Bail Bondsman in Sanford – The Supreme Court Sets a Higher Standard for Special Education

Source     : Real Clear Education News
By             : Brian Rogers, Mihir Zaveri, and Gabrielle Banks
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

The Supreme Court Sets a Higher Standard for Special Education

Amid the Neil Gorsuch confirmation hearings, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District and handed down what may prove to be the most important special education ruling in thirty-five years. The unanimous decision in Endrew F. smacks down the Rowley decision which has, since 1982, fueled an often-contentious relationship between parents and school districts. It was tough news for a man awaiting confirmation to the highest court as Gorsuch had supported the Rowley standard as a federal judge in the Tenth Circuit. Despite that drama, the Endrew F. ruling is good news for children, families and special educators, and a crucial milestone in the 40th year of implementing federal special education law. Under Rowley, public schools were only required to establish a floor for opportunity through their special education programs. The Endrew F. decision ruled that a floor, alone, was insufficient. It reflects a belief in the potential of all students by requiring that schools offer “an IEP [individualized education plan] reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances.”  Endrew F. is not specific; it does not prescribe a definition of progress or offer grade level equivalents that are the basis of mainstream schooling.  The Endrew F. case shifts the position of the school district from one that must satisfy a minimum standard to one that must offer a reasonable hope of progress and in doing so, takes a step toward fulfilling the promise of special education that started with President Ford’s signing of Public Law 94-142 in 1975.

Few teachers today can remember the “bad old days” when a school administrator could refuse to enroll a child with a disability. When Congress passed Public Law 94-142, it was focused on the million children who were excluded from public schools and on the lack of quality services for many of those severely challenged children who were enrolled. It became illegal after the law to exclude children from school because of a disability. The law was rooted in a commitment to access—all children are entitled to a public education. But the law was not written for benefit. Public Law 94-142 and its successor, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), do not set academic, social or behavioral expectations. The law watched after the outcomes for children by giving parents an unprecedented role in designing and approving the program for their children. Giving parents a voice in their child’s IEP was an amazing feat. Congress knew that parents were not educators and that many parents lacked an adequate education themselves. But Congress also knew that parents love their children. Giving parents a voice was revolutionary in 1975 and still remarkable today. But the administrative realities of having mom and dad engaged in the IEP process mounted as the number of children covered under the law grew to more than 6 million.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that a law designed to address access ultimately failed to advance equity. Compliance superseded opportunity as the law’s primary focus. Sadly, the cost of compliance fueled fiscal nightmares for state and district leaders. Special education became a maintenance system for too many students whose disabilities remained static. Serving the students was mandatory; improving their lot in life was not. But Endrew F. changes that. The reauthorization of IDEA now looms large and presents an opportunity for the U.S. Department of Education to recapture the high ground in special education. While President Trump’s “skinny budget” showed no decrease in support for special education, it also showed no increase or no move to the full funding that has eluded federally guided special education since its implementation. Endrew F. is an upgrade for children and a concomitant increase in expenditures for school districts. States and districts will now look for guidance and leadership from an understaffed U.S. Department of Education in the application of Endrew F. In recent decades, special education has drifted from its role as a champion of access and of care for those with disabilities to a compliance-driven model. Children should not have to pay for the organizational inadequacies of the education system or for the underfunding of special education. But they do. The Endrew F. decision provides a mandate for school districts to move beyond de minimus and toward appropriate progress. It’s a step in the right direction and a move in keeping with the law’s original intent as a champion for those with disabilities.

Read more here : realcleareducation.com/articles/2017/04/11/the_supreme_court_sets_a_higher_standard_for_special_education__110141.html

Bondsman in Seminole County – European Court of Justice lays down the law on Kodipocalypse

Source     : The Register News
By             : Andrew Orlowski
Category :  Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

European Court of Justice lays down the law on Kodipocalypse

Europe’s highest court has made it easier for member states to halt the sale of media sticks with preloaded pirate streaming links and add-ons. The past few months have seen significant growth in pre-configured streaming boxes or USB sticks. These use the Kodi platform, an open-source player, configured by a vendor with add-ons that enable access to pirate TV services.

