Free Republic

How bad do the Democrats want to win the Senate seat vacated by newly crowned Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado?First they strung out Republican Maldo's confirmation in the Assembly to force – they thought – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to make the special election for the Senate seat the same day as the general election in November. That, the Dems figured, would let them take advantage of the largest possible voter turnout and give them the best chance to capture the Central Coast Senate seat.But the Republican governor is still a Republican, and he called for a special election in the dead...

Barry A. Hazle Jr. served a year in prison on a drug charge. After he got out, his parole agent sent him back for being an atheist. Now, the 41-year-old Redding computer technician has won a ruling from a Sacramento federal judge against the state and stands to collect damages for having his constitutional rights violated. Even before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. decided in his favor last week, California corrections officials had issued a new policy protecting the rights of atheist parolees. "This has been a long and painful process for me," Hazle said in a statement...

The 1st District Court of Appeal has granted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's petition for writ of supercedeas in Union of American Physicians and Dentists v. Schwarzenegger. The decision means that furloughs continue during the appeal of Alameda Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch's decision to end furloughs for state workers in "special fund" departments named in the lawsuit. Here's the language from the San Francisco-based court's Web site:

MODESTO – The Episcopal-Anglican battle in Stanislaus County got very personal this week when the Episcopal faction filed a lawsuit against St. Francis Anglican Church in Turlock seeking control of the its assets. The suit was filed Monday in Stanislaus Superior Court by the Rev. Jerry Lamb, bishop of the Modesto-based Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. It names the Rev. Gerald "Gerry" Grossman and nine members of the church's vestry, or ruling body, as well as the St. Francis parish as defendants. St. Francis is the first parish in the diocese to face an individual lawsuit in the dispute that...

California legislative Republicans said Wednesday they'll be rolling out their own bills over the next several weeks to try to spur private-sector job growth by cutting regulations on businesses and trying to reduce lawsuits. Members of the minority party gathered on the Capitol steps with Senate GOP leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murietta, who said Republicans will introduce some new bills and revive others they've tried "for years and for years" to get approved. "The answer isn't more government," Hollingsworth said, "and it isn't more government spending and it certainly isn't more taxes and more regulations on California's businesses and workers." Hollingsworth...

Governors and other politicians come to the Capitol and eventually go away, some to other political venues and some to obscurity. As they come and go, however, thousands of interest groups and their professional warriors remain, fighting and refighting battles for decades. None of those conflicts is more enduring than "tort war," the struggle over the rules governing injury lawsuits waged by trial lawyers, who would expand the ability to sue and collect damages, and business groups that want to restrict suits. While some of their clashes are obvious – the decades-long fight over medical malpractice damages, for instance –...

State officials and advocates for the rights of the disabled are hailing a $1.1 billion settlement of a suit regarding access to sidewalks and facilities owned or maintained by the state's Department of Transportation. "This settlement is a win-win," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a statement released by Caltrans today. . . .

California just missed being labeled a "judicial hellhole" by the American Tort Reform Foundation, a business-backed group that lobbies for changes in the laws and procedures governing lawsuits that allege injuries. Instead, the state was placed on the organization's "watch list" for what the Washington-based organization termed "poorly reasoned California court decisions (that) have placed the state's citizens and business owners in jeopardy." It did not specify what those decisions were, but added, "California businesses are concerned that they will be unfairly hit with consumer and disabled-access lawsuits by those who have chosen litigation as a lifestyle. . . .

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues. Such lawsuits ask courts to second-guess presidential decisions and pose "the risk of deterring full and frank advice regarding the military's detention and treatment of those determined to be enemies during an armed conflict," Justice Department lawyers said Thursday in arguments to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco....

BERKELEY -- Berkeley activists can sue federal agents for their role in a 2008 raid in which officers seized their computers and records in search of alleged threats by animal-rights advocates, a federal judge ruled Monday. The activist group Long Haul Inc. can try to prove that the search of its Berkeley offices exceeded legal boundaries, that agents misled the judge who issued a search warrant, and that it was targeted because of its left-wing views, said U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. An unaffiliated group with offices in the same Berkeley building, East Bay Prisoner Support, also won the right...

