Daniel Poulin’s First Monday article makes a persuasive case for open access to law in developing countries. Daniel, the founder and director of CanLII, has wide experience in bringing open access to Francophone Africa, and it shows. Highly recommended.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan, Astronomer and science writer (1934-1996)
April 22 Davis v. Federal Election Commission: Over the years, Congress and the judiciary have made significant changes to the campaign finance system in an attempt to make it more evenhanded and to root out corruption. The case at hand is another test of Congress’s latest attempt to create sustainable election financing laws through the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment”.
Giles v. California: Defendants have a right to confront witnesses by subjecting them to cross-examination under the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, but may waive this right by making a witness unavailable through wrongdoing. The Court’s decision in this case will determine the scope of a defendant’s right to cross-examine witnesses and how broadly courts may apply the forfeiture doctrine.
April 23 Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory: Since 1963, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”) has provided both a means to ferret out insidious age discrimination and an effective defense for the business community to justify its actions through the “reasonable factors other than age”defense. In this case, the Court will determine whether the burden of proving the “reasonableness” of the challenged practice falls upon the employer or the employee — a decision worth almost $6 million dollars in this case.
Metlife V. Glenn: The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) provides a private cause of action for employees challenging wrongful denials of benefits under an employee benefits plan. In this case, the Court will determine whether and to what extent a plan administrator that both authorizes the payment of benefits and is responsible for the payment of those benefits has a conflict of interest that must be considered on judicial review.
LII co-founder and Co-Director Emeritus Peter Martin has written an interesting paper on court records and privacy — certainly an issue that is much on our minds here. The tension between openness in court proceedings (on the one hand) and the legitimate privacy interests of participants in the legal system (on the other) are very difficult ones, compounded by many, many private agendas.
We’ve touched on these issues here before, and no doubt will again. If you’re interested, you might take a look at the presentation from Peter Winn that we jointly sponsored with Cornell Information Science in January — and if you’re not interested, you might want to take a look at WhosARat.com. Thirty seconds of thought about what it means to criminal prosecution will get you interested, in a hurry.
Here’s the abstract:
For over a decade the public has had remote access to federal court records held in electronic format, including documents filed by litigants and judicial rulings. First available via dial-up connections, access migrated to the Web in 1998. That and a succession of other improvements to the federal “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” system or PACER prompted the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to proclaim in 2001 that “the advancement of technology has brought the citizen ever closer to the courthouse.” Unquestionably, what the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and Judicial Conference of the United States have built offers citizens, businesses, journalists, and scholars unprecedented access to the details of individual court proceedings. But to hold PACER in that frame is to miss much of its impact. Moreover, some of the gains one might hope or expect to flow from enhanced judicial transparency remain largely untouched by this system. The article explores PACER’s evolution, larger impact, and unrealized possibilities. It then proceeds to examine why state courts are, in general, approaching online access to court records so differently.
Also this month: new articles from Greg Alexander and Bob Hockett.
Attempt to inflict physical harm on another individual, whether successful or not, of which the intended victim is aware. Assault can be both a criminal and civil wrong, redressed by either criminal punishment or damages.
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
Robert F. Kennedy, Speech, South Africa, 1966.
Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions was a breath of fresh air when it was first published, and it still is. It’s about the sociology of the professions — a subject that seems a little far afield. But we spend some time thinking about how all this legal information is going to alter the contours of the profession, and Abbott’s book is a guidepost — it talks about the role of information and knowledge in defining professional boundaries, and about the commodification of knowledge. Ever think about why Quicken Willmaker Plus is like an eighteenth-century aspirin? Thought not. Seriously, though — this one’s fundamental if you want to know how all this public information is going to affect the profession.
Financial Institution Fraud (FIF) involves fraud or embezzlement occurring within or against financial institutions that are insured or regulated by the U.S. Government. Financial institutions are threatened by a wide array of frauds, including commercial loan fraud, check fraud, counterfeit negotiable instruments, mortgage fraud, check kiting, false applications, and a variety of traditional and non-traditional FIF scams.
No doubt every legal blogger in the US is going to say something about the fact that today, April 15, is the annual due date for personal income tax filings in the US (it’s also the date on which Wordsworth found his inspiration for I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, but there’s not nearly as much to say about that.)
We like tax law, because it’s complicated and geeky. It’s also a place where the public frequently comes face to face with the law — Amazon lists over 68,000 books with the words “income tax” in the title. And it’s a longstanding arena for disputes over professional jurisdiction between lawyers and other groups (like accountants, for instance, or financial planners). Those things alone would make tax more than usually interesting. But let’s start with the numbers:
Popular linking destinations within the tax code include:
But that’s all the really boring stuff. The tax code is…well, it’s unique. More than any other chunk of law we can think of, it’s created a language of its own. We say things like “it’s a Subchapter K”, or “we’re forming a 501(c)(3)”, and people who are not tax lawyers have some idea what they’re talking about. It also holds a prominent place in many systems of what we guess you’d call “alternate jurisprudence” — the beliefs of those who, like militia groups, see something fundamentally different when they look at the way the US is governed. The IRS deals with many such arguments on its page debunking a number of claims by tax protesters; it’s one of our favorite pieces of public legal information. Wikipedia strongly distinguishes between tax resisters and tax protesters — a valid distinction we confess we hadn’t thought about, but probably also one of those places where Wikipedians have agreed to disagree. You can find other debunking pages linked from the Wikipedia articles.
All in all, a lot of things to distract you from the fact that you forgot to file that extension….
Most of the time, the LII thinks about law on the Internet rather than the law of the Internet. But we often work with our friends at the University Computer Policy and Law Program to sponsor things here at Cornell. They’ve got a great archive of video material — including presentations by Dan Solove, Yochai Benkler, William (“Terry”) Fisher, John Palfrey, Fred Schneider, and many more. These will be particularly interesting to you if you’re trying to explore law-of-the-Internet issues with undergrads or other non-law folks. Highly recommended.