The UK has approved realtime blocks by ISPs during popular Premier League games until the end of the English season to gauge the effectiveness of blocking the streams at source. Meanwhile, trading standards officers and police have launched raids on vendors. The European Court of Justice was invited to give its opinion on a Dutch district court case involving a vendor of one player, filmspeler.nl. The court today decreed that the vendor’s actions constituted a “communication to the public”.

This is a peculiar doctrine specific to European law, not found in the Berne Convention, which some of Europe’s top legal experts believe is based on a mistranslation. URLs were deemed not to be a “communication to the public” last September. It’s a cumbersome analog to the idea of secondary liability, which takes into account intent, as it did for Grokster in the US Supreme Court in 2005. But the advantage for legal wonks and lawyers in Europe is that they can continue to evolve the concept for years to come. Only a cynic would suggest that lawyers and legal academics profit from such confusion, so we won’t.

The ECJ decided that: In the present case and having regard, in particular, to the content of the advertising of the multimedia player and to the fact that the main attraction of that player for potential purchasers is the pre-installation of the add-ons concerned, the Court finds that the purchaser of such a player accesses a free and unauthorised off.

Read more here: theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/ecj_kodi_addons/

Bail Bond Seminole County – Supreme Court rules for disabled girl, service dog

Source     : USA Today News
By             : Richard Wolf
Category :  Bail Bond Seminole County , Bail Bondsman in Sanford

Supreme Court rules for disabled girl, service dog

The proverb “every dog has its day” came true at the Supreme Court on Wednesday for the family of a 13-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and her goldendoodle, Wonder. In a case that was closely watched by the disability community, the high court ruled unanimously that Ehlena Fry’s family can pursue a lawsuit against her former public school district for denying access to her service dog.

Lower courts had ruled that the family first had to exhaust all administrative remedies under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act before seeking damages under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the justices ruled that if the family did not pursue a solution under IDEA, it can sidestep that process in search of its real goal: providing Ehlena with greater physical and emotional independence. “Nothing in the nature of the Frys’ suit suggests any implicit focus on the adequacy of (Ehlena’s) education,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote. “The Frys could have filed essentially the same complaint if a public library or theater had refused admittance to Wonder.”

Even so, the 8-0 ruling leaves open the possibility that a lower federal court still could require exhaustion of the IDEA administrative process, depending on further fact-finding. As often happens as court proceedings drag on, Ehlena was moved to a different Michigan elementary school that welcomed Wonder — now 10 and retired as a service dog — and even put the pooch’s mug shot in its yearbook. Over the years, the lawsuit against the Napoleon Community Schools became more about principle than keeping the girl and her goldendoodle together.

A number of justices had seemed sympathetic to the Frys’ argument during oral arguments in October. Forcing them to negotiate with school officials over Ehlena’s educational program seemed unfair, they said, when her education wasn’t the problem. Rather, the Frys wanted Wonder — not a human aide — to perform such tasks as helping Ehlena in the bathroom and through doorways. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer expressed concern that a decision in the Frys’ favor could allow families of children with disabilities to gain an advantage over school districts by threatening ADA lawsuits while negotiating their educational programs. But Roberts acknowledged that requiring the Frys to go through the IDEA process when their concerns were not about education was “a kind of charade.” The case was the first of two heard this term that could influence how schools handle children with disabilities. In January, the justices also appeared to side with the family of a Colorado student with autism seeking a more substantial education under the IDEA law. That case, likely to be decided this spring, could have a broader impact on thousands of students with disabilities.

Read more here: usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/22/supreme-court-disabled-girl-wonder-service-dog/98214948/

Bail Bondsman in Sanford – State’s high court to ‘ride the circuit,’ visit high school

Source     : MC Clatchy DC News
By             : The Associated Press
Category :  Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

State’s high court to ‘ride the circuit,’ visit high school

The Rhode Island Supreme Court will hear oral arguments at Woonsocket High School in a tradition known as “riding the circuit.” The state’s high court will hear three cases at the school Wednesday. Chief Justice Paul Suttell says it’s an opportunity to take the court’s work out of Providence to show students and the public how their justice system works.

The court will hear arguments in a lawsuit involving serious injury to a man while target shooting, an appeal of a criminal conviction for robbery and an appeal of a criminal conviction for possession of a firearm.

The court revived the centuries-old tradition of traveling throughout its jurisdiction within the last 16 years to reach out to the community.

