Seminole County DUI Lawyer – Children held in Barwon Prison illegally, Supreme Court rules

Posted on Updated on

Source    : Herald Sun News
By            : REBEKAH CAVANAGH
Category : Seminole County DUI Lawyer , Matthews Bark Attorney

Children held in Barwon Prison illegally, Supreme Court rules
Children held in Barwon Prison illegally, Supreme Court rules

YOUTH locked in an adult prison could sue the Andrews government for unlawful detention in a move that would likely dig deep into the taxpayer’s pockets. It comes after an Andrews Government move to lock up youth in a wing of Barwon’s maximum security adult prison was once again declared illegal. In another humiliating legal blow to the government, Supreme Court Justice John Dixon today ruled its gazetting of the Grevillea unit to a youth facility was unlawful. Human Rights Law Centre executive director Hugh de Kretser said they would discuss with the remanded children the possibility of suing for compensation for unlawful detention — a move that would likely dig deep into the taxpayer’s pockets.

Mr de Kretser said it would be “very difficult” for the government to sidestep this decision like it had done in the past. He urged them to “put this chapter in Victoria’s youth justice history behind it” and move the youth back to Parkville. “We know with the repairs to Parkville youth justice facility almost complete, that will return some 60 beds to the system,” he said.

Children and Families Minister Jenny Mikakos told the Victorian Parliament she was considering options following the judgement. “Obviously I am disappointed in the decision that has been handed down,” Ms Mikakos said. “The government will consider this judgment and consider the options in relation to this decision. “We took the steps necessary to ensure the community was safe and the young offenders themselves were safe. We have always acted with community safety in mind and our response to this decision will be no different.”

Outside court, Human Rights Law Centre lawyer Alina Leikin said the decision would be a relief to the 15 children who remain at Barwon. “We shouldn’t give up on children. We’re talking about 15, 16 and 17 year olds who have their whole lives ahead of them,” Ms Leikin said. “This is the third Supreme Court decision that says children do not belong in a

Maximum security adult prison.
“The government made a mistake and it now has the opportunity to do the right thing and get these kids out of Barwon immediately.” It is the second time the government’s decision to hold kids in the jail has been declared illegal. In December, Justice Greg Garde ordered the teens be removed by 4pm the following day, saying the government had “failed to give proper consideration to their human rights”. But Ms Mikakos forced through changes to reclassify the prison’s Grevillea unit as a youth justice facility.

The change meant that youth could remain in the cells despite Justice Garde’s ruling. In April, the unimpressed Human Rights Law Centre launched a fresh challenge against the government’s gazetting. Justice Dixon heard throughout the trial that children on remand were in lock down in concrete cells designed for adult males for up to 23 hours a day. The teens were also handcuffed to be taken to the exercise area and there were not a suitable school facility for them. The juvenile offenders were moved to the adult jail following riots in Parkville and Malmsbury youth detention centres that saw dozens of beds trashed in November.

The minister said the Andrews government was forced to act after more than 60 beds were trashed in Parkville and hit out at human rights organisations, saying they had not been able to bring up alternative options. Sixteen children are currently being held at the unit in Barwon. Ms Mikakos was unable to reveal where the youth offenders would be moved to; however, she said “we have no intention in using police cells”.

Read More : heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/children-held-in-barwon-prison-illegally-supreme-court-rules/news-story/c72716f5f7790297d1e508b5b1087a69

Criminal Defense Attorney Seminole – Lowa Supreme Court blocks portion of 20-week abortion ban

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Source     : Reuters News
By             : Timothy Mclaughlin
Category : Altamonte Springs DUI Lawyer , Criminal Defense Attorney Seminole

Lowa Supreme Court blocks portion of 20-week abortion ban
Lowa Supreme Court blocks portion of 20-week abortion ban

The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday granted an emergency temporary injunction halting a portion of a 20-week abortion ban that was signed into law by Republican Governor Terry Branstad just hours earlier. The law, passed by Iowa’s Republican-controlled House and Senate last month, bans abortions once a pregnancy reaches 20 weeks and stipulates a three-day waiting period before women can undergo any abortion.

