2008 – Page 2 – LII News

Today in Supreme Court history

Today is the birthday of Edward T. Sanford (1865), who was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding after strenuous lobbying efforts by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The two Justices were sympatico, as Sanford joined with the Chief Justice regularly while they were on the Court and also participated in Taft’s “inner club” of conservative justices who met at Taft’s home on Sunday afternoons. Sanford was still on the Court when he died unexpectedly on the same day as the death of his mentor. His most noted opinion was in the so-called Pocket Veto case, in which he ended a 140-year-old dispute by ruling that the president has 10 calendar, rather than legislative, days to act on a bill before the adjournment of Congress.

July 23 is also the birthday of current Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (1936). Justice Kennedy has been an Associate Justice since 1988, when he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. He has acted as the Court’s swing vote in many cases, and he has, consequently, held special prominence in many politically charged 5–4 decisions.

Moot: definition of the day

Because Federal Courts only have constitutional authority to resolve actual disputes (see Case or Controversy) legal actions cannot be brought or continued after the matter at issue has been resolved, leaving no live dispute for a court to resolve. In such a case, the matter is said to be “moot”. For Supreme Court decisions focusing on mootness, see, e.g., Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona, 520 U.S. 43 (1997) and Hicklin v. Orbeck, 437 U.S. 518 (1978). See also Federal courts, Constitutional law

Our favorite quotes: Walter Bagehot

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), British economist, critic. The English Constitution, ch. 9 (1867).

Pew reports economic divide in internet growth

A July 2008 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home — up from 47% in early 2007. And, nearly one-third of home broadband users have a premium broadband service that gives them a faster connection to the internet.

But poorer Americans saw no growth in broadband adoption in the past year. 25% of low-income Americans – those whose household incomes are $20,000 annually or less – reported having broadband at home in April 2008, which compares to the 28% figure reported in March 2007. African Americans showed slow growth as well, with 43% saying they had broadband at home in April 2008 versus 40% who said this in March 2007.

Bastille Day

The storming of the Bastille has been commemorated in France for more than a century. Paris was in a state of high agitation in the early months of the French revolution. On the morning of July 14, 1789 a crowd broke into the Bastille and released the handful of prisoners held there. The anniversary of the storming of the Bastille is seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern French nation, and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the First Republic.

Now a national holiday, Bastille Day is celebrated with a mixture of solemn military parades and easygoing dancing and fireworks.

Collateral attack: definition of the day

Also known as an indirect attack. A collateral attack occurs when a prior judgment is used as the basis for a new claim or defense to a claim in a different court, and the opposing party argues that the prior judgment is invalid. Habeas corpus claims are a type of collateral attack. See e.g. Miller-El v. Dretke 545 U.S. 231 (2005).

LII does legal information in Philadelphia

Tom, Sara and Deborah — half of the LII’s staff — made a day of it yesterday in the City of Brotherly Love. The Jenkins Law Library started off the festivities by hosting a meeting with its staff, the LII, and other area law librarians to talk about providing legal information to an increasingly diverse group of people in an ever-changing environment. Next on the itinerary was the monthly luncheon of the Philadelphia Association of Paralegals, where Tom was the keynote speaker; and, finally, a little gathering at Misconduct Tavern with some of the LII’s stalwart supporters. We all enjoy getting out now and then, right?

Our favorite quotes: Abraham Lincoln

In law it is a good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not.

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Letter to Usher F. Linder, Feb. 20, 1848. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 453, Rutgers University Press (1953, 1990).

The Glorious Fourth

If you’re not otherwise occupied with traditional potato salad, fireworks, or blowing anvils, this isn’t a bad day to re-read the Declaration of Independence. We did, and we found this paragraph, #4 of the many grievances listed by the colonists against the King:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

That the colonists should consider a complaint about informational distance to be on a par with the dissolution of the legislatures, imposition of unfair taxes, and the lack of a judiciary is revealing. These days, the de facto depository of our public records is the Internet, no longer physically distant but perhaps equally fatiguing in other ways. Outmoded publishing policies and practices — and a failure to recognize the public need for legal information — keep us at a remove from our public legal information that is greater than it should be. We’re a click away in theory, but the practical distance is much greater.

And as to those rumors: of course this isn’t the first time we’ve read the Declaration in its entirety. And we certainly did not get kicked out of Mrs. Nungezer’s seventh-grade social studies class that day for passing notes (an early form of experimentation with packet-switched networks).

And now we’re off to shoot bottle rockets and light sparklers. Happy Fourth.

Our favorite quotes: Charles Macklin

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.

Charles Macklin (1690–1797), Irish actor, dramatist. Sir Archy MacSarcasm, in Love à la Mode, act 2, sc. 1 (1759). (In 1735 Macklin quarrelled with a fellow actor named Hallam and accidentally killed the man by thrusting his cane through Hallam’s eye. He was tried for murder, conducted his own defense, and won an acquittal.)