Read more here: mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article146277844.html

Bondsman in Seminole County – Is the Supreme Court acting less like a court?

Source     : The Conversation News
By             : Bob Egelko
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

Is the Supreme Court acting less like a court?

As the pinnacle of the judicial branch, the U.S. Supreme Court is necessarily involved in some of the highest-profile, most controversial and most political cases across the country. And it is one of the most widely respected government institutions in the country. Some of its reputation may be because the justices are not seen as mere “politicians in robes.” Research also tells us people respect the Supreme Court in part because it shares traditions and pageantry with the larger judicial system – such as judges in robes wielding gavels. As members of a team of legal scholars and information scientists who use computational methods to study the judicial system, we wondered whether another potential source of the Supreme Court’s public esteem is its use of language. Like other courts, the Supreme Court doesn’t announce its rulings with one-line tweets, for example, the way many politicians declare their intentions to vote for or against legislative bills. Rather, it issues lengthy documents setting out facts and legal precedents and connecting them to each other in ways that both declare an outcome and explain (or object to) how the court reached that decision. The more these written opinions suggest the court is set apart from the political fray, the more they can help its reputation. But how can we know if the Supreme Court is writing like a judicial body rather than a more political institution? One way is to compare its decisions to those issued by the next-highest level of federal courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, which are widely perceived to be less politically partisan and more focused on addressing run-of-the-mill legal issues. Our comparison found that from 1951 to 2007, Supreme Court opinions have indeed become increasingly different in their content from opinions issued by lower federal courts, indicating that over time, the court appears to be drifting away from its judicial roots.

Machine reading the law
In other work, our group has studied the evolution of the writing style of the Supreme Court and timescales of influence of opinion as well as ideological expression in judicial opinions. In each project, we applied various kinds of big data text mining tools to collections of tens of thousands of opinions. For our current research, we chose to view judicial opinions as a genre of lawmaking text, akin to legislatures’ statutes, the president’s executive orders (or, these days, tweets) and agencies’ regulations. We analyzed a random sample of 25,000 of the entire corpus of approximately 300,000 opinions issued from the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts between 1951 and 2007. Our analysis included all opinion types, including dissents. We were interested not in whether there were small stylistic differences – such as increased use of footnotes – but whether the actual words of Supreme Court opinions were distinctive from those of the appeals courts, and whether that distinctiveness was changing. Our analysis found that over five decades, the language of the Supreme Court’s opinions became increasingly different from those of the appellate courts. This trend may undermine the court’s popular legitimacy over time, particularly when viewed in concert with other developments indicating the Supreme Court may be becoming increasingly politicized, such as the process of nominating and confirming new justices.

Who wrote that?
The first step in our analysis used a specific type of machine learning, called a “topic model,” which detects groups of words that generally appear near each other with predictable frequency in a given body of texts. For example, it can tell whether a particular opinion is more focused on the equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment as opposed to environmental law because in the former, the words “discrimination” and “race” are more likely to appear together and frequently, while in the latter this is true of the words “pollution” and “water.” For the next step, we used the results of the topic analysis to teach a machine learning program to classify thousands of opinions as either written by the Supreme Court or a federal appeals court. Based on the topic information, the machine was able to pick up on content differences between the two groups of opinions. For example, the Supreme Court’s opinions tend to have more words associated with interpreting laws and constitutional rights, like using the history of Reconstruction to interpret civil rights statutes. The appeals courts’ opinions tended to have more words referring to times, dates, testimony and evidence.

Based on this training, we tested how well the machine was able to guess whether new opinions were written by the Supreme Court. To humanize it a bit, imagine a legal scholar who had read the first set of opinions walking down the street one day and coming across a few pages of a judicial opinion with all identifying information torn away. How good would she be at identifying which court produced it – and does her accuracy vary depending on when the pages were written? Even in the 1950s, the first decade in our sample, the Supreme Court’s opinions were already quite different from appeals court decisions. When presented with opinions written in this period, the machine was able to judge with roughly 80 percent accuracy which opinions were written by the Supreme Court. So its decisions were already fairly easily distinguished from appeals court opinions. But they got even more so as years went by: When presented with opinions written in the 2000s, the algorithm achieved an almost perfect score. An exception that illustrates how this works is the algorithm’s tendency to misclassify the Supreme Court’s 2003 Yarborough v. Gentry ruling. That opinion provides guidance for the lower courts on how to deal with habeas corpus cases, which are a mainstay of their work. It deals with a common issue in the lower courts that does not come up to the Supreme Court as often. As a result, it is not surprising that it might be mistaken for a lower court opinion.

