This representation could conflict with her campaign's assertion she "never represented that she was licensed to practice in Massachusetts."
While the top lawyer for the Massachusetts bar said this week a law professor who "dabbled" in practice probably wouldn't need a license in the state, the state's own rules indicate otherwise.
Massachusetts rules require attorneys "engaging in the practice of law" to register with the state's regulatory board and notify it that they've been admitted to the state's bar.
Warren's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on reports that she lied about her law license.
Police found 28-year-old Lewis' body in the driveway of the home of an 81-year-old woman who was dead inside, TMZ reports.
Lewis was renting a room from the woman.
According to TMZ:
"Investigators say they believe Lewis beat the woman to death.
According to multiple reports, neighbors heard the 81-year-old woman screaming ... and then saw a young man outside her home attack 2 other men with a piece of wood ... before he climbed onto the roof and fell to his death.
Law enforcement sources tell us Lewis is the sole suspect in the woman's murder, and they are not looking for other possible suspects."
Lewis dated Perry back in 2006, and they attended many Hollywood events together.
A leading Chinese forensic scientist has publicly cast doubt on the conviction of Gu Kailai for murdering British businessman Neil Heywood with cyanide.
The wife of ousted leader Bo Xilai was convicted and handed a suspended death penalty last month over the death of the 41-year-old Briton in Chongqing last year.
But Wang Xuemei, an official at the Supreme People's Procuratorate, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday night: "I feel very pained, upset and scared that our court believed the theory [Heywood] was poisoned with cyanide."
Wang has had an unusually high media profile in the past, lauded in the Chinese media as the first female forensic scientist to work for the country's highest level prosecution body.
But she told the Guardian that she had been pressing officials to move her from her position for almost a decade because she had an "empty title" with no real duties.
Even so, it is extremely surprising that an official in her position would publicly question the verdict in such a politically sensitive case.
Discussions of the case have been heavily censored online and almost no coverage has appeared in Chinese media beyond reproductions of reports from state news agency Xinhua.
Wang asked why none of the obvious symptoms of cyanide poisoning were cited in the accounts that emerged from Gu's trial or that of the former Chongqing police chief, Wang Lijun.
On Monday a Chinese court sentenced him to 15 years for covering up Heywood's murder, accepting bribes and abuse of power and defection.
One simple explanation may be that few details of the scientific evidence used to convict Gu have emerged, although an unofficial account of her trial from a person in the court said her defence team questioned the scientific evidence against her.
Her lawyers reportedly said Wang Lijun took two blood samples yet found no traces of poison, while a third sample that he took – tested only four months later – found low levels of a toxin, apparently insufficient to kill.
Chinese trials often rely heavily on testimony from the accused and state media have said Gu confessed and to Heywood's murder.
Wang Lijun's trial is also said to have heard a recording the police chief made secretly of Gu confessing to him the day after Heywood's death, though no details were given.
After discussing Gu's mental health problems, including her alleged paranoia, Wang Xuemei also wrote that the 53-year-old trusted the former police chief deeply and added: "In other words, Wang Lijun could easily have used Gu to do whatever he wanted to do.
"Who would benefit from Neil Heywood's death?"
She told the Guardian: "I don't care how long the blog is up there. I just want to tell people I feel humiliated.
"I think Chinese criminal doctors are not such idiots. I have done my duty and fulfilled my historical responsibility."
Alito planned on going to law school, which he did at Yale, and ultimately getting a seat on the Supreme Court, his yearbook points out.
In his undergraduate years at the university, Alito also wrote a thesis, "La corte costituzionale italiana," which he researched in the summer of 1971 on "various sidewalk cafes in Rome and Bologna."
He completed the Woodrow Wilson School and spent his senior year as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, "thinking great and ineffable thoughts," as his yearbook puts it.
It would seem that a young Samuel Alito knew a thing or two about his own potential.
A chemist who tested more than 60,000 drug samples submitted in the cases of about 34,000 defendants over nine years has admitted to faking drug sample results, according to a police report obtained by the Associated Press.
The revelations about the chemist, Annie Dookhan, who is also accused of having fabricated a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, throws thousands of criminal cases into question because of tampered evidence and the fact that shetestified in about 150 criminal cases since 2009 while claiming false credentials.
"I screwed up big time," Dookhan said, according to the report by investigators for Attorney General Martha Coakley's office obtained by the AP. "I messed up bad. It's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."
The AP also reports that supervisors at the Boston lab, which was closed by police in August, may face federal scrutiny because they did not intervene after lab employees reported concerns about Dookhan's work.
