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Special Interest Dollars Influencing Judicial Elections

Estate of Denial: The Occupy Wall Street movement is shining a spotlight on how much influence big-money interests have with the White House and Congress. But people are not talking about how big money is also increasingly getting its way with the courts, which is too bad. It’s a scandal that needs more attention. A blistering new report details how big business and corporate lobbyists are pouring money into state judicial elections across the country and packing the courts with judges who put special interests ahead of the public interest.

A case in point: West Virginia. In 2007, the West Virginia Supreme Court, on a 3-2 vote, threw out a $50 million damage award against the owner of a coal company. Funny thing: the man who would have had to pay the $50 million had spent $3 million to help elect the justice who cast the deciding vote. The West Virginia ruling was so outrageous that in 2009 the United States Supreme Court overturned it. But that was unusual. In most cases, judges are free to decide cases involving individuals and groups that have paid big money to get them elected. (MORE: Justice on Display: Should Judges Deliberate in Public?)

Supreme Court Could Impact 2012 Elections

USA Today: The Supreme Court opens a potentially epic term Monday that could roil debate in the 2012 presidential election campaign.

The justices have taken a raft of cases that would affect people in their daily lives, including on when police can track their cars with GPS devices and what racy material gets on television when children might be watching.

In coming weeks, the justices will announce whether they will take on two major disputes over federal power, the most closely watched involving the new requirement that most people buy health insurance by 2014. The other concerns Arizona’s law allowing police to check the immigration status of people they have stopped.

Federal Challenge to Immigration Laws Expanded By Obama Administration

Washington Post: The Obama administration is escalating its crackdown on tough immigration laws, with lawyers reviewing four new state statutes to determine whether the federal government will take the extraordinary step of challenging the measures in court.

Justice Department lawyers have sued Arizona and Alabama, where a federal judge on Wednesday allowed key parts of that state’s immigration law to take effect but blocked other provisions. Federal lawyers are talking to Utah officials about a third possible lawsuit and are considering legal challenges in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina, according to court documents and government officials.

The level of federal intervention is highly unusual, legal experts said, especially because civil rights groups already have sued most of those states. Typically, the government files briefs or seeks to intervene in other lawsuits filed against state statutes.

Idaho Vs. Uncle Sam Over Grizzly Bear Killing

LA Times: Reporting from Bonners Ferry, Idaho— To understand the deep rift over federal regulation of endangered species, one only had to sit in the stands of the annual 4-H auction at the Boundary County Fairgrounds here last month, when 14-year-old Jasmine Hill’s handsome pig, Regina, went up for sale.

First, it’s important to know the back story: Jasmine’s father, Jeremy, had been charged by the U.S. Justice Department a few weeks earlier with shooting a grizzly bear — a federally designated threatened species — 40 yards from the back door of the family home at the base of the Selkirk Mountains.

Plenty of people have been charged with illegally killing endangered wolves, bears, caribou and other animals with tenuous footholds in the rugged country in places like northern Idaho.

But this was different. Hill, his neighbors said, was protecting his home and his family. He was doing what any of them might have done. And now a man trying to raise six children out in the woods on a backhoe operator’s earnings was facing up to a year in prison and a $50,000 fine.

ABA President Says Deregulating The Practice Of Law A Bad Idea

ABA Journal: ABA President Wm. T. (Bill) Robinson III agrees the poor need more legal help, but says deregulating law practice is not the answer.

Robinson outlines the ABA’s views on legal aid for the poor in a letter to the editor of the New York Times. His letter responds to a Times op-ed last week that suggests the “justice gap” could be addressed by allowing nonlawyers “into the mix” who could handle easier matters such as uncontested divorces. A Wall Street Journal op-ed by two Brookings Institution fellows, also published last week, made a similar point.

Robinson disagrees. “A rush to open the practice of law to unschooled, unregulated nonlawyers is not the solution,” he writes. “This would cause grave harm to clients. Even matters that appear simple, such as uncontested divorces, involve myriad legal rights and responsibilities. If the case is not handled by a professional with appropriate legal training, a person can suffer serious long-term consequences affecting loved ones or financial security.”

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