The law society’s initiative comes several months after the Utah Supreme Court launched its own regulatory sandbox amid a growing movement in North America to open up the legal marketplace to nonlawyer financial interests and practitioners.
“It is an opportunity to connect while you are doing good in the world,” says Mark Daniel Maloney, a member of Blackburn, Maloney and Schuppert and now the immediate past president of Rotary International. “It is wonderful to be a volunteer, but you go in and you perform the service, and you leave.”
Building for Good was launched in October 2019 by members of the ABA Forum on Construction Law. Their mission is to offer construction lawyers more pro bono opportunities and relieve the financial burden on organizations that need construction law services.
Of the 500-plus individuals appointed to President-elect Joe Biden’s agency review teams, over 150 are lawyers. The agency review teams are also some of the most diverse in history.
Gig economy companies hope to leverage their recent California ballot measure victory to usher in laws across the country classifying their workers as independent contractors, and some experts say they have the momentum to succeed on that front.
“I don’t think anyone had Utah on their radar as the state likely to be leading the charge on regulatory reform in the legal space,” says Joanna Mendoza, who served on California’s Task Force on Access Through Innovation of Legal Services.
The justices are reviewing Philadelphia’s decision to exclude Catholic Social Services, an agency of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, from its foster care system over the church agency’s refusal to abide by the city’s nondiscrimination policy.
Earl B. Dickerson’s name may not be well known to the public, but the civil rights lawyer lived a larger-than-life existence. Now, scholars, relatives and activists are marking the 100th anniversary of his 1920 graduation from the University of Chicago Law School in celebration of his becoming the first African American to receive a juris doctor.
An old T-shirt, a pair of scissors and a little patience. That’s all members of the ABA Section of Environment, Energy and Resources needed for their first virtual public service project, where they cut and braided fabric into dog tug toys for the Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago on Tuesday.
On a cold December morning in the town of New Milford, Connecticut, Officer Scott Smith was driving an unmarked police car along Route 202 looking for Franklyn Reid, who was wanted on some warrants. Smith, who is white, spotted Franklyn, who is Black, near a gas station.
ExamSoft, the company that provided the software for the two-day online bar exam offered earlier this month, maintains that only a small percentage of test-takers experienced problems with their product. But for those who did, many say there should have been no issues and some suspect the hitches were expected by the company.
Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the federal bench, she argued and won several landmark gender discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—in spite of the justices all being men who sometimes made flippant remarks about gender during her oral arguments.
We spoke to a number of legal experts across the ideological spectrum to get their thoughts on this week’s hearings. Here are four takeaways.
As April Frazier Camara celebrates the 100th anniversary of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section, she also looks forward to facing the many challenges she sees in the criminal legal system. “Racial injustice is something that is on the minds and hearts of American people,” says Camara, the chair of the section.
Lawyers’ personal relationships with opposing counsels may create a conflict under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, according to a new ethics opinion from the ABA’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility.
The U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes for its new term on Oct. 5 with grief in the air after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a confirmation battle and election controversies swirling all around it and the court’s operations still disrupted by the pandemic.
After a gunman opened fire at Judge Esther Salas’ suburban New Jersey home in July, killing her 20-year-old son, she made an emotional plea. But she isn’t the only one sounding the alarm and asking for greater protections and privacy for jurists. Others in the federal judiciary are taking another look at privacy protections and security at judges’ homes.
A growing number of negligence suits are being filed across the country against nursing homes and other long-term care facilities by families whose relatives died from the coronavirus while living in such facilities.
“People who violate the norms get punished. Whether that is demanding equal pay, demanding to get the same quality of work as a nonminority or demanding to be spoken to with dignity, norm violators get punished. And for too long, women were expected to sit down, be quiet and follow the lead of men,” says Fitzgerald Bramwell, a Chicago litigator.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ramos v. Louisiana that split verdicts in state trials for serious criminal offenses violated the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, overturning a high court ruling in 1972 that upheld them. The effect of the court’s ruling in Ramos is that state courts will now vacate cases with split verdicts on direct appeal. Prosecutors will next decide whether to retry them. What is unclear is whether the ruling will apply retroactively.
New concerns about maternal risks in pregnancy emerged as COVID-19 plowed its way across the country this year. Maternal mortality across the spectrum shows stunning increases in the United States. The number of deaths has risen while declining in almost every other nation.
Lawyers have a long tradition of supporting efforts to bring racial and social justice to this country. Recent killings of unarmed Black people by police have sparked a new wave of protests and demonstrations on a scale not seen in decades. Once again, the nation has been forced to pay attention.
