Free Republic

Denia Perez’s parents brought her from Mexico to the United States illegally when she was 11. Last month, she became among the first of the so-called “Dreamers” to earn a law degree. And now, she and others are using their lawyerly know-how to take on the system so they can legally practice. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows young immigrants who entered the U.S. before 2007 and before their 16th birthday to go to school under temporary renewable work permits, became law in 2012. That means the first beneficiaries have now had just enough time to graduate...

It seems like every week, there’s a new story of a female high school or even middle school teacher who has been arrested for engaging in relations with one of her students.The women are often young, attractive, and often (seemingly) happily married. It has been happening so frequently that it appears to be a reasonably solid trend, and yet there’s little widespread call to end it.Selwyn Duke of the New American, in his article, Female Teachers Having Affairs With Young Boys — Now a Weekly Occurrence, says that while there are many high-profile cases the media has covered recently, the...

Caputo called for an “investigation of the investigators” and said he wanted to know who was “coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump.” “Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election,” Caputo said. “I want to know because God damn you to hell."

A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump was an outwardly happy man because of the utterance of one solitary word from the lips of special counsel Robert Mueller to one of Trump's lawyers. The word that thrilled the president and his legal team was "subject." It seems that Mueller and one of Trump's lawyers had been negotiating the terms under which the president would submit to an informal interrogation by Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents. Mueller's request for such an interview was not unusual. Investigators are usually looking to trap an unwary potential defendant into lying...

Oil companies? The government? The public? All of the above share the blame. There are numerous ongoing legal challenges in an effort to determine who’s responsible for climate change. Exxon is under investigation by state attorneys general, cities are suing oil companies over sea level rise costs, and Our Children’s Trust is suing the federal government for failing to protect their generation from climate change. At the heart of these legal challenges lies the question – who bears culpability for climate change and liability for its costs and consequences? The case against the fossil fuel industry largely relies on proving...

A summons has been issued to President Trump in a lawsuit alleging he is violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. The lawsuit — filed by the attorneys general in Washington, D.C., and Maryland — alleges that Trump is violating the clause, which prevents elected officials from receiving gifts or benefits from foreign governments without Congress’s approval, WAMU reported. The lawsuit is filed against Trump in his "official capacity and in his individual capacity," according to the Washington, D.C., radio station. The lawsuit also argues that businesses in Maryland and D.C. have been hurt because groups instead choose to stay...

Mueller indicts lawyer Alex van der Zwaan. MSM scream: the evil Drumpf is about to fall! They're embarrassingly WRONG, of course. And they are MISLEADING you, by not mentioning OTHER names (bombshells incoming). Let me explain.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has “quietly” put an end to most work at the Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), one of the lesser initiatives of the Eric Holder era, according to a Thursday New York Times report.The tiny ATJ was founded in 2010 under then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Its last published organization chart, from 2015, shows only three appointees and their support staff. ATJ distributed grants and drafted “statements of interest” aimed at supporting the right to competent legal representation for the poor and indigent secured by the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s famous 1963 decision in...

Scientists and lawyers do not get along. There's a reason for that. Simply put, scientists and lawyers do not think alike. I was smacked in the face by this reality when I was called into jury duty in 2011. The case involved a car accident, and the standard in Washington State for the jury to decide in favor of the plaintiff is a "preponderance of evidence," which is a fancy way of saying, "51 percent." Essentially, a coin toss decides if the plaintiff wins a bunch of money. The judge asked if any of the potential jurors objected to that....

Wednesday, January 03, 2018 The Lawyers' War on Trump Posted by Daniel Greenfield The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points. From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by...

Former US President Barack Obama is set to visit Chinese Leader Xi Jinping this Tuesday while on a five-day trip to China, India and France. A statement from Washington's spokeswoman has told CNN that former President Barack Obama is set to meet with his former counterparts during his trip, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. Obama, who will be arriving in Shanghai to deliver remarks at the Global Alliance of SMEs Summit, will meet with Xi for the first time since September 2016, when both leaders ratified the Paris climate agreement in their respective countries. Just recently, current US President Donald...

