Our Disclaimer Nothing contained in this blog or on www.keytlaw.com is legal advice. This is just a website that provides information about the law designed to help people deal with their legal needs. Legal information provided on this website is not the same as legal advice, i.e., the application of the law to a person’s specific circumstances.
We try to make our legal information accurate and useful, but we recommend that you consult a lawyer if you want professional assurance that our information and your interpretation of it is appropriate to your particular situation and legal needs.
Our blog and website is also an indirect advertisement for legal services by our attorneys who are licensed to practice law in Arizona. Neither KEYTLaw, LLC, nor any of its attorneys are your attorney and you are not our client unless you enter into a written agreement with us to provide legal services.
|
Tax Prof Blog: “Approximately half of the 45,000 people who will graduate this year from ABA-accredited law schools will never find jobs as lawyers. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next decade 21,000 new jobs for lawyers will become available each year, via growth and outflow from the profession.)
Most of those who do find jobs will be making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year.
People currently in law school are going to graduate with an average of $150,000 of educational debt. This debt will have an average interest rate of 7.5%, meaning the typical graduate will be accruing nearly $1,000 per month in interest upon graduation. Unlike almost every other form of debt, these loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.”
Thomson Reuters: “Apple Inc and five major book publishers have failed to persuade a U.S. judge to throw out a lawsuit by consumers accusing them of conspiring to raise electronic book pricestwo years ago.
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York is related to government charges in April accusing Apple and publishers of colluding to break up Amazon.com’s low-cost dominance of the digital book market. HarperCollins Publishers Inc, Simon & Schuster Inc and Hachette Book Group reached settlements with the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division.
Apple and two of the publishers, Macmillan and Penguin, said in court last month that they want to go to trial to defend themselves against the government charges. The judge has scheduled the next pre-trial hearing for June 22.
The consumers’ main allegation is that the publishers worked together to raise prices and decrease retail competition with Apple coordinating the agreement among them.”
ABA Journal: “A suit filed on Monday by Common Cause claims the Senate filibuster is anti-democratic and unconstitutional.
“The principle of majority rule was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution,” the suit (PDF) says. Other plaintiffs include several Democratic lawmakers and three immigrants who would be aided by passage of the Dream Act, according to Politico, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a press release.”
ABA Journal: “Last week, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton warned lawyers in Roger Clemens’ perjury trial that they were dragging out the case and boring the jurors.
The trial is now in its fifth week, and two jurors are gone. They were dismissed after they were caught sleeping during the testimony, the New York Times reports.”
Facebook may see its value touch the $100 billion mark if its impending IPO is offered at the top of its new pricing range.
The Capitol Mall Association is raffling off two renovated homes in Phoenix. The tickets are only $20 each (or six for $100).
According to Michael Orr, real estate expert at A.S.U.’s W.C. Carey School of Business, the Phoenix housing market is continuing to recover. He also says that traditional homes sales are on the increase.
Of the 314,000 jobs lost during the recession, Arizona has recouped only 78,000 of those positions. ASU economist LeeMcPheters estimates that it could take five years to create the additional 235,000 jobs needed to get back to pre-recession levels. Read more…
losangelesimmigrationlawattorney.com: According to this post:
In a very interesting case out of the state of Illinois, a young man is currently being held in an immigration detention center as a fugitive despite his insistence that he has sought to secure citizenship through the proper legal channels.
Eugene P., 28, was originally born in Nigeria, where he was part of the Ogoni tribe, who are well known for their protests against petroleum drilling in their region of the country in the 1990s.
It is rumored that in response to these protests, oil companies enlisted the assistance of the Nigerian military. This in turn, created an extremely chaotic and dangerous environment that Eugene P. sought to flee.
He is currently appealing the detention as his deadline for the appeal of his green card had not expired when he was taken into custody. Eugene also married a woman while living in the United States – three days prior to being arrested and detained by an ICE worker.
miamicriminallawyer.com: “Even a small charge is worth fighting.” That was unfortunately true for the woman featured in this article, who lost her job when her employer, Wells Fargo, discovered a 40 year-old conviction. After five years of awards for employee excellence, she was terminated for a 1972 shoplifting conviction.
azcentral.com: A dog-fighting ring in Phoenix was busted recently and nine people have been arrested. Two more spectators left with injured dogs, which were never found. Dog-fighting is usually associated with other illegalities. There is a strong body of evidence that animal cruelty is linked to other crimes, particularly crimes against humans. According to the New York Times:
“….We discovered that in homes where there was domestic violence or physical abuse of children, the incidence of animal cruelty was close to 90 percent. The most common pattern was that the abusive parent had used animal cruelty as a way of controlling the behaviors of others in the home. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what links things like animal cruelty and child abuse and domestic violence. And one of the things is the need for power and control. Animal abuse is basically a power-and-control crime.”