“I can’t imagine she could have been this corrupt without someone noticing,” Attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, who represents several defendants whose samples Dookhan handled, told the AP. “The investigation needs to go deeper than Annie Dookhan to get to the point of ‘How did she get away with it?’”
The Boston Globe reports that the office of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrickhas identified 1,141 inmates in Massachusetts jails and prisons convicted based on evidence handled by Dookhan, who was also the quality control officer in the lab.
"I intentionally turned a negative sample into a positive a few times," Dookhan said in a signed statement she gave police.
She also admitted to identifying drug samples by looking at them instead of testing them, contaminating samples to get more work finished and saying drug evidence was heavier than it actually was, according to the AP.
Authorities have not filed criminal charges against Dookhan or commented on her possible motives.
Guest blogging for the right-leaning Legal Insurrection, New Orleans attorney Matt Farley says Warren represented a company that wanted to liquidate rural cooperative Cajun Electric Power Coop.
Farley says Warren went to bat for bigtime utility Southwestern Electric Power Co., a major coal burner that wanted to liquidate Cajun so it could take over its "plum of a power plant" and lay off a "goodly number of its 400 employees."
Farley doesn't go into a lot of detail about his role in the bankruptcy, but based on this court document, it appears he represented another power company that wanted to buy Cajun's assets.
Business Insider reached out to Warren's campaign for comment but didn't receive an immediate response on Tuesday.
The issue presented by Fisher v. University of Texas is whether a state university should give preference to some applicants on the basis of their race and thereby disadvantage other applicants on the basis of their race.
For most people, at least outside of academia, the answer is clear: Race preference is obviously inconsistent with the American ideal that all persons are equal before the law and are to be treated as individuals, not as members of racial groups.
It is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education holding, everyone thought, that all race discrimination by government is unconstitutional.
It is inconsistent with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race discrimination by any institution, such as the University of Texas, that receives federal funds.
The purpose of the university’s race preference program is to admit blacks and Mexican-Americans who do not meet the university’s ordinary admission standards. The program effectively adopts as official university policy the view that members of these groups cannot meet and cannot be expected to meet standards applicable to others. One unfortunate result of the policy is to raise the question, as in The Bell Curve, of group racial differences, a question that a policy of race neutrality thankfully makes irrelevant. It also necessarily raises a question as to and tends to demean the achievements of every member of the group.
What can the university hope to gain by a race preference program that can justify its costs? The “diversity” rationale for such programs — the claim that they benefit not the preferred students, but the school — is hard to take seriously. There is no reason to think, and no real empirical basis for the claim, that substituting a few under-qualified blacks and Mexican-Americans for better-qualified whites and Asians in a classroom or school improves anyone’s education. There are studies indicating that the opposite is true.
Nor can race preference programs be justified (the Supreme Court has held that they cannot be) as a remedy for disadvantage. If disadvantage were the concern, disadvantage would be the criterion. Race is not a proxy for disadvantage, because not all and not only blacks (or Mexican-Americans) have suffered disadvantage. In any event, racially preferential admission to selective institutions of higher education is not a program for the disadvantaged, but almost always only for the most advantaged. Indeed, today many of the preferred blacks come from the upper classes in Africa and the Caribbean. The UT Law School never denied a black preferential admission because he or she was not disadvantaged or was exceptionally advantaged. The result is that a racially preferred applicant with professional-class parents of high economic status will be granted admission while a better-qualified non-preferred applicant with working-class parents with at most a high school education is denied admission — the justice of which is difficult for most people to see.
Apart from all questions of principle or morality, the use of race preference in higher education must be rejected on the purely practical ground that the gaps in academic competitiveness that are involved are too great to be ignored or overcome. The source of the problem, as of all our racial problems, is the grim fact that the average black 12th grader performs at the level of the average white eighth grader in reading and math, making high school graduation a more serious problem for many than admission to a selective college, The average black college applicant scores about 200 points lower than the average white or Asian on the SAT, reflecting the average four-year deficiency in academic achievement. Rather than addressing this problem, racially preferential admission programs pretend that it doesn’t exist. Perhaps most discouraging, blacks from families with annual incomes in the highest economic quintile, score lower on the SAT than whites from families with incomes in the lowest quintile (849 vs. 869 in 1995). Further, the gap has actually increased in the last 10 years, not decreased as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stated in her opinion for the Court in Grutter, the Michigan law school case, making her statement that preferences can be expected to end in 25 years pure fantasy.