The idiosyncratic court
Over time, by increasingly focusing on an idiosyncratic set of topics and by constructing their arguments in an increasingly unique way, Supreme Court opinions have become more distinctive. That hypothetical random opinion found on the street is easier to identify because the court is expressing itself in a new subgenre of legal writing that is more identifiable. This isn’t just because of differences in the mix of topics the courts rule on. For example, the Supreme Court takes up constitutional issues more commonly than any other type of case. The appeals courts, by contrast, decide the occasional high-profile constitutional cases alongside a large number of unexceptional contract law, administrative law and criminal law matters. Our analysis shows that while the details of these differences shift over the years, the degree of difference didn’t change from 1951 to 2007. What we find, instead, is that the Supreme Court is analyzing and writing about cases in an increasingly idiosyncratic fashion, distinct from the style of the appeals courts. This may contribute to an overall impression within the public that the court is just another political body. If that is true, the Supreme Court’s unique place in American society may be compromised, as the reservoir of prestige and respect that it currently enjoys eventually runs dry.

Read more here: theconversation.com/is-the-supreme-court-acting-less-like-a-court-75910

Bail Bond Seminole County – A despotic Supreme Court does not ensure national security

Source     : Israel National News
By            : Dr. Aviel Sheyin-Stevens
Category : Bail Bond Seminole County , Bail Bondsman in Sanford

A despotic Supreme Court does not ensure national security

The security of a country is the first and most important duty of its government. In advanced democracies, public security is within the exclusive control of the political branches of the government: The legislature legislates on immigration, national defense, security matters, etc., and the executive executes the instructions of the legislature. In Israel, the legislature is not sovereign to legislate, and the executive lacks actual control to execute the instructions of the legislature. The Supreme Court has seized the government’s power to enforce border controls, and to determine policies on immigration, military matters, national defense, public security, etc. The dictum of Aharon Barak, President of the Supreme Court of Israel (1995-2006), that “everything is justiciable”, everything is liable to trial, makes nonsense of the rule of law, as well as Israel’s reputation as a democracy. It renders Israel a judicial despotism. The rules of law that Barak’s judicial opinions created have no counterpart in most democracies: that a court can countermand military orders; that a court can decide “whether to prevent the release of a terrorist within the framework of a political ‘package deal’” and direct the government to move the security wall that keeps suicide bombers from entering Israel; that judges can only be removed by other judges; etc. This is what passes for the rule of law in Israel: arbitrary decrees by unelected officials.

The U.S. is trending towards the Israeli model. Some U.S. district court judges ruled that they had the authority to contravene legally framed executive order issued by President Donald Trump, making themselves the supreme law of the land; judicial despotism. In January 2017, Trump issued an executive order calling for extra vetting of certain foreign nationals seeking entry into the U.S. The order temporarily suspends entry by the nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (a reissued order excluded Iraq). It is to last for 90 days, while extra vetting procedures are developed. The judges ruled that the travel ban was not about national security, as the order stated, but “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus.” By vetoing the travel ban, the judges were orchestrating a judicial coup against the constitutional authority of the president; they should be impeached immediately. A U.S. immigration law states that the president can by proclamation “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” Yet the judges ruled against the travel ban based on their own subjective opinion of a president’s supposedly incorrect attitudes and past statements. Intent is neither an element nor a requirement of that law. The U.S. constitution vests all executive power in the president. Shortly after its adoption, Thomas Jefferson wrote that under the Constitution, “the transaction of business with foreign nations is Executive altogether. It belongs then to the head of that department, except as to such portions of it as are specifically submitted to the Senate. Exceptions are to be construed strictly.” The rare exceptions were such matters as the approval of treaties, which Article II expressly vests in the Senate. There are also Constitutional bases for a congressional role in foreign affairs, such as Congress’s power over international commerce, to declare war, and to establish the qualifications for the naturalization of citizens; however, when Congress legislates in this role, it must do so mindful of what the Supreme Court, in United States v. Curtiss-Wright (1936), described as “the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations – a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.”

In international matters, if there is a conflict between a presidential policy and a congressional statute, the president’s policy will take precedence in the absence of some clear constitutional commitment of the subject matter to legislative resolution. In addition to the president’s presumptive supremacy in foreign affairs, there is also a settled doctrine of constitutional law: Where it is possible, congressional statutes should be construed in a manner that avoids constitutional conflicts. The national security distinction between Trump’s 2017 order and the objective of a 1965 immigration act makes it necessary not to construe them as contradictory, and principles of constitutional interpretation counsel against doing so. A section of that act, codified in Section 1152(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, states that “no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” The purpose of the anti-discrimination provision was to end the racially and ethnically discriminatory “national origins” immigration practice that favored Western Europe. Trump’s executive order is not about the racial or ethnic composition of the nation or its incoming immigrants. It is an effort to protect national security from a terrorist threat, which Congress has found to have roots in specified Muslim-majority countries. Another issue is that the order is related to the conduct of foreign affairs – a matter of high importance since it involves foreign threats to national security. If there were conflicts here, the president’s clear constitutional authority to protect the U.S. would take precedence over Congress’s purported authority to limit the president’s denial of entry to foreign nationals; however, there is no conflict. The U.S. immigration law mentioned above states in full in Section 1182(f): “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” Section 1182(f) authorizes the president to issue temporary bans on the entry of classes of aliens for national security purposes, without revealing his state of mind, or proving that he does not have animus against them.

This is precisely what Trump did. He cited Section 1182(f), and his executive order mirrored the language of the statute, finding the entry of aliens from these countries at this time “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”Some people theorized that because Section 1182(f) was enacted in 1952, whereas the non-discrimination provision in Section 1152(a) was enacted in 1965, then the latter must be deemed to have amended the former – thus removing the president’s authority to impose class restrictions based on the foreigners’ country of origin. In 1980, despite the 1965 anti-discrimination statute, President Jimmy Carter barred entry by Iranian nationals after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution led to the American hostage crisis. The discriminatory treatment of Iranians was rooted in anti-terrorism concerns, and was clearly proper. Trump, like Carter, is properly acting on national security concerns.  Trump’s executive order also relies on an Obama-era provision of immigration law, Section 1187(a)(12), which empowers the executive branch to waive the documentation requirements for certain aliens. In the statute, Congress expressly discriminates based on country of origin. Under this provision, Congress provides that an alien is eligible for the waiver only if he or she has not been present (a) in Iraq or Syria any time after March 1, 2011; (b) in any country whose government is designated by the State Department as “repeatedly provid[ing] support for acts of international terrorism;” or (c) in any country that has been designated by the Department of Homeland Security as a country “of concern.” So, Congress never repealed the president’s statutory power to exclude classes of aliens from entry on national security grounds. Moreover, decades after the 1965 anti-discrimination provision, Congress expressly authorized discrimination on the basis of national origin when concerns over international terrorism are involved. Consequently, by the spurious argument of those that theorized that the latter always amend the former, the 1965 statute must be deemed amended by the much more recent Obama-era statute.

The president has plenary power to decide who may and who may not travel to the U.S. The seven Muslim-majority countries (now six) Trump specified are hotbeds of radical Islam, and pose vetting challenges. The ban has to do with national security, not religion. If he wanted to institute a travel ban against Muslims, he would have included the countries in which more than 85 percent of Muslims live. The U.S. judges are carrying out a judicial coup, having decided that the judiciary, not the executive branch, is in charge of immigration, international relations, national security, etc. Beginning with the Chinese exclusion case of 1889, the Supreme Court has made it clear that “the power of exclusion of foreigners” belongs to the political branches of government: Congress and the president; not to the judiciary. Since then, the president’s authority to exclude foreigners in the public interest has been reaffirmed in various cases, including: INS. v. Aguirre-Aguirre (1999), “(J)udicial deference to the Executive Branch is especially appropriate in the immigration context where officials ‘exercise especially sensitive political functions that implicate questions of foreign relations;’” and United States v. Valenzuela-Bernal (1982), “The power to regulate immigration — an attribute of sovereignty essential to the preservation of any nation — has been entrusted by the Constitution to the political branches of the Federal Government.” Law should govern a nation, as opposed to arbitrary decisions of individual government officials. Since power tends to corrupt, democracies limit the powers of elected officials. The most important limit on their power is their need to stand for election on a regular basis. Voters can replace an elected official with another if an incumbent fails to meet their expectations. Power also corrupts appointed officials just as much as it corrupts elected ones; however, voters have no similar authority over unelected officials who fail them. The public did not appoint them, and they owe it no account for their behavior. The Knesset should determine the matters that courts are empowered to consider, and the disputes that they have the authority to resolve. They should not be policy upon vital matters affecting the nation, such that by their nature should be decided by the political (legislative and executive) branches of the government: defense matters, foreign policy, immigration, governmental spending, public security, the making of treaty, the making of war, etc. Congress should impeach the despotic judges that are appropriating the powers of the commander-in-chief, and overriding the decisions of Congress and the president pertaining to immigration, national defense and public security.