And that, kids, is justice. Walk into court in a jail jumper, plead guilty to a lie, walk out the door and laugh. That’s where the Leticia Astacio clown circus took us yesterday, as all of a sudden it’s not just about #drunkjudge, it’s about a system that might be as effed up as she says it is. She is a Rochester City Court judge who, caught driving drunk one morning on the way in to do arraignments, has been in and out of jail and she has taken a simple misdemeanor and turned it into the most exasperating local...

For the fourth time since January, one of President Trump’s nominees for a Federal Judgeship has received the extremely rare “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, and this time it’s a man who has never tried a case in a Federal or State Court in what amounts to a very short, limited career: A 36-year-old lawyer who has never tried a case and who was unanimously deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association has been approved for a lifetime federal district judgeship by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The lawyer, Brett Talley, is the fourth judicial nominee under...

The Supreme Court decision on defence lawyer Joe Groia's behaviour will have a significant impact on lawyers and judicial independenceOn Monday, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear a case that will determine who gets to regulate a lawyer’s courtroom behaviour, which has important implications for our justice system. At the centre of the storm is a Toronto litigator named Joe Groia, who has been convicted of being “rude” — that is, in engaging in uncivil courtroom conduct — by the Law Society, the body that regulates Ontario lawyers. As a result of his conviction, Joe has been sentenced to...

Maryland officials appear to have begun to circle the wagons in defending Hillary Clinton’s lawyers, according to the lawyer trying to get them punished by the state bar. Ty Clevenger, who last month won a court order demanding the state’s attorney grievance commission investigate David E. Kendall, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson over accusations of destruction of evidence, says the state is now refusing to divulge the progress of the probe, breaking its usual rules. Mr. Clevenger also said the state’s top court quietly changed the rules in June to allow the bar to refuse to investigate complaints filed by...

One of the worse effects of sentencing someone to prison time is what it does to that person’s health. Which is why anyone on the cusp of a term of imprisonment is really much, much better off seeing a dentist and a doctor before they go in. Another problem that anyone who has spent any time in a jail or prison knows — even in a lawyer visiting room — is that prisons underspend on HVAC systems, if they spend at all. In the summer, jails and prisons are sweltering. In the winter, people in federal prisons often have to...

A personal injury law firm is now suing the producer of bump stocks — devices that can be fitted to a semi-automatic weapon to simulate fully-automatic fire — over its reported role in the Las Vegas shooting. The lawsuit was filed Friday on behalf of concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival and does not purport to represent the 58 who were killed or the hundreds of others who were injured, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Police said that at least two of the weapons in Stephen Paddock’s hotel suite were fitted with bump stocks. The firm, the...

In the heart of South Beach’s entertainment district, a woman was shot dead by a police officer after causing at least one crash and then knocking a cop to the ground with her car Sunday evening. Police Chief Daniel Oates said the incident started at about 6:15 p.m., when a woman driving a black BMW westbound on 12th Street hit a Mercedes with two men inside at Collins Avenue after running a red light. An officer who was nearby on foot because he was part of additional patrols for the weekend tried to get her to stop, but she accelerated...

An expanding special counsel probe into the Trump campaign's alleged Russian ties has saddled many of President Trump's current and former associates with hefty legal fees and left them few options for footing the bill. More than a dozen people, including the president and vice president, are known to have hired attorneys to help them navigate special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and several additional probes in Congress. Some have complained about the burden of paying for their legal bills without assistance from the wealthy president whose campaign is in the crosshairs of federal investigators. "It's very expensive and nobody's called...

A wildlife photographer and an animal rights group have reached a settlement in perhaps the weirdest lawsuit of the century. David Slater and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have been at loggerheads for years over who owns the rights to the famous "monkey selfie" taken by a curious macaque in 2011.