As the U.S. Supreme Court neared the end of its term in June, liberals and conservatives waited with great anticipation to see how Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would vote in the two most contentious cases on the docket: the future of the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage.
Roberts, as he has sometimes done during his just-completed first 10 years as chief justice, managed to please and disappoint both sides of the political spectrum with his votes.
Water conservation is so important to California that it's in the state constitution. Article X, Section 2, says that "the waste ... of water [should] be prevented, and that the conservation of such waters is to be exercised."
That's especially so this year, when Gov. Jerry Brown called for urban areas to cut back their water use by 25 percent in response to a multiyear drought. The April 1 executive order also asked water agencies "to develop rate structures ... to maximize water conservation."
Late last year, officials in Warren County, Kentucky, enacted a measure that state lawmakers spent decades rejecting: The Warren County Fiscal Court, equivalent to a city council, passed its own “right-to-work” law, which allows employees in unionized business to opt out of paying dues. The occasion was seen as cause…
It's mid-March and I'm at the DocuSign conference at the Grand Hyatt in downtown San Francisco. It's a bustling gathering with a Fortune 500 vibe—room after room of people discussing various aspects of digital transaction management.
At a rather small table in a large hotel conference room, five pioneers in new legal services met with the ABA Journal in May. Someone suggested the Las Vegas gathering looked like a poker game, but the intention was a discussion of a very different kind of gambling—the risks they've taken in beginning legal businesses outside the traditional law firm and the bets they've placed on the future of the legal industry.
International law firm Dentons announced in January it was combining with the largest law firm in China, a union that would create the world's largest firm to date. Dessert came not three months later, when Dentons said it would also swallow the 400-lawyer Atlanta firm McKenna Long & Aldridge.
What does the 1980 boxing movie Raging Bull have to do with adult diapers? Plenty. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, also known as the Raging Bull case because it concerned a copyright in that movie’s screenplay. The court held that the equitable doctrine of laches,…
In an attempt to stave off same-sex marriage, many states passed religious freedom restoration acts this year, with language that exempts businesses from providing services to same-sex couples based on the owner’s religious beliefs. But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, issued in…