Read more here: israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20375

Bail Bondsman in Sanford – Harvard Law Graduate Gorsuch Confirmed to Supreme Court

Source     : The Crimson News
By             : Jamie D. Halper, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

Harvard Law Graduate Gorsuch Confirmed to Supreme Court

Neil M. Gorsuch became the 113th justice of the United States Supreme Court after the Senate confirmed him Friday, joining five other Harvard Law School attendees on the nation’s highest legal body. Gorsuch, who graduated from the Law School in 1991, was confirmed by a vote of 54-45 after weeks of tension in the Senate. President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch to the Court in late January, and his Senate confirmation hearings began in March.

Last week, Senate Democrats filibustered Gorsuch’s confirmation, aiming to block the vote by denying him the 60 votes necessary to move forward to a confirmation vote. Senate Republicans, invoking the so-called “nuclear option,” then changed their voting rules to require only a simple majority to break the filibuster. The justice’s nomination came a year after his predecessor Antonin G. Scalia died in February 2016, leaving a vacancy on the Court. Former president Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland ’74—a Harvard College and Law School graduate—to the Court last year, but Senate Republicans refused to hold confirmation hearings, arguing the next president should select the justice to replace Scalia.

Gorsuch, widely known as a conservative respected across the aisle, is expected to maintain a similar judicial philosophy to Scalia, who advocated a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution. Gorsuch’s views on controversial issues the court is likely to hear cases on, such as abortion, are unclear, and his Senate hearings did little to clarify his stance. However, he is expected to take a traditionally conservative stance on most issues. After Trump attacked a federal judge for blocking one of his controversial immigration executive orders last month, Gorsuch condemned Trump’s accusations, which some signaled the justice’s independence from the Trump administration.

Read more here: thecrimson.com/article/2017/4/10/gorsuch-confirmed-supreme-court/

Bondsman in Seminole County – U.S. Supreme Court ruling could affect Connecticut credit card law

Source     : Yankee Institute News
By             : Marc E. Fitch
Category :  Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

U.S. Supreme Court ruling could affect Connecticut credit card law

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Wednesday a New York law that prevented businesses from charging an extra fee for credit card purchases. The ruling could affect a nearly identical law in Connecticut. Merchants in Connecticut and nine other states can only offer customers a “discount” for using cash but can not charge a “surcharge” for using a credit card. Whether or not the practice is legal depends on how the merchant describes the difference in price, which turned the case into a freedom of speech case.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman determined that New York’s law “does regulate speech” and remanded the case to the Court of Appeals to determine whether or not the law is unconstitutional. The ruling could have ramifications for Connecticut’s law regulating surcharges and discounts. According to Connecticut state statute, “no seller may impose a surcharge on a buyer who elects to use any method of payment, including, but not limited to, cash, check, credit card or electronic means, in any sales transaction.” However, the statute also said that a discount is fine; “Nothing in this section shall prohibit any seller from offering a discount to a buyer to induce such buyer to pay by cash, debit card, check or similar means rather than by credit card.”

The practice is most commonly seen at gas stations which list one price for credit card purchases and a second for cash purchases. Businesses pay a 2 to 4 percent processing fee to credit card companies for every purchase a customer makes using a credit card. Credit card companies contractually prohibit merchants from applying a surcharge to customers but this practice has been repeatedly challenged in court on antitrust grounds. In the court’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that state laws which mimicked and extended these contract provisions invited scrutiny because the antitrust suits have “created uncertainty about the legal validity of such contractual surcharge bans.”

