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. . . .

Lawyers Flocking to West Virginia Chemical Spill Already Talking About Punitive Damages.

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Celia C. Elwell, RP in Environment Law, Environmental Protection Agency, Punitive Damages

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American Water Works, Bloomberg Businesweek, Charlston, Chemical Contamination, Elk River, Freedom Industries, Hill Peterson Carper Bee & Deitzler, James Peterson, Paul M. Barrett, West Virginia, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection

Lawyers Aim Bigger Than Freedom Industries in West Virginia Chemical Spill, by Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

http://tinyurl.com/lcugp8s

In a neo-Tuscan villa in an office park near the Charleston, W. Va., airport, seven West Virginia plaintiffs’ lawyers gathered on Jan. 13 for a council of war. Chemical contamination that four days earlier had cut off tap water to 300,000 West Virginians was making its way west into Ohio. Local authorities were saying that Freedom Industries, the source of the 7,500 gallons of rogue coal-processing chemical, may not have acted swiftly to warn about the seepage. And the federal prosecutor in town sounded dead serious about a criminal investigation.

No surprise, then, that the atmosphere in the elegant conference room of Hill, Peterson, Carper, Bee & Deitzler, while businesslike, had an undertone of bellicose joy. ‘We’re looking at punitive damages, ‘piercing the corporate veil’ at Freedom Industries, and holding the water company and the chemical manufacturer liable, too,’ said James Peterson, the strategy session’s host. Dressed in a black sweatsuit and tan baseball cap, he acknowledged that he hadn’t showered in five days. Then he smiled and said: ‘Neither have a lot of other people around here, and they’re pissed.’