The law does not make exceptions for instances of rape or incest but does allow for abortions if the mother’s life or health is at risk. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood, a group that provides family planning services, including abortions, challenged the waiting-period part of the legislation in court as well as the requirement for an additional clinical visit women must make before an abortion.

The state Supreme Court on Friday issued the injunction after it was denied Thursday by a district judge. “We are pleased that the court granted the temporary injunction, ruling on the side of Iowa women who need access to, and have a constitutional right, to safe, legal abortion,” Suzanna de Baca, chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland said in a statement.

The state will have an opportunity to respond to the court’s decision on Monday. “This is all part of the process and we’re confident that the stay will be lifted very shortly,” said Ben Hammes, a spokesman for the Republican governor.

Women in the United States have the right under the Constitution to end a pregnancy, but abortion opponents have pushed for tougher regulations, particularly in conservative states. There are 24 states that impose prohibitions on abortions after a certain number of weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive policy. Seventeen of these states ban abortion at about 20 weeks and after.

Iowa’s law, Hammes said after the signing, marked a “return to a culture that once again respects human life.” In Tennessee, a bill similar to the Iowa measure was sent to the desk of that state’s Republican governor on Wednesday to possibly be signed into law.

Read More : reuters.com/article/us-iowa-abortion-idUSKBN1811RX

Altamonte Springs Criminal Defense – Master of the High Court condemns house repossessions

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Source     : Irish Times News
By             : Kitty Holland
Category : Matthews Bark Attorney , Altamonte Springs Criminal Defense

Master of the High Court condemns house repossessions
Master of the High Court condemns house repossessions

Thousands of orders granted in the Circuit Court to repossess homes may be open to challenge because these courts are not applying EU law, the Master of the High Court has said. Edmund Honohan criticised the Government for failing to properly protect people facing repossession and said it was instead allowing the courts to “pump people into homelessness”. “There is a lack of joined up thinking and a huge amount of ignorance,” he told The Irish Times. Circuit courts “up and down the country” were failing in their role as “agents” of the EU as current procedures did not ensure application of EU consumer legislation, he said, adding that this was the “fault of the Irish State”.

He said county registrars – who grant the majority of repossession orders in the circuit courts – “should not be dealing with these cases at all”, as they had neither the legal training nor the legal discretion to apply EU law. “The rules and procedures of the Circuit Court need to be updated to allow for a hearing with regard EU legislation on unfair contract terms . . . in every possession case . . .EU law is not an optional extra.” In particular the 1993 EU directive on unfair contract terms in consumer contracts was not being properly applied. This failure, according to the European Court of Justice, breached consumers’ rights.

Legal discretion
In its 2013 ruling on the Aziz case – which had been referred to it by the Spanish courts – the ECJ, said: “…the national court is required to assess of its own motion whether a contractual term falling within the scope of the directive is unfair, compensating in its own way for the imbalance which exists between the consumer or the seller or supplier.” The Circuit Court should be taking the initiative to assess whether mortgage contracts were fair before making possession orders, he said, noting that only a judge had the legal discretion to do this.

“So we have a county registrar sitting in wherever… and she is now an agent of the EU. She is obliged, of her own motion i.e. without the defendant present, to look at the mortgage contract and see if it’s fair. Does she have the skills to do that? No. Is there any case law to help her? No. Does she have any idea what she is doing? No. So what is happening is she sees there is no defendant in court and makes the order.” The legality of a possession order was “often touch and go..It is not as clear-cut as county registrars think they are”. “Something the Government could do is change the procedures in the courts to put a brake on the number of families they are pumping into homelessness.”

