney General has issued a strange and interesting set of “guidelines” (pdf) around medical marijuana, a document whose legal significance would seem to be totally unclear. These guidelines are actually required by statute (H& S 11362.81 but they are coming at a time when the medical marijuana law is real, seriously unsettled as […]
READ MOREDecriminalization: End of War on Drugs?
An even question might be, have we actually lost the very expensive war on drugs which started way back in 1971 when Nixon was still President. Two states, Washington and Colorado, have made it legal to use recreational marijuana. Not all of the supporters of these laws were stoners and dealers, actually even some in […]
READ MORECardinal Egan Under Fire
Secret court documents reveal that New York Cardinal Edward Egan, while serving as bishop of the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese, allowed several priests facing multiple accusations of sexual abuse to continue working for years. Egan failed to investigate aggressively some abuse allegations, did not refer complaints to criminal authorities and, during closed testimony in 1999, […]
READ MOREThe Forbidden Zone The Nature and Prevalence of Clergy Sexual Abuse
A Long Island foster care house of horrors is in the spotlight now. An accused predator took in boys, over the course of two decades, and subjected many of them to abuse. The spotlight has shone elsewhere — many elsewheres. Maybe nowhere is the tsunami felt more than when exploitation is discovered within the religious […]
READ MOREWhy Winning at All Costs Compromises Justice
There’s an old “joke” among prosecutors that anyone can convict the guilty, but it takes a really exceptional prosecutor to convict the innocent. Not very funny, is it? The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Cain, 132 S.Ct. 627 (2012), demonstrates that there are still criminal prosecutors out there who either don’t understand […]
READ MOREFrom Broken Windows to Broken Policies: On James Q. Wilson’s Analysis of “The Benefit of Prisons”
Note: I first wrote this post back in March when James Q. Wilson published an op-ed in several major American newspapers defending America’s intense use of prisons. I decided not to publish it at the time, but today I see that Wilson is guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy and making the same argument all […]
READ MORERedding v. Safford United School District: En Banc Ninth Circuit Overturns Student Strip Search for Ibuprofen
In a little blow for sanity, the en banc Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday overturned the decision in Redding v. Safford United School District that had previously concluded there was no Fourth Amendment violation when school officials strip searched a 13-year-old middle school student who was believed to have been carrying ibuprophen. The […]
READ MOREAn Update on Everyone’s Favorite Cravath Alum
It’s too bad we already picked a Lawsuit of the Day. This latest litigation — brought by James Colliton, the ex-Cravath tax lawyer who, in the words of theAP, “paid a woman so he could have sex with her two underage daughters” — is pretty rich. Once again from the AP: A disbarred Manhattan lawyer […]
READ MOREMan sentenced to false statements in a loan application
Steven F. Shaw, 49, a New York resident, was sentenced in United States District Court in Albany, New York, to 36 months in prison, to be followed by supervised release for 5 years, and to pay restitution in the total amount of ,653,530, upon his conviction of making false statements in a loan application, tax evasion, and […]
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