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Laws & Legal Heritage of Florida

From the Scout Report:

The Florida Law Collections document the laws and legal heritage of Florida through a wide range of texts digitized from the holdings of the University of Florida's Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center, the State Library, and Archives of Florida, and several other key institutions. Specifically, the collection includes issues of the Journal of the Florida House of Representatives, the Florida Historical Legal Documents collection, a Florida Water Law collection that is particularly noteworthy, as well as other general texts on Florida laws, the legislative process, and government. Given the debates over water rights and usage throughout the state, the Water Law collection is a real find, and visitors can search over 7300 documents within the collection. From the homepage, visitors can perform advanced searches and also look over recently added items. Finally, visitors can also sign up to receive their RSS feed and contact the site administrators with any additional queries they might have.

An Interesting Twist on the States' Rights Argument

Considering who usually makes states' rights arguments, it's intriguing to read that the Attorney General of the State of Massachusetts has filed suit against the federal government.  Her claim is that the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutionally interferes with the state's right to regulate marriage.  The Defense of Marriage Act does not recognize same sex marriages, and consequently denies same sex couples, legally married under Massachusetts law, the same rights and privileges as other Massachusetts married couples.  See the Official Website of the Attorney General of Massachusetts

FAMU Law School closer to full accreditation

FAMU Law in Orlando is nearing full ABA accreditation. Story

A Treat for Wills, Estates and Trusts Lawyers

Here is a link to Michael Jackson's will. Hat tip to Wills, Trusts & Estates Prof Blog. 

LawCite - an emerging International Citator

LawCite takes cases and journal articles and provides citing reference with links in full text. The world-wide coverage enables a researcher to see where the case or journal article is being used in the world's courts. LawCite is sponserd by AustLII.  

McNamara Dead at 93

Fit for the Fourth, Colbert Gets a Haircut

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt, and Still Not a Lawyer

Finding that he had too much delinquent student loan debt, a five judge panel in New York has held that a New York Bar applicant is ineligible for bar membership.  The court held that the would-be lawyer did not possess the requisite character and fitness to become a lawyer, noting that he had not made any substantial payments on his $400,000+ student loans, some of which he incurred as long ago as 1985.  See the article in The New York Times.    

Just in Time for the Fourth, News from the SCOTUS

SCOTUSblog has released its report on October term, 2008.  Among other things, the report shows how many times each Justice voted with the majority, how many decisions each justice wrote, the ideological alignment of each justice, the court's work load, and the majority/dissent break-down of the court on each case decided. 

A particularly fascinating chart shows the number of times each justice was in agreement or disagreement with every other justice.  Chief Justice Roberts, for example, was in full agreement with Justice Alito 85% of the time, with Justice Stevens 37% of the time.  The memo summarizing the Court's year reveals that while seven circuit courts of appeal had all of their decisions reversed, the Eleventh Circuit had a 100% affirmance rate (granted, this was only three cases). 

Financial Institutions Fight Creation of Consumer Financial Protection Agency - Wonder Where the Money in Their War Chest Came From?

The White House has sent a plan to create a new agency, to be known as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to Congress.  Whereas now, the enforcement of consumer protection measures is fragmented among the agencies which regulate the various financial institutions, this agency would have sole responsibility for protecting consumers from practices such as predatory lending, arbitrary changes in credit card rates and other deceptive financial practices.  It would be charged with looking out for consumers' financial interests across the board, whether the financial institution involved was a bank or a mortgage broker or a credit union.  Predictably, the very financial institutions we are propping up with our collective taxes are opposed to anything that interferes with their ability to extract more profit from each individual taxpayer.  See this story in The New York Times.