Read More : latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-court-executions-20170108-story.html

Casselberry DUI Attorney – Supreme Court Freakout at the New York Times

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Source     : Powerline Blog News
By             : JOHN HINDERAKER
Category : Casselberry DUI AttorneyAttorney Matthews R Bark

Supreme Court Freakout at the New York Times
Supreme Court Freakout at the New York Times

The New York Times was once known as The Grey Lady. Today, a more apt moniker would be The Hysterical Bag Lady. The Times editorial board is home to the most immoderate, shrieking Leftism you will find this side of the Nation. On Christmas Eve, the Times editorialized on The Stolen Supreme Court Seat. It is a classic of the post-Trump-election freakout genre: Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by a vacancy since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. This is wrong. The Supreme Court has been working away, deciding cases. Where the vote is 4-4, as has occasionally happened, the decision of the Court of Appeals stands. Temporarily having an even number of Supreme Court justices (the Constitution does not specify a number) is not optimal, but it isn’t “hamstrung,” either.

No matter how it plays out, Americans must remember one thing above all: The person who gets confirmed will sit in a stolen seat. Seriously? A “stolen seat”? The next Supreme Court justice may be on the Court for decades, but the Times implies that all decisions in which he or she participates will be of questionable legitimacy, since the seat was “stolen.” What the editorialists mean, of course, is that the justice will be a Trump appointee rather than an Obama appointee: It was stolen from Barack Obama, a twice-elected president….

It was stolen by top Senate Republicans, who broke with longstanding tradition and refused to consider any nominee Mr. Obama might send them, because they wanted to preserve the court’s conservative majority. This is the substance of the Times’s complaint: that Senate Republicans “broke with longstanding tradition” by deferring the next Supreme Court selection until after the November 2016 election. How do the editorialists support their claim? By citing their own paper. The Republican party line — that it was an election year, so the American people should have a “voice” in the selection of the next justice — was a patent lie. The Times editorial board, like so many liberals, has been unhinged by Trump’s victory. The entire board seems to be off its meds.

The people spoke when they re-elected Mr. Obama in 2012, entrusting [Ed.: sic] him to choose new members for the court. And the Senate has had no problem considering, and usually confirming, election-year nominees in the past. The link goes to an op-ed in the Times by Timothy Huebner. Huebner writes: On 13 occasions, a vacancy on the nation’s highest court has occurred — through death, retirement or resignation — during a presidential election year. … In 11 of these instances, the Senate took action on the president’s nomination. In all five cases in which a vacancy occurred during the first quarter of the year the president successfully nominated a replacement. But those events occurred long ago, and instances where the president’s party also controlled the Senate are inapposite. Mr. Huebner admits: Of course, none of these represents an exact parallel to today’s situation. In all but one of these instances, the president and Senate majority were of the same political party, unlike today.

The fact is that there is no exact, or nearly exact, precedent for the situation the Senate found itself in when Justice Scalia died earlier this year. A distinguished appellate lawyer wrote to Power Line: If Grassley has any sense, the nomination never makes it out of committee. The last time a justice was confirmed for a vacancy that occurred during an election year was 1932, and Cardozo was more than acceptable to the Democrats. The closest parallel in more recent history occurred in 1968: Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he would retire upon confirmation of a successor. President Johnson then nominated Associate Justice Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice, and Homer Thornberry to replace Fortas as an associate justice. The Republicans filibustered Fortas, with the vote being taken in October, near the end of Johnson’s term. As a result, Warren did not retire until 1969, when Nixon was president. It’s not an exact parallel, since there was no vacancy on the court during the election year of 1968. But then, as now, the Senate refused to vote on the president’s nominee, and the decision was deferred until after the election, when a new president nominated a new chief justice. Nuances of this sort are, of course, beyond the capacities of the Times’s dim-witted editorial board. For them, it is sufficient to spew venom against “[t]he shameful, infuriating actions of the Senate Republicans.” It is fair, however, to ask: if a Supreme Court vacancy had occurred during the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, is there a snowball’s chance in Hell that Harry Reid would have allowed a vote on Bush’s nominee? Of course not. And the Times editorial board undoubtedly would have found excuses to cheer Reid on. The Times editorialists denounce the “infuriating actions” of Senate Republicans, but what is actually infuriating the Times, one suspects, is that Hillary Clinton lost the election.