The implication is that these state laws were designed to protect credit card companies in case their contractual prohibitions are ever ruled illegal. The case originated out of New York when a lawyer noticed a sign at Expressions Hair Design that informed customers they would be charged an additional fee for payment by credit card.

Read more here: yankeeinstitute.org/2017/03/u-s-supreme-court-ruling-could-affect-connecticut-credit-card-law/

Bail Bond Seminole County – Supreme Court Considers Why Patent Trolls Love Texas

Source     : NewYork Times News
By             : ADAM LIPTAK
Category : Bail Bond Seminole County , Bail Bondsman in Sanford

Supreme Court Considers Why Patent Trolls Love Texas

More than 40 percent of patent lawsuits are filed in a federal court in East Texas with a reputation for friendliness to plaintiffs. That curious fact was the backdrop for a Supreme Court argument on Monday over whether the court should halt what many big technology companies say is pernicious forum shopping in patent cases. In recent years, a single judge based in Marshall, Tex., oversaw about a quarter of all patent cases nationwide, more than the number handled by all federal judges in California, Florida and New York combined. The Texas court is a favorite venue of patent trolls, or companies that buy patents not to use them but to demand royalties and sue for damages. Many tech companies filed supporting briefs in Monday’s case, TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods Group Brands, No. 16-341, urging the Supreme Court to limit the places where defendants in patent cases may be sued. But a few companies urged the justices to retain the current rules, saying there was a value in letting cases be considered by courts that have developed expertise in patent matters. And some pharmaceutical companies said they should be able to sue the makers of generic drugs all at once in a single court.

The case heard Monday concerns low-calorie sweeteners made by TC Heartland, which is based in Indiana. Kraft sued it for patent infringement in Delaware, which also has a high concentration of patent suits. TC Heartland sought to move the case to Indiana, but lower courts refused, relying on a 1990 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court that handles patent appeals. That decision said defendants in patent cases, as in other cases, may be sued essentially anywhere they do business. On Monday, Justice Elena Kagan noted a curiosity about the 1990 decision: It was at odds with a 1957 Supreme Court precedent. She sounded surprisingly sanguine about this state of affairs. “For 30 years the Federal Circuit has been ignoring our decision, and the law has effectively been otherwise,” she said.

Justice Kagan also reflected on what the case had in common with one argued earlier on Monday about pension plans. “Sometimes we have accidental theme days at the Supreme Court,” she said. “So today’s accidental theme is: When 30 years of practice goes against you, what happens?” The 1957 decision interpreted a federal law about where patent suits may be filed. The law said that “any civil action for patent infringement may be brought in the judicial district where the defendant resides.” The court said that meant where the defendant was incorporated. The patent law has not changed, but a more general one on where suits may be brought has gone through amendments. Kraft argued that those changes effectively revised the law on patent cases.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court’s 1957 decision was exceptionally narrow. Corporations are often incorporated in one place and have headquarters in another, she said, with both states counting for many purposes. But the 1957 decision focused only on the state of incorporation. The argument was almost over before the justices discussed the question of forum shopping at length. William M. Jay, a lawyer for Kraft, said any complaints about the court in East Texas should be addressed directly and not through a decision on where suits may be filed. “They tend to be complaints about how the cases are managed, how discovery takes place, how motions practice is handled, and so on,” he said. “And those complaints, if they are valid, would be valid even when venue is indisputably proper over a Texas defendant. They are problems that should be dealt with on their own terms.” That did not seem to satisfy Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Do “generous jury verdicts enter into this, or is that something we shouldn’t think about?” he asked.

Mr. Jay said the data on verdicts and other matters was inconclusive. In any event, he added, Congress — not the Supreme Court — should address the issues. A court ruling, he said, would be precipitous. “If you adopt the rule that my friends on the other side are proposing,” he said, “you will shift more than half of all cases from the district where they now are into other districts.” That could lead to overcrowding in the federal court in Delaware, he said, given the large numbers of corporations incorporated in the state. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he was inclined to ignore the controversy over forum shopping, focusing instead on what Congress had meant to achieve in the statutes before the court. The supporting briefs, he said, were “filled with this thing about a Texas district which they think has too many cases.”“As far as I can see,” he told James W. Dabney, a lawyer for TC Heartland, “if we’re supposed to decide what’s good or bad, maybe you’d lose. But I don’t know whether that’s good, bad or indifferent.”

