German mom, daughter facing eviction blow up house: policeGerman authorities on Wednesday said a mother and daughter are under investigation for allegedly setting off an explosion at their home in western Germany when police and a court officer showed up to evict them. ….. Read More.FOX NEWS – World | World News & EventsWed, September 18, 201921 hours ago
What Happens to All Those Unused Gift CardsBrenda Mayrack never intended to become an unclaimed property czar. Even among legal specialties, the field is particularly obscure: During law school at the University of Wisconsin, she remembers hearing only a 10-minute lecture introducing the topic at the end of her trusts and estates class. But as the director of Delaware’s unclaimed property office, Mayrack now oversees a fund of $540 million per year, forgotten by people from Paris to San Francisco and then held temporarily by the state.“You can think of all kinds of examples,” says Mayrack. “The parent has an insurance policy, then they die, and no one knows about it.” Or, Mayrack says, someone might have a bank account they lost track of, and the records disappeared in a fire or flood. “The only way the beneficiary will know about it is through unclaimed property,” she says. Because that…
Imagining a World Without Qualified Immunity, Part IIIThe Supreme Court has written that “the ‘driving force’ behind creation of the qualified immunity doctrine was a desire to ensure that ‘insubstantial claims’ against government officials [will] be resolved prior to discovery.” The Court presumably believes, then, that eliminating qualified immunity would increase litigation burdens on defendants. But, as I explain in a forthcoming article, excerpted here, all available evidence suggests qualified immunity actually increases the time, cost, and complexity of civil rights cases in which the defense is raised—and that eliminating qualified immunity would decrease the average cost, complexity, and time spent adjudicating civil rights cases. Litigants and courts spend money and time on qualified immunity in four different ways. First, they spend time and money researching, briefing, writing, arguing, and deciding motions raising qualified immunity. Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity unless a plaintiff can prove the constitutional violation was…
Trump sues Manhattan district attorney Vance, MazarsU.S. President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars, according to records in Manhattan federal court. ….. Read More.REUTERS – Politics | Politics & GovernmentThu, September 19, 201945 mins ago
Impeach Both Trump and KavanaughIt’s election season, and impeachment is in the air. But it’s not just President Donald Trump who is the target of impeachment demands. Thanks to the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is also hearing the “I” word for possible perjury committed during his raucous and controversial Senate confirmation hearings last year about his alleged sexual depredations as a teenager. The Times triggered the Kavanaugh outcry Saturday, when it published an op-ed adapted from a new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, written by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who helped cover the Kavanaugh hearings for the paper. No one who watched the hearings on television will forget the gut-wrenching testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who said Kavanaugh tried to rape her while drunk at a house party in high school. Nor will anyone forget Kavanaugh’s angry and tearful rebuttal,…
Introducing ConLaw.usRandy Barnett and I are pleased to launch ConLaw.us. We built this interactive site as a a supplement to our new book, An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. We built four innovative new features to teach about constitutional law. 100 Supreme Court Cases First, we developed an interface to display our 100 cases both chronologically, and by topic. This feature allows students to quickly scroll through two centuries of Supreme Court decisions, or to study the leading cases within each of the 15 topics in the book. https://conlaw.us/cases/https://conlaw.us/cases/by-topic/ The Justices We developed a graphical interface to view all of the Justices. They are sorted by the appointing President. Annotated Constitution This feature allows students to quickly read the entire Constitution, and see what cases are associated with a particular clause. Constitutional Places Constitutional Places allows students to see… ….. Read More.REASON – Free…