Read more : powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/supreme-court-freakout-at-the-new-york-times.php

DUI in Sanford – Illinois Supreme Court clarifies snow-shoveling law’s protections for property owners

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Source     : Chicago Tribune News
By             : Tribune news services
Category :  Orlando Criminal Defense Attorney DUI in Sanford

Illinois Supreme Court clarifies snow-shoveling law's protections for property owners
Illinois Supreme Court clarifies snow-shoveling law’s protections for property owners

Property owners can take comfort, but shouldn’t lapse into negligence, now that the Illinois Supreme Court has clarified a 1979 state law protecting them from some slip-and-fall lawsuits. The high court reaffirmed earlier this month that the Snow and Ice Removal Act shields property owners from liability if someone gets hurt because they didn’t do a good enough job of shoveling, but only when the snow or ice was the result of natural conditions.

The court ruled Dec. 1 that when lawmakers passed the law nearly four decades ago, they meant to protect property owners from injury claims resulting from inadequate shoveling. The law, the court said, was intended to encourage people to voluntarily clear their sidewalks.

But property owners aren’t free to ignore hazardous “unnatural accumulations” of ice and snow, the court said.

The case stems from a suburban Chicago woman who fell on an icy sidewalk outside her Carol Stream condo building in 2011, breaking her leg, knee and hip. Pamela Murphy-Hylton claims that inadequate drainage and the placement of downspouts caused the icy patch. She’s seeking damages from the condominium association and the property management company. Attorneys for Klein Creek Condominium Association and Lieberman Management Services had argued the law gave them immunity, winning a summary judgment in trial court that was reversed on appeal. The Illinois Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Mary Jane Theis, affirmed the appellate court’s judgment and sent the case back to the trial court.

“The Snow and Ice Removal Act provides immunity to residential property owners from claims of liability for injuries allegedly caused by icy sidewalks that result from negligent snow and ice removal efforts, but it does not extend to immunize them from claims of liability for injuries allegedly caused by icy sidewalks that result from an otherwise negligent failure to maintain the premises,” Theis wrote. Attorney Kristina K. Green said her client has steep medical bills — possibly totaling $1 million — and is ready to resolve the case, either through mediation or at trial.

“The statute’s intent was you can’t get in trouble for attempts to clear the ice and snow,” Green said. “The ice that our client slipped on wasn’t the result of snow and ice removal efforts. The ice formed because there were defects in the property.” The Illinois Supreme Court ruling aligns with “the way the law was intended,” Green said. “We think it was the right decision obviously.” A phone message left for the attorney for the property manager was not immediately returned.

Read more : chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-snow-shoveling-law-20161225-story.html

Altamonte Springs DUI Lawyer – New US Okinawa base backed by Japan Supreme Court

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Source     : BBC News
By             : Agency Press
Category  : Altamonte Springs DUI Lawyer , Criminal Defense Attorney Seminole

New US Okinawa base backed by Japan Supreme Court
New US Okinawa base backed by Japan Supreme Court

Japan’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the government’s plan to relocate a US airbase to a remote part of the island of Okinawa.The island’s governor wanted the base moved off Okinawa altogether and built in another part of Japan.

The US has about 26,000 troops and several bases in Okinawa as part of a deal with Japan after World War Two. Many Okinawans, including the governor, object to the alleged crimes and accidents attributed to the troops.

The government wants to move the US Futenma airbase from its densely populated site to a more remote area. Land reclamation work has already begun off the shore of Camp Schwab, the US base in Henoko, south of Nago city.

But construction work was suspended in March while judges heard the case. Resentment at the US presence has been growing among Okinawans, particularly since the 1995 gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by US troops. Residents have also complained about the environmental impact of land reclamation.