Read more here: nytimes.com/2017/03/27/business/supreme-court-patent-trolls-tc-heartland-kraft.html

Bail Bondsman in Sanford – Legal Test Of School’s Responsibility In $41.5 Million Hotchkiss Case

Source     : Courant News
By             : JOHN C.P. GOLDBERG, BENJAMIN C. ZIPURSKY
Category : Bail Bondsman in Sanford , Bondsman in Seminole County

Legal Test Of School’s Responsibility In $41.5 Million Hotchkiss Case

The Connecticut Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Munn v. Hotchkiss, a tragic personal injury case. The court will be sorely tempted to make bad law in Munn. It must resist that temptation. Cara Munn, 15, was bitten by a tick while hiking on a mountain in China during a summer trip organized by The Hotchkiss School, her private school. The tick transmitted encephalitis, which has left her permanently unable to speak. Cara and her parents sued Hotchkiss in a federal court, arguing that the school was negligent for failing to warn them that the trip might bring her into contact with disease-bearing insects and for failing to take steps to ensure that she used insect repellant, wore proper clothes while walking in forested areas and checked herself for ticks. A jury awarded her $10 million in economic damages and $31.5 million in noneconomic damages.

Hotchkiss appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Unsure about how to apply Connecticut tort law (as it is required to do), the Court of Appeals invited the Connecticut Supreme Court to provide it with guidance on two questions: (1) whether a private school owes a duty of care to students when they participate in school trips, and (2) whether the jury’s damages award was excessive. Tort cases that seem to present simple legal issues often in reality are hiding complex ones. Not so with Munn, at least with respect to the first question. Hotchkiss is urging the court to rule that schools do not owe their students on field trips a duty to be careful to protect them from dangers. This is as preposterous in tort law as it is in common sense. The very able lawyers for Hotchkiss seem to have convinced the Second Circuit that the existence of this legal duty is an open question, but it is not. Under the law of Connecticut and probably every other American jurisdiction, schools owe a common law duty of care to 15-year-old students under their custody.

A much more difficult question is whether Hotchkiss fulfilled its duty: Was Hotckiss really careless in failing to provide Cara with sufficient warning of and protection from insect-borne illnesses? A jury concluded that the school was careless, but was the jury right? The correctness of that conclusion, however, is not before the state’s high court. Indeed, this is why Hotchkiss’ lawyers are going for broke by arguing that the school had no duty at all to be careful. It is also argued on behalf of Hotchkiss that the $41.5 million verdict is excessive, and that damage awards like this could overwhelm even wealthy schools, let alone those that are strapped. The award is so large, the school’s lawyers claim, as to demonstrate that the jury was inflamed by anger or prejudice and hence vastly exceeded any plausible notion of fair compensation.

On the damages issue, Hotchkiss has a far stronger argument. While Connecticut courts have upheld large verdicts in the past, and while the computation of damages is normally for the jury, this award is so large that the state Supreme Court would be entitled to instruct the Second Circuit that Connecticut law does not require deference to the jury in this case. Indeed, it would be within its rights to recommend that the damages be substantially reduced or even that a new trial be ordered. Although we have suggested that Munn’s duty question is easy, we understand why the Second Circuit may have thought the case was sufficiently challenging to pass onto the Connecticut Supreme Court. A young woman losing her capacity for speech because of her school’s carelessness is horrific and tragic. Even if a $41.5 million award is too high, it is hard to say why it is too high (or what an appropriate award would be) and it is hard to say whether an order requiring the parties to start all over with a new trial after years of litigation would be fair. These are the difficult judgments in Munn, and the court will be tempted to finesse them altogether by embracing the defendant’s legally unsupportable “no duty” argument. The court must stand firm on the duty question and do its best to provide the Second Circuit with a legally tenable framework for reducing damages.

Read more here: courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-goldberg-hoctchkiss-liability-case-key-questions-0326-20170324-story.html