Quote by Randall Lockwood, the A.S.P.C.A.’s then-senior vice president for forensic sciences and anticruelty projects and a member of the new Anti-Animal-Abuse Task Force in Baltimore.
huffingtonpost.com: According to this slideshow, the top ten celebrity divorce settlements come with the rather dubious honor of the owing spouse funding such settlements as $100 million dollars (Tiger Woods). We suspect, but cannot prove, that most celebrities’ divorces do not play out as publicly as commoners’ because many celebrities hire attorneys and experts to negotiate behind the scenes and reach an out-of-court resolution. This dynamic strongly resembles collaborative law, an out-of court dispute resolution process in which the parties hire attorneys, divorce coaches, neutral financial experts and child development experts. Several attorneys in Phoenix are specially trained to practice in this area. Collaborative law saves families time, money and the uncertainty of court proceedings. It also typically results in a resolution that both parties may not love, but at least they can live with it. It certainly beats spending $100 million on a divorce settlement.
huffingtonpost.com: Men (and women) make several mistakes after a divorce. Particularly common with men, according to this article, are (1) rushing back into marriage, (2) becoming the bachelor at-large, and (3) introducing your new “friend” to your children way too soon. If the divorce has resulted in a custody dispute, each of these mistakes could also result in your being portrayed negatively in court.
Findlaw.com: Mitch Torbett was arrested in Tennessee for a crime committed by his identical – and deceased – twin brother. He’s suing authorities for the 36 hours he spent in jail and according to this article, he won’t likely win.
New York Times: “On April 30, the Treasury Department announced that 461 Americans had renounced their citizenship in the first quarter of 2012. A 1996 law requires that every person doing so be named, with their names published in the Federal Register. The idea is to shame those who may be renouncing their citizenship solely to escape taxation.
The extreme step of renouncing one’s citizenship is necessary to escape taxation by the United States, because the United States, alone among the major nations of the world, taxes its citizens wherever on earth they live.
Other countries tax only those who live and work within their borders; if their citizens live and work in another country, they are liable only for taxes incurred in that country.
Americans living abroad, however, must not only pay taxes in the country in which they are living, but United States taxes as well, although there is an exemption of $93,000 that is adjusted for inflation annually. The only legal way for American citizens to avoid American taxes is to renounce their citizenship and live their lives permanently in another country.”
Law.com: “I long have believed that the best predictor of whether the U.S. Supreme Court finds a violation of the Fourth Amendment is whether the justices could imagine it happening to them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld drug-testing requirements in every case until it considered a Georgia law that required that high-level government officials be subjected to it. The two Fourth Amendment decisions this term, U.S. v. Jones and Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County, powerfully illustrate that the justices only seem to care if it could happen to them.”
ABA Journal: “Consensus doesn’t seem to have a place in policy discussions about the state of the U.S. immigration system. But there is, at least, widespread agreement that the system needs fixing.
“Everyone will tell you the laws aren’t working,” says Brittney Nystrom, director of policy and legal affairs at the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C. But beyond that starting premise, views on immigration laws start to splinter.
“On both sides of this debate, there are deeply held beliefs about what immigration means to America,” says Nystrom. “On one side, you have the idea that we’re a nation of immigrants, and it’s healthy and important to keep that tradition alive. On the other side, you have the argument that immigrants are a burden. Trying to factually discuss immigration becomes almost impossible when people tend to fall into one camp or the other based on what they’re told.”
Such an environment is the perfect incubator for rampant mythmaking. Advocates on different sides of the debate support their positions by insisting that certain beliefs must be true while dismissing evidence that might suggest otherwise.”
ABA Journal: Law School Transparency has resived its estimates of the total cost of financing a legal education. The group’s new numbers show that the cost of paying full, out of state tuition prices are even higher than originally estimated.