Read More : bbc.com/news/world-asia-38381107

Attorney Matthews R Bark – San Francisco doubles down on sanctuary city policies with legal defense push

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Source     : FOXS News
By             : Claudia Cowan
Category  : Attorney Matthews R Bark , Criminal Defense Attorney Seminole

San Francisco doubles down on sanctuary city policies with legal defense push
San Francisco doubles down on sanctuary city policies with legal defense push

Reaffirming its reputation as the most sheltering sanctuary city in the country, San Francisco is doubling down on its support of illegal immigrants with a proposal to fund legal assistance for those facing deportation. The initiative was introduced by San Francisco Supervisor David Campos, a staunch immigrant-rights advocate. “We are proud to be a sanctuary city,” Campos said. “And we’re not only proud to stand up for that, but we’re going to invest the resources needed to make sure that the 44,000 undocumented people who live in the city and county of San Francisco have, at a minimum, legal representation if they’re taken into immigration court.” The legislation would offer legal defense to anyone who ends up being detained.

“People who are facing criminal charges, no matter their immigration status, already have the right to an attorney under the Constitution,” Tamara Aparton, a spokesperson with San Francisco’s Public Defender’s office, told Fox News. “People whose only ‘crime’ is being in the country illegally currently do not have that same protection.” But critics say moves like the city’s proposed legal aid lay out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants. “We’ve seen for the past two administrations, at least, encouragement to illegal immigration,” immigration reform activist Rick Oltman said. “What we need to be sending is a message around the world of discouragement to reduce the flow to our border. That will make securing the border easier.” President-elect Donald Trump has said he will deport convicted felons who are in the country illegally, and throughout his campaign pointed to the 2015 shooting death of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier by a repeat felon who had been deported several times.

At recent rally outside San Francisco City Hall, former detainees said that they deserve the same legal rights as anyone else, and that their lack of access to an immigration lawyer turned their lives upside down. Isolda Matamoros said when she was jailed after passing a bad check in 2014, her young son became suicidal and still suffers from post-traumatic stress. “It’s so important to get the lawyer and get these families back together,” Matamoros said, “because the American citizen children, of America, will get affected – extremely – when they wake up and their parents are not there.” In the wake of the election, cities including New York and Chicago are looking to set aside millions of dollars to try to block deportations.

In San Francisco, a proposal calls for spending $5 million, half of which would go to the Public Defender’s office. Mayor Ed Lee opposes that part of the plan, saying he only wants to fund community-based legal groups that specialize in deportation defense. Even so, the legislation is going through the budget committee process, with a vote by the full Board of Supervisors expected early next year. Eventually, city leaders also may have to consider which programs will have to go. Trump has vowed to cut funding to sanctuary cities, a sum that could total about a billion dollars a year in San Francisco alone.

Read more : foxnews.com/politics/2016/12/13/san-francisco-doubles-down-on-sanctuary-city-policies-with-legal-defense-push.html

Matthews Bark – Google brings internet free-speech battle to Supreme Court

Posted on Updated on

Source      : CBC CA News
By             : Nicole Ireland, Matthew Braga
Category : Matthews Bark,  Attorney Matthews Bark of Orlando

Google brings internet free-speech battle to Supreme Court
Google brings internet free-speech battle to Supreme Court

Armed with the support of human rights and civil liberties organizations, Google is at the Supreme Court of Canada on Tuesday to appeal a ruling it says poses a threat to freedom of expression and access to information both in Canada and around the world. Google wants to overturn a Canadian ruling it says could pave the way for countries to use their courts to block worldwide access to any internet content they don’t like. According to documents filed by Google’s legal team, a decision made by the B.C. Supreme Court effectively issues “a permanent, mandatory, worldwide injunction … intended to silence speech regarding the existence of publicly accessible websites on the internet.”

This all started with an intellectual property rights case in B.C.

The defendant — a company accused of stealing trade secrets from Burnaby, B.C.-based technology company Equustek — was ordered to stop doing business online. According to B.C. court documents, Google was not a party to the legal action, but had “voluntarily” complied with Equustek’s request that the defendant’s web pages be removed from internet searches originating in Canada. However, Equustek then argued that because web sales are global in nature, Google should not only block the infringing company from appearing in web search results on Google’s Canadian domain, Google.ca, but Google sites worldwide. The B.C. Supreme Court agreed and issued the order Google is now fighting in Canada’s highest court.

