When Risa Levine, a real estate attorney in New York City, got married, she wanted nothing more than to have a baby. Her husband at the time also wanted a child, but they weren't able to do so on their own. So they went to a fertility clinic together.
The word patchwork may be the best way to describe the layers of laws that governed the relationships of same-sex couples before June 26, 2015, the day the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to marriage for gay couples in Obergefell v. Hodges (PDF).
Attorney Sherri Jefferson still remembers a juvenile criminal case that, she says, “really works me up.” Her 14-year-old client, suspected of participating in an armed robbery that led to murder, did something unusual for someone his age: He asked questions when the police read him his Miranda rights. He asked…
Debra Black was accused of stealing about $6 worth of goods from a Goodwill store. Black, a quadriplegic in her early 60s, claims she didn’t intend to steal. She says she hung a child’s purse and other items from the arm of her wheelchair so she could use her hands,…
The 90-mile corridor between Key West and the north coast of Cuba is far wider, deeper and considerably more dangerous when you factor in everything that's happened between the two countries during the last 57 years. Former ABA President Stephen Zack (with a flag from pre-revolutionary Cuba in his office) escaped from the island as a teenager two years after Fidel Castro seized power.
Angry about a child custody dispute, Scott Dekraai armed himself with three handguns, drove to the beauty salon in Seal Beach, California, where his ex-wife worked and opened fire. The two-minute rampage in October 2011 left eight people dead and one injured, making it the worst mass shooting in Orange County history. Within an hour, Dekraai was pulled over by police and confessed. Numerous witnesses, including a survivor, could testify that he was the shooter. There was no reason to think that convicting him would be difficult.
Elizabeth Townsend Gard was researching British literature when it became clear that she would have to learn something about copyrights. It was 1994, and Gard was trying to start her dissertation on the author Vera Brittain, who is best known for her work set during World War I. She didn't know much about copyrights; she wanted to be a history professor. But she needed Brittain's writing to do her work, and it wasn't clear whether she could use it legally.
Many people love using cellphones to take selfies and post the pictures on social media. Lately, one version of such photos has drawn the attention of lawmakers, free speech advocates and the courts. They're called ballot selfies, in which people take shots of their election ballots and share them online.
America's founders believed in creating a criminal justice policy that was swift and certain—yet at the same time less harsh than England's "bloody code," which favored capital punishment for many crimes.
As the most successful band in history, the Beatles generated not only a record number of music hits but probably more legal disputes than any other music group before or since. As the first international rock band brand in a still nascent music business – and guided by a neophyte personal manager – the Beatles became entangled in a distracting series of legal problems nearly from the start of their career.
