Try our Advanced Search for more refined results
Access to Justice
-
June 27, 2024
Denver Must Face 2020 Protest Response Claims, Judge Rules
A Colorado federal judge has largely rejected Denver's bid to end claims that it encouraged police to use excessive force against social justice advocates in 2020, allowing a lawsuit over the police response to move forward.
-
June 27, 2024
Lowenstein Pro Bono Head On Guiding NJ Public Interest Law
Law360 Pulse caught up with Alexander Shalom, head of the Lowenstein Center for Public Interest as of the beginning of June, to discuss his plans for the influential pro bono center’s future and his reflections on his time at the ACLU-NJ.
-
June 26, 2024
Calif. Sanctioned $111M In 30-Year Prison Staffing Case
A California federal judge has ordered state officials to hand over more than $111 million for failing to bring prison mental health staffing up to levels set by the court in 2009 in a 30-year-old case, saying Tuesday that "given defendants' contumacy, it is for the court to effect compliance."
-
June 25, 2024
Immigration Org.'s Attys Can Be In Union, NLRB Official Says
Attorneys at a nonprofit providing immigration legal services may remain in a voluntarily recognized union bargaining unit, a National Labor Relations Board regional director concluded, saying the attorneys are not supervisors who are excluded from unionizing under federal labor law.
-
June 24, 2024
Mich. Justices Take Up Young Adults' Life Sentence Challenge
Michigan's top court will weigh whether the state's mandatory life sentence for murder is unconstitutional when applied to young adults, after 19- and 20-year-olds argued that a 2022 precedent banning the punishment for 18-year-olds should extend to them.
-
June 21, 2024
Justices Keep Domestic Abusers Disarmed, Clarify Bruen
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Texas man's constitutional challenge to a federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms Friday, providing limited guidance to lower courts on how to apply the high court's Second Amendment historical analogue test.
-
June 11, 2024
DC Firms Honored For Local Legal Services Donations
The D.C. Access to Justice Commission is recognizing 39 law firms for their financial contributions to legal aid providers in Washington, saying the private bar's support is crucial to meeting the community's needs.
-
June 10, 2024
New 'Access DOJ' Aims To Nix Barriers, Boost Accessibility
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the launch of an initiative to improve access to its programs and services, including an upcoming project to make it easier to report tips about crime or other violations of law.
-
June 07, 2024
Judge Doubts Ethnicity Questions Deserve Jury Bias Probe
A Washington appellate judge pushed back Friday against a Filipino family who claimed a hospital's questions about their ethnicity at trial required a bias inquiry, noting race is "something that can't be ignored" in any courtroom filled with people who look different from one another.
-
June 06, 2024
Judge Seems Likely To Make Denver Face 2020 Protest Claims
A Colorado federal judge on Thursday appeared inclined to reject Denver's bid to end claims that it encouraged police to use excessive force against social justice advocates in 2020, pressing the city to explain how its law enforcement policies didn't amount to indifference to violating protesters' rights.
-
June 06, 2024
Some Colo. Justices Call For Nixing Peremptory Strikes
Three Colorado Supreme Court justices said this week that eliminating peremptory challenges would help remove "the taint of impermissible discrimination" from the jury selection process, writing in two cases involving the dismissal of Black jurors that the strikes often facilitate racism that can be near impossible for a court to address.
-
June 04, 2024
SDNY Taps Nonprofit To Run Clinic For Pro Se Litigants
The City Bar Justice Center announced Tuesday that it has been enlisted to take over the Southern District of New York's 8-year-old legal assistance clinic's services for self-represented litigants, as many low-income Americans face the civil legal system alone.
-
June 03, 2024
Ga. Sheriff Wants Bookstore Suit Over Jail Book Policy Tossed
A Georgia sheriff and jail commander asked a Georgia federal judge to toss a lawsuit brought against them by a bookstore that alleges the jail instituted an unconstitutional and arbitrary policy of only allowing books into the county jail from "authorized retailers."
-
May 31, 2024
DOJ Looks To End A Legacy Of Bias In Sex Assault Cases
The U.S. Department of Justice says that legal fallacies and misogynistic stereotypes often lead prosecutors to decline to charge alleged perpetrators of sexual violence, but new guidance from the department is pushing prosecutors to give more credence to victims and see that their claims are more thoroughly investigated.