Canada could set ‘international law norm’

The concern, according to David Price, a lawyer for Google, “is the principle of whether a court in Canada can direct Google to take an action to delist something [including search results] in a manner that may not be consistent with the laws of other countries where Google does business.” In turn, if Canada helps to set an “international law norm” establishing that global search removal orders are OK, Price said other countries and courts “may seek to impose a delisting obligation on Google that would end up being effective in Canada that would not be based on Canadian conceptions of freedom of expression and the right to access information.” Issues of jurisdiction are “one of the earliest internet problems,” said Tamir Israel, a staff lawyer with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), who has been closely watching the case. “Because [the internet] was this network that wasn’t in any place at once, and was everywhere at once, it was one of the first challenges that was flagged. Like, how are laws, legal systems, which have always been territorial and based on physical territory, going to work on this medium?”

Rights groups intervene

Several high-profile rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have listed themselves as intervenors supporting Google’s case in the Supreme Court. “Free speech groups are really, really concerned about this case because of the precedent it sets,” said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel for Human Rights Watch. “Courts are experimenting with this idea as a way to deal with the problem that the internet is transborder,” PoKempner said. “In this case we have to be, I think, a bit deferential to the speech impact, the rights impact, and not simply to the problem of the individual intellectual property right holder.”

Google must respect ‘right to be forgotten,’ EU court says
That impact, according to a news release issued Monday by EFF, “censors Google search results for users everywhere” and “violates our rights to freely search the web without government interference.” “We’ve argued essentially that they should only be ordered [to delete search results] in the most extreme circumstances, where the rights at issue are so fundamental that they outweigh any concerns about free expression or the right to receive information,” said Vera Ranieri, a staff attorney with EFF.

‘Red herring’ argument
Barry Sookman, a senior partner at McCarthy Tétrault law firm specializing in technology, internet law and intellectual property, says raising the threat of global implications for freedom of speech is a “red herring.” “The nature of the alleged speech [in this case] is a website purely devoted to selling illegal goods,” said Sookman, who is representing various music and publishing groups concerned with intellectual and cultural property protection as intervenors on the other side of the Google case. “There could be a future case, with different facts, where the court would have to say, ‘OK, is there some unnecessary interference with speech?'” he said. “But that’s not this case.” But both Google and freedom of speech advocates say the implications reach far beyond the specific details of the case itself. “The idea that just any country in the world can issue a global injunction is disturbing,” said PoKempner.

Read more : cbc.ca/news/technology/google-eff-human-rights-supreme-court-canada-equustek-1.3882350

DUI Attorney in Sanford – The Nuclear Path To Legal Sports Betting

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Source     : Business Insider
By             : THE LEGAL BLITZ
Category :  Criminal Lawyer in Altamonte Springs , DUI Attorney in Sanford

The Nuclear Path To Legal Sports Betting
The Nuclear Path To Legal Sports Betting

The other Sunday something happened I thought was only possible in dreams — my wife actually asked me to watch football. I owe this small miracle to sports betting. The night prior we were at Delaware Park Casino playing poker when I decided to take advantage of the only legal sports betting East of the Mississippi, albeit a severely limited form. Delaware offers NFL parlay “lottery” cards due to an exception under the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (“PASPA”) that grandfathered in existing sports betting laws in Nevada, Oregon, Montana, and Delaware when enacted in 1992. New Jersey also had an opportunity to legalize full-scale sports betting under PASPA, but bungled doing so in true Jersey fashion.

After filling out a variety of parlay cards, I asked my wife if she wanted to take a crack. She wisely went with the Patriots -6.5 over the Bills, Saints +3.5 over the Seahawks, and Packers +2.5 over the Falcons for a 5.5 to 1 payout. The first two picks hit fairly easily, but the Packers/Falcons game was heading toward a tight finish. With my Steelers on a bye and my fantasy team cruising to a victory, I was milling about the house pretending to be useful when I heard those glorious words: “Steve, come watch the end of this game.” You don’t have to ask me twice. We watched the entire fourth quarter together and celebrated the narrow Packers cover.