One of the many contentious issues in the national health care debate is something that began 34 years ago in California when Jerry Brown, in the first year of his first governorship, signed legislation imposing a $250,000 limit on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases. The version of a national health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House contains a provision that would push – but not quite compel – California and other states with malpractice damage caps to repeal them.

Thanks to a timely traffic wreck, a local real estate developer won 57 acres of prime Rancho Murieta property five years ago for just $2,000. And if that came as a shock to the big union pension fund and the bank that lost out in the deal, the bad news recently got worse for them.On Nov. 16, a judge gaveled more salt into the wounds of the Operating Engineers Local 3 Pension Trust Fund and the Amalgamated Bank. It came in a tentative decision that established the value of the land at $27 million, or 13,500 times more than what...

When California's political consultants share war stories, 1988's immensely expensive, multifront battle between insurance companies and lawyer-backed consumer groups takes center stage. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on a confusing array of competing ballot measures, and when the dust had settled, insurers had lost big, particularly with passage of Proposition 103, which made the state insurance commissioner an elected official and dramatically increased insurance regulation. It was a big battle in the decades-long "tort war" over rules governing who can sue whom for personal injuries, including auto accidents – a war fought in the Legislature, on the ballot...

California's government is in a state of civil war. The battlegrounds: courtrooms from San Francisco to Sacramento. The fight: furloughs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration spent $228,000 on furlough litigation as part of an eight-month contract that ended in June with Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard, a Sacramento-based law firm. "These legal costs wouldn't be so high if people weren't fighting the furloughs," said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger's Department of Personnel Administration. "That's ludicrous," said Yvonne Walker, president of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which represents about 95,000 state workers. "What audacity, to blame the very people they're hurting...

The American Civil Liberties Union and the United Farm Workers Union filed a lawsuit this morning against Cal-OSHA, accusing it of not being capable of protecting the state's 650,000 farm laborers from heat injury and death. The suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court credits occupational safety officials with stepping up enforcement in the wake of fatalities last year. But it says employers remain out of compliance with regulations. It cites as evidence six farmworker deaths last year -- three more than Cal-OSHA recognizes -- injuries of farmworkers this year and widespread violations of laws that Cal-OSHA inspectors have found...

In 1992, after he stopped wearing clothes to his UC Berkeley classes, Andrew Martinez was something of a walking only-in-Berserkeley joke as the campus' own Naked Guy. But his life was no laughing matter. Around 1997, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 2003, he was arrested for assaulting a staff member at a halfway house where he was a resident. He spent the next 21/2 years in Santa Clara County jail, its acute psychiatric unit, Napa and Atascadero state hospitals - until at age 33, he killed himself by suffocating himself with a plastic bag in a jail cell on...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Friday largely agreed with a landmark ruling that found cigarette makers deceived the public for decades about the heath hazards of smoking. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld the major elements of a 2006 ruling that found the nation's top tobacco companies guilty of fraud and violating racketeering laws. The ruling said manufacturers must change the way they market cigarettes. It bans labels such as "low tar,""light,""ultra light" or "mild," since such cigarettes have been found to be no safer than others because of how people smoke them. It also...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The Obama White House is reversing a Bush administration initiative that used federal health and safety regulations to limit the ability of injured consumers to sue companies in state courts. ...Trial lawyers who file class-action lawsuits on behalf of millions of consumers praised Obama's action.

Members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp. How things have changed since 2004, when Democrats were outraged that, in time of war, the GOP White House could be run by men with no combat experience. Saying that he was "reporting for duty," while speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., made much of his combat experience, as others criticized President George W. Bush for only serving in the Air National Guard during Vietnam. From the Senate floor, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called Vice...

City Council members on Tuesday approved a resolution authorizing the city to file suit against national lenders who they say created a foreclosure crisis in Memphis and Shelby County that disproportionately affected African-Americans. The resolution alleges lenders engaged in "deceptive" and "discriminatory" lending practices targeted at the black community and "other select groups" that caused "substantial" and "irreparable" harm to neighborhoods and the governments. The Shelby County Commission recently approved a similar resolution, claiming the foreclosure epidemic has devastated neighborhoods, slashed property values, eroded the tax base and drained local government coffers because of a host of direct and indirect...