Of the 10,500 blacks who took the LSAT in January 2002, 29 scored at or above the 92nd percentile, a very good score, but not good enough for admission to one of the top half-dozen schools, where the median LSAT is at or above the 98th percentile. At this level of qualification, the number of eligible blacks approaches zero. Former Harvard President Derek Bok’s estimate that without preferences the number of blacks at selective schools would drop to less than 1.5 percent was probably an overestimate.
The dispositive argument against racially preferential admission in higher education, however, is or ought to be that its primary effect is not to increase participation by blacks, but to create a mismatch by placing blacks in selective schools at least one level above the schools that they are fully qualified to attend. Blacks fully qualified to attend the selective University of Texas law school, for example, may find themselves instead in the much more selective Yale law school where they will be at an academic disadvantage. To meet a self-imposed quota, Texas will then admit under-qualified blacks who would otherwise attend less selective schools.
It has now become clear that race preference admission programs typically do not operate to the preferred student’s advantage. Their relatively poor qualification — of which they are often unaware — usually leads to relatively poor performance, the bottom portion of the class and an increased dropout rate. Studies have shown what common sense indicates, that blacks (like everyone else) do better in terms of grades, graduation rates, admission to graduate schools and bar passage rates in schools for which they are fully competitive than in schools for which they are not.
A well-known study by law professor Richard Sander at UCLA concludes that “the production of black lawyers would rise significantly and blacks would be significantly better off” if law schools did not practice race discrimination. The nation has spent billions of dollars to encourage blacks and Latinos to study science and engineering — with very little success. Yet there is an easy way to do it — abolish preferential admission to selective schools. A study shows that blacks and Latinos actually sign up for science and engineering in good numbers, but then get discouraged and drop out when they can not keep up with the class because they are underqualified. When they can keep up in a less selective school, the chances are much better that they will graduate. If facilitating the movement of blacks into the economic and educational mainstream is the objective, racially preferential college and university admission is not merely unhelpful, but counterproductive.
Racial preferences send blacks the message they least need to hear, that they cannot and will not have to compete academically with whites and Asians. Perhaps the most harmful result is that it tends to create an expectation of a general “black exemption” from ordinary obligations and requirements. If blacks may properly be exempted from compliance with college and university admission requirements applicable to others, why may they not also be exempted from compliance with other requirements? That cannot, however, be the way to interracial harmony, integration and respect. A society in which it is generally understood that blacks cannot be expected to conform to the rules applicable to whites is a society in which blacks and whites will not be able to live together. Racial preference in higher education is a prescription for unending racial conflict and hostility as white and Asian parents will never cease to protest having their children place at a disadvantage in admission to selective schools.
Although the case is still ongoing, the federal judge dismissed several of Linda Eagle's claims against her former company, Edcomm.
The judge found Edcomm could not be held liable under a federal anti-hacking law for Eagle's missed business opportunities—over $100,000-worth, she claims—following the hijacking of her LinkedIn account.
• Establish, in writing, whether a social media account—and this may be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.—is a solely personal account or belongs to the company.
• If it is a personal account, do not share your password with a co-worker, assistant, or boss. This is exactly what Eagle says allowed Edcomm straight access to her account—no hacking experience needed.
• Move to a state such as California, which somewhat protects an employee's personal social media accounts from nosy employers. The state's law, however, only protects personal accounts. So still follow the rule of establishing what type of account you hold—personal or business-related.
Despite these loose guidelines, there is still much room, legally, to dispute ownership of a LinkedIn account.
The main reason for that is the unclear definition of "personal" and "business-related," Goldman has written in Forbes.
In the case of a LinkedIn account, users probably use it for both work and personal purposes. Ultimately, Goldman wrote, the courts will probably have to spend a lot of time figuring out when employers actually have a right to these "mixed accounts."
In the meantime, the best thing for you is not to mix business and personal matters, at least online.
It seems strange, but before they took their seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices played sports, went to school, and maybe even got into trouble like the rest of us.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a cheerleader. Stephen Breyer was on the debate team.
Amendola began wreaking havoc on Sandusky's already chaotic case at least six months before the trial actually began.
In an ill-advised interview with NBC's Bob Costas, Sandusky said he "didn’t go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I’ve helped" — a statement legal experts called "creepy."
Following Sandusky's disastrous interview with Costas, the Today Show's Ann Curry flat out asked Amendola whether he was competent enough to manage the case.
As part of his testimony in the appeal, Amendola will say he didn't have enough time to prepare for the blockbuster trial, according to the Patriot-News.
A man sentenced to 15 years behind bars for selling fake collectible coins to the elderly might soon have a new crime to add to his rap sheet.