-
May 31, 2024
Do Jails' 'Approved Vendor' Rules Keep Out Drugs, Or Books?
Jailhouses and other correctional facilities are increasingly banning books not because of what they say, but because of who sent them, a practice that officials say is designed to keep drugs out of facilities, but which advocates for incarcerated people say only keeps out books.
-
May 31, 2024
Small Town Va. Firm Wins Big Pro Bono Recognition
Decades ago, the leaders of a small law firm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley decided to focus on the pro bono legal needs of their community. Its work, including at least one case the firm won before the state Supreme Court, recently earned the firm a national award from the American Bar Association.
-
May 31, 2024
Migrant Influx Fuels Push For Right To Immigration Counsel
Amid a soaring backlog of asylum cases in the United States, pro-immigrant advocates have intensified their push for legislation that would give noncitizens the right to legal representation in deportation proceedings.
-
May 30, 2024
Insurance Atty Fights For Lone Woman On Death Row In Miss.
Attorney A. Kate Margolis lives a double life: one, in which she fights on behalf of insurance policyholders as counsel at Bradley, and another, spent trying to save convicted murderer Lisa Jo Chamberlin, the only woman on Mississippi's death row.
-
May 29, 2024
2nd Circ. Unsure If Error Kept Murder Exonerees' Case Alive
A Second Circuit judge expressed doubt Wednesday that a lower court erred in declining to grant qualified immunity to two Connecticut police officers whose actions allegedly contributed to the wrongful convictions of two men for a 1985 murder, noting that a key piece of evidence challenging prosecutors' theory remains shrouded in mystery.
-
May 29, 2024
Non-Atty Advice To Debtors Is Unprotected, 2nd Circ. Told
New York urged the Second Circuit on Wednesday to find that stopping a nonprofit focused on bankruptcy education and the South Bronx pastor it's working with from advising low-income debtors represents a content-neutral regulation on who can practice law that does not violate the First Amendment.
-
May 28, 2024
Gorsuch Unhappy Court Won't Rethink Jury Size Precedent
In a strongly worded dissent Tuesday, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the U.S. Supreme Court needs to rethink precedent that "made the unthinkable a reality" by permitting juries of fewer than 12 people to decide cases involving serious criminal offenses.
-
May 23, 2024
High Court Sides With Gov't Over Repeat Offender Sentencing
A state drug conviction can trigger a mandatory 15-year sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act if it involved a drug on the federal schedules at the time of that conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
-
May 20, 2024
Lethal Injection 'Not Rocket Science,' Ga. Says As Trial Begins
As Georgia began a bench trial Monday against a death row inmate who is suing to be executed by firing squad, counsel for the state told a federal judge that she expected the inmate to have "a hard road to hoe" in disproving that the state's use of lethal injection is safe, effective and can be carried out with relative ease.
-
May 17, 2024
NY Discovery Reform Feud Simmers Between DAs, Defenders
Four years after New York imposed new requirements on prosecutors to more promptly hand over evidence to defendants in criminal cases, data suggests that district attorneys’ offices are still struggling to comply. In the meantime, experts and advocates say many are quietly working to tweak the reforms or potentially scale them back.
-
May 17, 2024
Reid Collins Helps Score Verdict For Teen In La. Policing Case
Nearly four years to the day when Louisiana teenager De’Shaun Johnson recorded his mother’s arrest in their Slidell driveway, attorneys with Reid Collins & Tsai LLP and the ACLU help convince a federal jury that a local sheriff’s deputy who threatened to Tase him had intentionally inflicted emotional distress.
Expert Analysis
-
Passing The HALT Fentanyl Act Will Repeat Past Mistakes
The war on drugs has failed, with overdose deaths at an all-time high despite decades of criminalization, so lawmakers should vote no on the HALT Fentanyl Act's proposal to impose lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for fentanyl-related drug offenses, says Liz Komar at The Sentencing Project.
-
Behind The Unique Hurdles Of Rural Access To Justice
While rural access to justice has become conflated with access to lawyers, the two are not synonymous, and in order to solve both issues, it is critical to further examine the role and impact of resident attorneys in these communities, say Daria Fisher Page and Brian Farrell at the University of Iowa College of Law.
