Can You Buy A Gun For Someone Else?

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Appellate Law, Gun Control Laws, Second Amendment, United States Supreme Court

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BloombergBusinessweek, Gun-Trafficking, Justice Kagan, Justice Scalia, Law Enforcement, Paul M. Barrett, Second Amendment, Straw Purchaser, U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court Is One Vote Away From Wrecking Gun-Trafficking Prosecutions, by Paul M. Barrett, Politics & Policy, BloombergBusinessweek

http://tinyurl.com/msbaoh2

Sometimes what the Supreme Court almost does is more striking than what it says in its majority opinion. Such is the case with today’s 5-4 ruling that federal agents may go after a ‘straw’ purchaser who buys a gun for someone else, even if both people are legally eligible to own firearms.

What’s amazing about this decision is that four dissenting members of the court—led by Justice Antonin Scalia—were prepared to rule against the federal government in a fashion that would have undermined countless prosecutions of alleged gun traffickers. To put this more starkly: The Supreme Court is one vote away from judicially nullifying one of the most common tools U.S. law enforcers use to deter and punish criminals who send other people into gun stores to purchase firearms and circumvent the federal background-check system. . . .

Whistleblower Comes Clean About Fake Classes for College Athletes.

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in College Sport Research Institute, Employment Law, Intercollegiate Athletics, NCAA, Race Discrimination, Sports Law, Whistleblower

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Basketball, BloombergBusinessweek, College Sport Research Institute, Football, Intercollegiate Athletics, NCAA Inc., Paul M. Barrett, Phony Courses, Politics and Policy, Recruiting Atheletes, Richard Southall, Sports Law, University of North Carolina, University of South Carolina, Whistleblower, William Friday

In Fake Classes Scandal, UNC Fails Its Athletes—and Whistle-Blower, by Paul M. Barrett, Politics and Policy, BloombergBusinessweek

http://tinyurl.com/m4g76ky

Sitting in Memorial Hall at the heart of the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, Mary Willingham wondered what William Friday would want her to do. . . .

* * *

In his last decades he’d [William Friday] tried to stir discussion about whether commercialized intercollegiate athletics was distorting higher education. That’s why Willingham had approached Friday in his 92nd and final year. In private conversations, she’d told him about her mounting anxiety that rather than educating its recruited athletes, UNC was playing a shell game to keep them from needing to study at all. She’d told him about basketball and football stars who read at a grade school level. She confessed that she’d helped steer some of these young men—many of them black—into lecture classes that never met. Worst of all, given Carolina’s racial history, the phony courses were offered in the black studies department. . . .

Apple and Google Fighting Patent Trolls In the U.S. Supreme Court.

15 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Appellate Law, Apple, Google, Intellectual Property, Legal Technology, Patent Law, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, United States Supreme Court

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Allcare Health Management Systems, Apple, BloombergBusinessweek, Charlene Morrow, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Greg Stohr, Intel, Octane Fitness, Patent Freedom, Patent Infringement, Patent Trolls, Silicon Valley, Susan Decker, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, U.S. Supreme Court, Verizon, Yahoo

The Supreme Court Takes on Patent Trolls, by Greg Stohr and Susan Decker, Technology, BloombergBusinessweek

http://tinyurl.com/mav2rc4

Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) say they’re tired of being slapped with baseless patent suits that cost them millions in legal fees. Now they’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let them hit back. The two are leading a group of companies urging the court to make it easier for businesses to recover legal costs when they win a patent infringement suit. In two cases to be argued this month, the justices will hear them out.

More than 100,000 businesses were threatened in 2012 by ‘patent assertion entities.’ Often derided as patent trolls, these companies get most of their revenue from licensing patents and from suing other companies for infringement. They filed 19 percent of all patent lawsuits from 2007 to 2011, according to the Government Accountability Office. . . .