Paging Roger Goodell. If you want to pull the NFL’s ratings out of the gutter, here is a great way to do it. Americans are already wagering $149 billion annually on sports through bookies and offshore websites according to the American Gaming Association. By comparison, only $3.3 billion is wagered legally in Nevada sportsbooks. Fortunately, legal sports betting is slowly becoming a matter of “when” rather than “if.” A Congressional committee is now reviewing the incoherent patchwork of federal gaming laws including PASPA, the Wire Act of 1961 and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). Pennsylvania passed a resolution urging Congress to lift the federal ban on sports betting, New York Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow is planning a legal challenge to PASPA in 2017, and Mississippi is eyeing a way to grab a piece of the potential tax revenue from legal sports betting.

Yet the best way to finally legalize sports betting, might be the craziest way. Despite dropping the ball in the 90s, and a series of recent federal court losses stemming from attempts to legalize sports betting, New Jersey is back at it with its most genius move yet – the so-called nuclear option. Introduced by Assemblymen Ralph Caputo and John Burzichelli, Assembly Bill 4303 would completely repeal New Jersey’s prohibition on sports betting. Doing so would allow anyone to open a sportsbook. In other words, the corner bookie could literally be on every corner.

The Bill has almost no chance of ever passing, but it is an attention-grabbing middle finger to PASPA that might just force Congress’ hand. PASPA prohibits “a governmental entity to sponsor, operate, advertise, promote, license, or authorize by law or compact, . . . a lottery, sweepstakes, or other betting, gambling, or wagering scheme based, directly or indirectly (through the use of geographical references or otherwise), on one or more competitive games in which amateur or professional athletes participate, or are intended to participate, or on one or more performances of such athletes in such games.” By completely removing all laws pertaining to sports betting, such as the seemingly necessary regulation of sportsbook operators, limiting sportsbooks to existing casinos, enforcing taxes, and monitoring wagers for signs of corruption, New Jersey could render PASPA useless. It is also a direct nod to the unintended consequences of a flawed Third Circuit decision preventing the Garden State from legalizing sports betting.

Read more : abovethelaw.com/2016/11/the-nuclear-path-to-legal-sports-betting/

Altamonte Springs DUI Lawyer – Supreme Court to hear case involving Google search results

Posted on Updated on

Source     : Metro News
By            : Ryan Tumilty
Category : Altamonte Springs DUI Lawyer , Criminal Defense Attorney Seminole

Supreme Court to hear case involving Google search results
Supreme Court to hear case involving Google search results

Google will go before the Supreme Court in the weeks ahead, appealing an order that forced the tech giant to try to remove a company from the Internet. Equustek Solutions is a British Columbia company that got a court order against a competitor that was selling their patented technology online.

The injunction didn’t stop the company, so Equustek got an injunction demanding Google delist their competitor from its search-engine results. Google will appeal that decision in a hearing in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court confirmed Monday. In its submission to the court, the company argued it is simply a search engine and can’t be the enforcer of the Internet.

“Google is incapable of taking these websites offline. It is incapable of stopping the defendants from launching new websites,” it wrote. “It is incapable of preventing users in Canada or anywhere else from accessing the websites at issue.” It also argued the case is a freedom-of-speech issue, because the company can’t tell its users about something on the Internet. “Google’s speech is restricted, as it is now prohibited from truthfully informing the global public.” Trent Horne, a partner and intellectual property lawyer with Bennet Jones, said one of many interesting aspects of the case is that Google is being brought into a private dispute.

“They have never been accused of any wrongdoing, they have just been brought into the fray as an enforcement mechanism,” he said. He said the court will have to decide if order forcing Google to delist website should take place and what the test should be for imposing them. He said there is also a major question about the limits of Canadian courts. “You could have a Canadian court granting an order that obliges somebody in California to do something, which prevents an individual in England from buying something,” he said. Horne said the Supreme Court has not ruled in any cases that are similar to this, so it’s hard to have any idea how they might rule. “I am hard-pressed to think of something that is close.”

Read more :  metronews.ca/news/ottawa/2016/11/21/supreme-court-to-hear-case-involving-google-search-results-.html