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Thirteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some lawyers have certainly benefitted from a bevy of lawsuits, on issues ranging from negligence to freedom of religion to whether Saudi Arabia was partially responsible. The Cross at Ground Zero In the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers, crews found two steel beams that had formed the shape of a Latin cross. They called it “the cross at Ground Zero” and it eventually got placed in the National September 11 Memorial and Museum....

Add Anna Smith to the growing list of plaintiffs involved in lawsuits against the NSA’s surveillance program. Smith is as innocuous as they come – “a mother of two who lives in rural Idaho, works the night shift as a nurse and goes to the gym often,” according to The Washington Post. Last year, she (with help from her lawyer/husband) sued the government for violating her Fourth Amendment rights by collecting her telephone data without a warrant....

What is there to do anymore on the weekends but watch football? Unfortunately, for those of us unable or unwilling to get DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, we still can’t watch out-of-market NFL games. It’s a familiar complaint for NFL fans, as the league has not telecasted out-of-market games on network television for decades. The NFL does, however, allow DirecTV to broadcast all games on satellite. AT&T, which owns DirecTV, pays the NFL $1....

Haley Moss, a Florida attorney, has autism. That does not make her different; it makes her exceptional. She is reportedly one of the first openly autistic lawyers in the state. While statistics on autistic lawyers are hard to find, Moss is not hiding behind her condition. Instead, she works at a big law firm and is a champion for disabled people. It helps that she also has a photographic memory. Oh, you didn’t know that about autism?...

In an action alleging a teacher’s constructive termination arising out of plaintiff’s complaints regarding the treatment of disabled students, dismissal of the complaint for lack of standing is reversed where the broad statutory language in section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and its corresponding anti-retaliation provision in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act did not demonstrate that Congress intended to limit standing under section 504 to only those with disabilities....

The Supreme Court has entertained a heavy criminal caseload so far this term, considering rights to effective counsel, returned-mail appeal waivers, and the wisdom of eyewitness testimony. Next week, the Court will take up prosecutorial misconduct in Smith v. Cain as it reviews questionable practices in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office for the third time in 16 years. Why has the Court showered the New Orleans prosecutors with so much attention over the years?...

In a prisoner’s action claiming that an official violated his First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances, summary judgment for defendants is reversed where there were genuine issues of material fact as to the existence of an adverse action against plaintiff, the causation for the adverse action, the chilling of plaintiff’s rights, and the relationship of any action to a legitimate correctional goal. Read Brodheim v. Cry, No....

Chuck E. Cheese Killer Nathan Dunlap is once again asking the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to stop his execution. Though it’s been 15 years since Colorado last executed a death row inmate, according to The Denver Post, Dunlap is in the final stages of his guaranteed appeals. Last year, the Tenth Circuit rejected Dunlap’s presumptive and actual prejudice challenges that the district court should have granted his motion for a change of venue, and should have applied the Skilling factors to his case....

The Supreme Court released two important free speech decisions on Thursday, finding that the government can’t limit temporary signage based on its content but can control what goes on specialty license plates. The difference? Who was speaking. The twin cases coming up from an Arizona sign restriction and a Texas DMV decision, emphasize the Court’s focus on not just the content of speech but on its speaker. The decisions taken together emphasize strictly protecting private speech while allowing greater regulation in government-sponsored speech....

In US v. Christensen, No. 08-30120, the court of appeals reversed defendant’s sentence for enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity and obstruction of justice for failing to appear at trial, on the ground that a Sentencing Commission amendment providing that U.S.S.G. section 2G1.3(b)(2)(B)’s sentencing enhancement should not be applied where the “minor” is actually an undercover officer applied retroactively and thus affected defendant’s sentence. In US v. Denton, No....

As if there wasn’t enough to keep you awake at night already, the Department of Justice on Monday, November 16, argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the federal government can kill U.S. citizens at its discretion if state secrets are involved. If you’re alarmed by that argument, you aren’t alone. U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millet called this argument an “extraordinary . . . proposition” that would allow the executive branch of the federal government to “unilaterally decide to kill U....