Previously, Law School Transparency had estimated that the average cost of borrowing money for legal education was about $195,000 for students starting law school this year, and $200,000 for students starting next year. Law School Transparency has now revised those numbers to $210,796 and $216,406, respectively.
abajournal: Arizona for-profits may now use .org in domain name. The State Bar has reconsidered its prohibition on the use, according to this article:
That’s the same conclusion an Arizona ethics panel reached in reconsidering a decade-old decision, which was based on state laws prohibiting lawyers from making false statements about their services. The original opinion determined that “by identifying a private law firm with the .org suffix, the communication creates a false impression that the firm either is a nonprofit or is in some way specially affiliated with a nonprofit.”
But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers doesn’t require businesses that use .org to be nonprofit, and local firms argued that the use of the suffix has become widespread to the point of dilution. In its latest opinion, the State Bar of Arizona agreed that consumers were smart enough to know the difference. “The possibility that the public will be misled by a for-profit law firm’s use of .org in its website address is remote,” the ethics panel concluded.
abajournal.com: The practice of law is changing – you can only hope your lawyer is as flexible. Below we highlight from this article a comparison chart of the “new normal” vs. its “old normal” counterpart. Our favorite: “Make things more simple.” If only…
abajournal.com: According to this article, a landmark Florida case will be heard this week by the Florida Supreme Court. The Court weighed in on its reasoning for hearing a twice-dismissed action:
“The question certified to us by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in this case transcends the individual parties to this action because it has the potential to impact the mortgage foreclosure crisis throughout this state and is one on which Florida’s trial courts and litigants need guidance,” the supreme court wrote. “The legal issue also has implications beyond mortgage foreclosure actions. Because we agree with the Fourth District that this issue is indeed one of great public importance and in need of resolution by this court, we deny the parties’ request to dismiss this proceeding.”
findlaw.com: We can breathe a collective sigh of relief:
First there was the Sundance Kid, and now there’s the “go-kart bandit.” A 14-year-old boy has been arrested in connection with about 100 home burglaries in Nashville, Tenn., the New York Daily News reports.
The teen’s name wasn’t released because he’s a minor. But police believe the young suspect stole and vandalized homes in at least four different neighborhoods. The teen allegedly found his targets by trolling the alleys behind homes in a go-kart. He got in by kicking in the back doors.
huffingtonpost.com: Forget Mexico, Colombia…Colorado, a key swing vote state, may be swinging against Obama if his administration does not stop shutting down dispensaries. For the entire article, click here.
The state has embarked on an ambitious effort to regulate its thriving medical marijuana industry. When it comes to marijuana policy, Colorado’s voters, businesses, tax collectors, doctors and policy makers are moving forward. The lone holdout: President Barack Obama.
On Sunday, 25 medical marijuana centers across Colorado closed their doors in response to a Department of Justice crackdown which did not appear rooted in state or local law, as the administration had previously promised it would be.
Bank of America is reaching out to thousands of homeowners in an attempt to reduce principal on home loans as a result of a $25 billion settlement with 49 state attorneys general and federal authorities.
The Arizona House and Senate approved a stay-the-course budget that will allow for the reversal of some previous belt tightening measures as well as a rainy day fund. Read more at azcentral.com.
An Arkansas judge has ruled that a woman who found a $1 million lottery ticket in a convenience store garbage can must return the winnings to the person who discarded the ticket.
Concerns are rising over the recent defections of key executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Even as news broke this week that home ownership in America has fallen to its lowest level in 15 years, the Phoenix housing market continues to surge. While increased demand bodes well for a recovery, there are concerns that it may be too much, too soon. Click here to read Phoenix Business Blog article.
A big part of the American dream is slipping away as owning a home becomes more elusive for people across the country. According to a Bloomberg article, home ownership has fallen to its lowest level since 1997.
thomsonreuters.com: Today in Missoula, Montana, a lawsuit against the author of Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson, was thrown out today with the judge citing “flimsy” claims by the Plaintiff:
But U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon dismissed the case for what he said was the “imprecise, in part flimsy, and speculative nature of the claims and theories advanced” by the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit was filed in May 2011 following a critical report by CBS television’s “60 Minutes” program that challenged the credibility of biographical details in Mortenson’s memoir.
In particular, the “60 Minutes” report disputed his account of being kidnapped in Pakistan’s Waziristan region in 1996, and said his institute, founded to build schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was largely being used to promote the book.
Page 1 of 8212345...102030...»Last »
|
|
Click to Follow Us!