Jay-D the Aspiring J.D.

My journey from 0L to J.D.

[notoriousrbg]

In anti-Obamacare case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg questions the foundation of the lawsuit

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

The Supreme Court justice zeroes in on whether the plaintiffs even have a basis to sue.

[basedpotatochip]

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

[npr]

Drive drunk, drive recklessly, and the state can suspend your driver’s license. But many police and motor vehicle administrators worry about a recent trend: A large number of suspensions are for reasons that have nothing to do with unsafe driving.

These reasons include unpaid traffic tickets, falling behind on child support, getting caught with drugs, bouncing checks; or minor juvenile offenses like missing school, using false identification to buy alcohol, or shoplifting.

Increasingly, people who study driver safety say this makes little sense. A study in 2013 from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators raised concerns that police and state and local motor vehicle officials find too much of their time and budget tied up going after people with suspensions for minor lawbreaking that has nothing to do with safe driving.

Can’t Pay Your Fines? Your License Could Be Taken

Photo credit: Joe Shapiro/NPR

Caption: Desiree Seats, 23, lost her license for two years before she even got it because of an unpaid fine. Without a license, she couldn’t find the jobs she needed to start earning money.

[jessehimself]

[npr]

Finding A Jury Of Your Peers Actually Is Pretty Complicated

Over the past few weeks, thousands of people have protested after grand juries failed to indict police officers in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. What they wanted was to have the officers tried in an open court before a jury of their peers. But the notion of a jury of your peers isn’t so straightforward.

Take, for example, 21-year-old Roderick Giles’ experience. When he got a jury summons in the mail, he reacted the way a lot of people do.

"I did not want to go to jury duty," he says. "That was the last thing on my mind to do."

Luckily for the California resident, the judge dismissed him because he was 10 minutes late getting to Sacramento County Superior Court. But ideally, that’s not how jury selection is supposed to work.

[chrisgeidner]

Expect Many, Many Lawsuits From Ferguson

WASHINGTON — It’s been nine days since Michael Brown was shot, unarmed, in the middle of a street in Ferguson, Missouri, but civil rights and civil liberties legal advocates say the legal fallout from the shooting and its tumultuous aftermath are just beginning.  

“There will be lawsuits up the kazoo,” said Barbara Arnwine, the longtime president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in an interview Sunday evening. “I think you’re going to see ripple after ripple of legal matters here in response to this outrageous situation.”

[shortformblog]

The cluster-you-know-what won’t be going away anytime soon.

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

. . .No one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, MADAME BOVARY 165 (Lowell Blair transl., Bantam Classic 1981) (1857).  

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

The law is a profession of words.

DAVID MELLINKOFF, THE LANGUAGE OF THE LAW, 1 (1963).  

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

Stanford research suggests support for incarceration mirrors whites' perception of black prison populations

Informing the white public that the percentage of black Americans in prison is far greater than the percentage of white people behind bars may not spur support for reform. Instead, it might actually generate support for harsh laws and sentencing.

[katiecouric]

SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg talked to me about her 35 page Hobby Lobby dissent. Watch the full interview here.

[washingtonpost]

A breakdown of the 1,385 people — responsible for killing more than 2,085 — who have been put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

State Bar of Georgia Swears in First African-American President

The State Bar of Georgia's annual conference drew twice the typical number of attendees, including an unprecedented number of minorities as the organization ...

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

[yesixicana]

Judge grants class action status to inmates' solitary confinement case

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

A federal judge in Oakland has granted inmates in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison class action status in their claims of unconstitutional treatment.

[jaydtheaspiringjd-blog]

In clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, the State of Alabama has proposed a set of rules that will require an otherwise eligible voter who lacks the required photo identification to prove his or her identity by the "voucher" of a class of mostly white poll officials.

"It is deeply problematic that Alabama's Secretary of State is trying to resurrect an unconstitutional and illegal relic of the Jim Crow South," said Ryan P. Haygood, Director of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "Discriminatory voucher tests, which Congress explicitly banned along with literacy tests when it passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, have no place in modern day Alabama," Haygood added.

The Alabama Secretary of State's proposed rules would require a voter without photo identification to show that he or she is personally acquainted with an election official in order to vote.

In a letter sent today to Jean Brown, the Chief Legal Advisor to Alabama’s Secretary of State, NAACP LDF details the racially toxic legislative session in which the photo identification law was passed and the tremendous burdens that the photo identification requirement and voucher test, together, will have on the half of a million registered voters in Alabama who lack state-issued photo identification:

"[T]he broad discretion that your proposed rules vest in election officials across the State, in tandem, make clear that the State intends to operate both the photo and positive identification requirements as unconstitutional devices to permit racial discrimination.

Alabama's proposed rules will likely disfranchise thousands of voters of color in the state. Indeed, according to a recent Reuters poll cited in today’s letter, 37 percent of white people in Alabama have no acquaintances of a different race. Thus, many white poll officials will not be able to vouch for the disproportionate numbers of people of color who lack photo identification.

“It is imperative that Alabama act quickly before the June 3rd election," said Deuel Ross, Fried Frank Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "This voucher test is exactly the kind of discriminatory device that the Voting Rights Act was designed to stop and that Sections 5 would have prevented were it not for the United States Supreme Court's devastating decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder,” Ross added.

Click here to read the letter NAACP LDF sent to Alabama's Secretary of State.

[wocinsolidarity]

LET’S ALL WELCOME JUDGE MARY YU TO THE WASHINGTON SUPREME COURT.SHE IS THE STATE’S FIRST OPENLY GAY JUSTICE, FIRST ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE, AND FIRST LATINA JUSTICE, SHE IS ALSO THE 6TH WOMAN CURRENTLY SERVING AND THE 11TH WOMAN EVER TO SERVE ON WASHINGTON STATE’S SUPREME COURT.