I just blogged about an incident where the 2nd Circuit sought to have Howard Bashman remove an unredacted judicial decision from his site and replace it with a redacted version. Apparently, the redacted version attempted to remove information about a rather dicey interrogation technique the FBI used. According to Tony Mauro of the Legal Times:
From the annals of the weird comes my absolute favorite item for sale on Amazon.com.
What is it?
I’m sure you think it might be my new book, but nope, it’s not. So what is it then?
Well, it is quite expensive, but it also is one of the most well-reviewed products on Amazon.com — it has 163 reviews and counting.
NOTICE: This is an unpublished blog post. It may not be cited by any court or any party to any litigation.
A common practice for many courts is to issue unpublished opinions that may not be cited as precedent. These opinions are often short and consist of a few paragraphs. They are generally supposed to be limited to cases that can be resolved by clearly-established legal rules. According to one news article: “California courts of appeal issued 11,852 opinions during the 2004-2005 fiscal year. Of these, only 1,047 were published. About one-third of federal appellate-court decisions reviewed in 2002 came in unpublished opinions.” These statistics are staggering. Are there really so many cases that do not warrant having precedential value?
It seems as though books are the theme of my blogging this week, so I thought I’d recommend another great new book: Professor Michael Sullivan’s Legal Pragmatism: Community, Rights, and Democracy (Indiana Univ. Press 2007). From the book jacket:
I‘m very excited to announce that my new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy, is now hot off the presses! Copies are now in stock and available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s website. Copies will hit bookstores in a few weeks.
In Mayfield v. United States, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken (District of Oregon) held that parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which were altered by the USA Patriot Act in 2001, are unconstitutional. The case was brought by Brandon Mayfield, a who was put under extensive surveillance and then detained for two weeks because the FBI suspected him of involvement in the Madrid train bombing of 2004. The FBI thought Mayfield’s fingerprint was at the scene of the bombing, but it was gravely mistaken. According to the AP:
I recently saw The Lives of Others and was thoroughly impressed with this film. After having seen the amazing Pan’s Labyrinth, I was stunned that another movie could win the Oscar for best foreign film of 2006 (one of the rare categories in the Oscars where worthy films actually win). But after finally seeing it, I now know why. It’s a spectacular film.
So you signed up for the federal Do Not Call List and expect not to receive any more of those annoying telemarketing calls ever again. Think again. Signing up expires after 5 years, so if you signed up back when the list first came into existence, you’ll need to sign up all over again soon. It’s the FTC’s way of making us feel like Sisyphus. Lame.
The WSJ blog points to this interesting update [link no longer available] about the TB patient who was quarantined for having a highly-resistant strain of TB. I blogged about the case here and here. According to the news story, times aren’t very good from Andrew Speaker, the TB patient:
It’s an old debate, but an important issue: Should U.S. Supreme Court justices have life tenure? Linda Greenhouse has an interesting article in the New York Times: