Hi Friends!

Today Cicely and I are pleased to announce Justia’s newest free law offering:   FREE Daily Opinion Summaries of all Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal and select State Supreme Courts!

Our Daily Opinion Summaries deliver clear, concise summaries of breaking court opinions right to your in-box. The summaries are tagged by practice area so that readers can quickly identify which opinions are relevant to their practice. This is a powerful tool for attorneys, journalists, and others looking to keep up with latest developments in the law. All summaries are written by licensed attorneys.

How to subscribe

To subscribe, visit the Justia Subscriptions Page at Daily.Justia.com. If you already have a Justia account, sign in to subscribe right away. If you are not yet registered, it’s fast and free!  Once registered, simply choose the jurisdictions and practice areas of interest to you.

Twice, I’ve reviewed PocketJustice by our friends at Oyez: a great app for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices for researching US Supreme Court Cases. Despite the strengths of PocketJustice, it lacked an easy way to follow current Supreme Court developments. It seems our friends at Oyez were aware of that, and have decided to release another app called OyezToday. This app for the iPhone and iPod touch is completely free through a sponsorship from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Much of the app works just like PocketJustice in that it shares the same features: bios of Supreme Court Judges, an archive of cases, and oral arguments with transcripts that follow along with playback. Unlike PocketJustice, however, this app is limited to much more current cases.

The High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law have teamed up on a new site, DoctoredReviews.com. The site was formed to provide consumers with information about medical contracts that purport to censor or prevent negative patient reviews online. If you have been presented with one of these contracts, this site is a great resource to understand your rights. It’s an interesting legal issue, where HIPAA intersects with Section 230 and the First Amendment.

According to DoctoredReviews, doctors are using a company called Medical Justice to source the “anti-review” contracts. Medical Justice bills itself as “Relentlessly Protecting Physicians from Frivolous Lawsuits.” They offer a variety of services, including those designed to “Prevent Internet defamation.”

Last month, the New York Times featured an article on how G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether. With Tax Day, just around the corner, I wanted to take a closer look at how much corporations were exactly paying in taxes.

The starting point for this exercise begins with the Instructions for Form 1120, where the Internal Revenue Service lists the income tax rates for U.S. corporations.

$18.3 million in taxable income is a relatively low threshold, at least when referring to major corporations. How many of them pay any where close to the 35% tax rate? Let’s take a look. Unlike the new York Times article, I will show my calculations so that you can comment on my methodology.

I want to follow up on a previous post I wrote back in October that, in part, discussed open access in scholarship and The Durham Statement.  As a reminder, and for those of you who might be new to this party, The Durham Statement, “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

An article was published recently as a part of The University of Georgia Law School Research Paper Series, “Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship,” which helps to further promote the proposition that opening up this secondary source material in digital format provides real benefits. Not only does this advance the greater philosophical principals of knowledge as a human right and a public good, but open access can positively impact the work and reputation of law faculty by supporting their professional goals to get their work published and, more specifically, cited, which is now a common benchmark used in tenure review.

Last week’s threat of a federal government shutdown had this country in a tizzy over political gamesmanship. Which benefits would be cut?  Federal funds for women’s healthcare, including abortions? Would military families endure missing paychecks and delayed life insurance payments for loved ones killed in action? A last-minute ‘compromise’ meant that one of these happened.

But who was targeted? Women.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now: the government is going to run out of money and “shut down” if Congress can’t agree on a budget before midnight tonight. Yes, Courtney, but how will it affect me?

Plenty of outlets are covering how this will affect the general public. Let’s talk about what our readers care about.

Last week, The New York Times published Arriving as Pregnant Tourists, Leaving with American Babies, a report that offered an interesting peek at a San Gabriel maternity center that catered to pregnant mothers from China. While the article focused on the immigration law aspects of this practice, I wanted to delve into some other issues that were not covered.

Medical Tourism

Medical tourism, or the practice of securing medical services in another state or country, is a serious business. Major American hospitals, including Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford, UCSF, Duke, and Massachusetts General Hospital, have programs dedicated to international patients seeking state-of-the-art care. Some hospitals even have dedicated maternity services for international patients. These programs offer hospitals an avenue to expand their revenue base by serving patients willing to pay full hospital costs by themselves. In an era of diminished public funding and renewed threats to Medicare, these premium paying patients may well end up subsidizing the cost of care for many of us.

Recently, our Justia friend (and my Law Librarian-Hero) Mary Minow mentioned that she traveled to Sacramento to testify in front of the California State Senate on Senate Bill (“SB”) 445.  The proposed bill seeks to amend the California Public Records Act by updating  privacy protections for public library patrons as it pertains to the use of computers and online resources.

While I’ve been able to spend some more time reading up on the Bill, and I encourage you to all to do the same, I actually wanted to focus this post on citizen (i.e., not lobbyist) participation as it applies to the drafting of state and federal laws.  The reason Mary was up in Sacramento voicing her support for SB 445 is because she won a “There Oughta to be a Bill” contest, sponsored by California State Senator Joe Simitian.  Senator Simitian has sponsored this contest since 2001 and, to date, 16 winning ideas proposed by California residents have been signed into law.

Last month was Mad March Legalness over at Justia. Here’s a rundown of last month’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Answers, and our most popular Onward blog and Facebook posts.

Justia’s Top 10 Legal Answerers for March

1. Paul Overhauser: 4,140 points, 75 answers!
2. Burton Padove, 3,615 points, 76 answers!
3. Andrew John Hawes, 1,060 points, 21 answers