It’s Fashion Week, and we would be remiss in neglecting to connect the glamour and frivolity that is consuming our RSS feed with our nine favorite jurists. Now that the days of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and everyone’s favorite first female, Sandra Day O’Connor, are firmly behind us, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only Supreme Court justice who dresses for court with any pizzazz. It makes us sad....

As the economy continues to struggle, and businesses shutter, more employers may start offering employees retention bonuses to keep a skeleton staff on board through a company’s final days. So what employer obligations attach to a retention bonus? The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that an employer that offers a retention bonus subject to a condition precedent may not have an affirmative duty to take actions to trigger the condition precedent....

Hammad v. Holder, No. 07-72370, a petition for review of the BIA’s determination that petitioner was not entitled to permanent resident status. The Ninth Circuit denied the petition, on the grounds that 1) 8 U.S.C. section 1186a(b) puts the burden of proof on the government to prove that his marriage was fraudulent; 2) given the numerous inconsistencies in his testimony, petitioner failed to carry his burden to prove that his marriage was bona fide; and 3) because petitioner’s extreme hardship argument was based on the effect his removal would have on a family from his second marriage, which did not exist during his two-year conditional resident status, he did not qualify for a waiver on that ground....

Millions of Americans who want to know more about their family histories have uploaded genetic information to commercial genealogy services like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, believing their DNA profiles will remain private. A recent development in Florida, however, is raising questions about how secure and confidential that information can continue to be. According to the New York Times, an Orlando police detective announced at a police convention in late October that he had been granted a warrant to search the full database of one of the sites, GEDmatch, which has around 1 million users....

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a YouTube-style video-sharing website was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor provision in a copyright infringement lawsuit stemming from user-uploaded music videos. The now-defunct Veoh Networks (Veoh) operated a publicly-accessible website that enabled users to share videos with other users. Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the world’s largest record and music publishing companies, filed a direct and second copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh in 2007 after Veoh users, without UMG’s authorization, downloaded videos containing UMG-copyrighted songs....

Petition for review of an order of the Board of Immigration Appeals is granted where the Board did not adequately take into account the difference between 8 U.S.C. sec. 1182(a)(9)(B)(i)(II) and 8 U.S.C. sec. 1182(a)(9)(C)(i)(I) when it concluded plaintiff was statutorily ineligible for permanent residence because he had accumulated more than a year of unlawful presence. Read Lemus-Losa v. Holder, No. 07-3942 Appellate InformationPetition for Review of a Final Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals....

For Roberto Roman, the criminal justice system must seem unreal. Reading the recent Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in his case, it’s easy to see why. After Roman confessed to the murder of a Utah sheriff’s deputy, he then was acquitted of the murder (after a state-court jury trial where he testified that the deputy’s brother, who died of a drug overdose a few months after his sister’s death, and who just so happened to be riding along in the car with Roman and doing meth, murdered his own sister)....

Oral arguments in McClutcheon v. FEC, a case with significant implications for campaign finance and free speech, began with a series of hypotheticals about how one might circumvent the contribution limits at stake in this case, such as donating to or forming PACs, and continued with more confusion throughout. There was one brief hint, however, of how a compromise might be reached. Based on their comments in oral arguments and past stances on campaign finance, most Court watchers are predicting that the four liberal justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) will likely vote to uphold the aggregate contribution limits, the four conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy) will likely vote in favor of striking them down, and Chief Justice Roberts will likely operate as the swing vote – or better yet, as a consensus and compromise builder....

New Jersey had the opportunity to persuade the Third Circuit that it should be allowed to offer betting on professional and college sports, reports The Inquirer. With only four other states in the country allowed to wager on sports, many other jurisdictions are watching this case closely to see if they can also get in on the action. The Inquirer reports that New Jersey missed the deadline to grandfather in sports betting in 1993, when the measure failed to make it on the ballot....