Joseph Romano and his associate Dejvid Mirkovic are suspected of trying to hire hit men to kill the judge and prosecutor in Romano's fraudulent coin collecting case, The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog reported Tuesday.
Too bad those potential assassins turned out to be undercover cops.
Despite that small glitch, Romano's alleged plan was pretty detailed.
He and Mirkovic allegedly offered the cops $40,000 for the hit, but only after they proved their value by assaulting another one of Romano's enemies.
The cops gave Romano proof the assault, which was staged, had been carried out and were paid $3,000 before accepting the murder-for-hire job, according to Law Blog.
Authorities wouldn't release the names of the judge and prosecutor targeted by Romano. But, according to Law Blog, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Bianco handled Romano's first case.
So can you really blame Yale law students for trying to make themselves appealing for any job market?
An absolutely horrified tipster sent Above The Law this video of Yale students dancing their way around Manhattan while singing about the horrors of running into an ex-lover when it was least expected.
Grammy nomination anyone?
The tipster sure doesn't think so, telling Above The Law to only post the video if they "say something mean."
"All I know is that it's full of kids from Yale who want to be musical stars but for obvious reasons had to settle for being attorneys," the tipster wrote.
Watch the full video, courtesy of YouTube user joshivanm and let us know what you think:
The U.S. Supreme Court let stand Tuesday an immunity law on wiretapping viewed by government as a useful anti-terror tool but criticized by rights activists as a flagrant abuse of executive power.
The top U.S. court declined to review a December 2011 appeals court decision that rejected a lawsuit against AT&T for helping the National Security Agency monitor its customers' phone calls and Internet traffic.
Plaintiffs argue that the law allows the executive branch to conduct "warrantless and suspicionless domestic surveillance" without fear of review by the courts and at the sole discretion of the attorney general.
But President Barack Obama's administration has argued to keep the immunity law in place, saying it would imperil national security to end such cooperation between the intelligence agencies and telecom companies.
"Electronic surveillance for law enforcement and intelligence purposes depends in great part on the cooperation of the private companies that operate the nation's telecommunication system," the Obama administration said while making its case.
"If litigation were allowed to proceed against those who allegedly assisted in such activities, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future, and the possible reduction in intelligence that might result is simply unacceptable for the safety of our nation," it stressed.
The Supreme Court is set to hear a separate case later this month in which civil liberties' group are suing NSA officials for authorizing unconstitutional wiretapping.
A Moscow appeals court has released one of the jailed members of anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot, but ordered two others to serve the remainder of their two-year jail term in a Russian prison colony.
Yekaterina Samutsevich, the oldest of the three women at 30, walked free into the arms of her father, after serving six months in a pre-trial detention centre after being found guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred in August.
A panel of three judges accepted the argument of Samutsevich's new lawyer that she had not participated fully in the group's February performance of an anti-Putin "punk prayer" in a Moscow cathedral. Samutsevich had been kicked out of the cathedral shortly after entering, meaning she did not engage in the "aggressive movements" that had offended Russia's Orthodox believers, she argued.
The other two women, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, hugged Samutsevich goodbye. They will now be sent to prison colonies to serve the remainder of their two-year terms.
The women issued final statements in the court, acknowledging that their public roles as harsh anti-Putin critics would be reduced once in jail. "I have lost all hope in the court," Alyokhina said from inside a glass cage. "But I want again and for the last time, because we probably won't get another chance, to talk about our motives. Dear believers, we did not want to offend you."
"We don't have and have never had any religious hate," Tolokonnikova said. The band's performance was political and not religious, she argued.
The case against Pussy Riot has highlighted the crackdown on freedoms inside Russia since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in May amid a wave of discontent. They have been held in a Moscow detention centre since their arrest in March.
In a documentary aired on Sunday, Putin said the three jailed members of the anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot "got what they asked for". He claimed on NTV that he had played no role in the case. "I have nothing to do with it," he said. "They got what they asked for."
File-sharing site Megaupload has tried to escape criminal prosecution in the United States by saying since the company doesn't have a mailing address in this country, it can't be prosecuted here.
But federal Judge Liam O'Grady ruled Friday that the government could circumvent that technicality by serving notice to infamous founder Kim Dotcom once he's extradited to America, Ars Technica reported Tuesday.
The feds can send notice to Dotcom's jail cell since he's essentially an "alter ego" for the company, the judge ruled.
Back in July, Megaupload's lawyers argued that since the company is based in Hong Kong, only that country's laws apply, Ars Technica reported at the time.
But, according to O'Grady, that doesn't really matter.
"To this court's knowledge, no court has ever dismissed an indictment for failure to meet Rule 4's secondary mailing requirement," he wrote in his opinion.