-
Compassionate Release Grants Needed Now More Than Ever
After the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recent expansion of the criteria for determining compassionate release eligibility, courts should grant such motions more frequently in light of the inherently dangerous conditions presented by increasingly understaffed and overpopulated federal prisons, say Alan Ellis and Mark Allenbaugh at the Law Offices of Alan Ellis.
-
Justices' Double Jeopardy Ruling Preserves Acquittal Sanctity
The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision last week in McElrath v. Georgia, barring the state from retrying a man acquitted of murder after a so-called repugnant verdict, is significant in the tangled web of double jeopardy jurisprudence for its brief and unequivocal protection of an acquittal’s finality, says Lissa Griffin at Pace Law School.
-
NY Must Address Urgent Need For Immigration Legal Aid
The recent influx of migrants to New York has exposed the urgent need for state legislators to make a long-term investment in sustainable immigration legal services infrastructure, supervision and training, say Marielena Hincapié and Stephen Yale-Loehr at Cornell Law.
-
911 Call Scrutiny Should Not Be Used To Identify Suspects
Though the use of 911 call analysis to identify suspects continues to spread across the country, this scientifically unproven method opens the door to wrongful convictions, so prosecutors should review investigations that relied on the technique, and lawmakers should ban it nationwide, say Miriam Krinsky at Fair and Just Prosecution and Isabelle Cohn at the Innocence Project.
-
6 Practice Pointers For Pro Bono Immigration Practice
An attorney taking on their first pro bono immigration matter may find the law and procedures beguiling, but understanding key deadlines, the significance of individual immigration judges' rules and specialized aspects of the practice can help avoid common missteps, says Steven Malm at Haynes Boone.
-
8th Circ. Redistricting Ruling Imperils The Voting Rights Act
The Eighth Circuit’s recent ruling in Arkansas NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, holding that private plaintiffs don't have standing to sue in redistricting cases, creates a circuit split, and, if upheld, would nearly destroy the Voting Rights Act, says William Brewer at Brewer Storefront.
-
Justices May Clarify Expert Witness Confrontation Confusion
After oral arguments in Smith v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to hold that expert witness opinions that rely on out-of-court testimonial statements for their factual basis are unconstitutional, thus resolving some of the complications created by the court’s confrontation clause jurisprudence, says Richard Friedman at the University of Michigan Law School.
-
Immigration Detention Should Offer Universal Legal Counsel
Given the large backlog of immigration court cases and the more than 70% of people in immigration detention without counsel in 2023, the system should establish a universal right to federally funded representation for anyone facing deportation, similar to the public defender model, say Laura Lunn and Shaleen Morales at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
-
UX Research And Design Is Crucial For Justice Technologies
It’s essential that new access-to-justice digital tools incorporate user experience research and design methodologies to enhance access and accessibility, improve efficiency in processes and service delivery, and reduce risk, says Sarah Mauet at Innovation for Justice.
-
Higher Juror Compensation Trend Is Good For Justice System
This year a number of states increased daily juror compensation rates after decades of stagnation — a positive development that facilitates more representative juries, aids decision making and boosts public confidence in the legal system, says Cary Silverman at Shook Hardy.
-
The Pop Culture Docket: Judge D'Emic On Moby Grape
The 1968 Moby Grape song "Murder in My Heart for the Judge" tells the tale of a fictional defendant treated with scorn by the judge, illustrating how much the legal system has evolved in the past 50 years, largely due to problem-solving courts and the principles of procedural justice, says Kings County Supreme Court Administrative Judge Matthew D'Emic.
-
6th Circ. Case Eases Path For Some Excessive Force Claims
The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear Fox v. Campbell, leaving in place the Sixth Circuit’s holding that excessive force claims based on police shootings can be founded on the Fourth Amendment even if no one is hit by gunfire — which will be helpful for some civil rights litigants, says Sharon Fairley at the University of Chicago Law School.
-
In Culley, Justices Unlikely To Set New Forfeiture Standards
As the U.S. Supreme Court considers Culley v. Marshall — a case with the potential to reshape civil asset forfeiture practices — the justices' recent comments at oral argument suggest that, while some of them may be concerned about civil forfeiture abuse, they are unlikely to significantly change the status quo, say attorneys at Jackson Walker.