In a classic case of he said/she said, a young Russian immigrant who claims she's here for school is accusing her ex-boyfriend of putting personal pictures of her on an escort website to get revenge after she ended their affair.
But her ex, a Brooklyn-based dentist, is calling foul.
Ruzilya Khusnutdinova, 24, said 42-year-old dentist Vladimir Dranovsky, with whom she had a years-long relationship after meeting through a Russian dating website, helped her get a student visa and come to America in 2009, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday.
The relationship turned sour last year when Khusnutdinova called things off, prompting Dranovsky to post sexy pictures she had taken during a romantic vacation to an escort website, she claims in a recently filed lawsuit.
Khusnutdinova told the Daily News she had no idea about the ad until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers knocked on her door and asked if she worked as a call girl.
“During the questioning that lasted several hours, she explained to the officers she was never engaged in prostitution, that she was a student, that she was a victim of abuse and harassment,” Khusnutdinova alleges in her complaint.
But, according to Dranovsky, Khusnutdinova is just trying to hide who she really is.
“She told me she was working for an escort service,” he told the Daily News. “Maybe she’s blaming me just to get out of it."
Ever since Disney bought Marvel and its some 5,000 characters for $4 billion in 2009, the company has earned profits off Stan Lee's many characters in the form of action figures, toys, costumes, and a little film called "The Avengers."
However, one company claims Disney has no right to any of the characters.
Now, Stan Lee Media Inc. (SLMI), formerly affiliated with Lee, filed a complaint in the district court of Colorado claiming it, not The Walt Disney Company, own the rights to any and all of Stan Lee's characters including the very profitable "Avengers" gang which earned Disney more than $1 billion at theaters worldwide.
According to the complaint filed, the Colorado based SLMI claims Stan Lee assigned copyrights for all Marvel properties and characters over to it in October 1998, before signing them over to Marvel Enterprises Inc. one month later.
From the complaint:
"Oddly, in November, 1998, Stan Lee signed a written agreement with Marvel Enterprises, Inc. in which he purportedly assigned to Marvel the rights to the Characters. However, Lee no longer owned those rights since they had been assigned to SLEI previously. Accordingly, the Marvel agreement actually assigned nothing."
SLMI goes on to claim Disney's purchase of the Marvel characters in December 2009 means nothing since ownership was allegedly never really transferred from SLMI in the first place.
The company is seeking damages of $5.5 billion for copyright infringement citing Disney's use characters "Iron Man 2," "Thor," "X-Men: First Class," "The Avengers," and "The Amazing Spider-Man" in films amounting to box office receipts of $3.5 billion (some of which are produced by Sony and Universal) and other merchandising (including Broadway show "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark") amounting to an estimated revenue of $2 billion.
The problem?
This isn't the first time SLMI has cried true ownership of Lee's Marvel characters.
College tuition has reached record highs and grads are still struggling to get jobs and pay off mounds of student debt.
So, it's more important than ever to have a ranking that asks a simple question: How much will a college help you succeed in life?
Last year, MIT earned the top spot in our list of America's Best Colleges, with Stanford and Harvard trailing close behind.
But have things changed?
To create the fourth annual Business Insider list of the Best Colleges, we need your help. We have selected what we consider the 60 best colleges in America and we want you to help us rank them. Please rate at least 10 of the colleges on this list—and let us know who you're furious that we left off. Also please take this opportunity to sound off on which colleges you think are total ripoffs and which are actually worth your money.
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.
Fisher, who "bled burnt orange," dreamed of going there too since the second grade, the Chronicle reported.
The aspiring UT student went on to earn a 3.59 grade point average on a 4.0 scale and finished as number 82 in her 674-person class at Stephen F. Austin High School, according to the Chronicle.
But that wasn't enough to get her accepted to her dream school of UT.
The school automatically accepts the top 10 percent from every high school. For students who don't get in that way, UT takes a number of other factors into account–including race.
After getting rejected in 2008, Fisher filed suit claiming UT's use of race in admissions decisions was unconstitutional. UT says it would have rejected her even if it hadn't considered her race.
Fisher, an accomplished cellist, finished LSU and scored a job as a financial analyst in Austin, the town where she wanted to go to school, The New York Times reported.
While Fisher apparently enjoyed her undergraduate years–the Times noted she enjoyed the "camraderie" of her LSU bowling team–she still thinks she missed out by not going to UT.
"Just being in a network of UT graduates would have been a really nice thing to be in," Fisher told the Times. "And I probably would have gotten a better job offer had I gone to UT."
Image may be NSFW.
