ExamSoft, the company that provided the software for the two-day online bar exam offered earlier this month, maintains that only a small percentage of test-takers experienced problems with their product. But for those who did, many say there should have been no issues and some suspect the hitches were expected by the company.
Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the federal bench, she argued and won several landmark gender discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—in spite of the justices all being men who sometimes made flippant remarks about gender during her oral arguments.
We spoke to a number of legal experts across the ideological spectrum to get their thoughts on this week’s hearings. Here are four takeaways.
As April Frazier Camara celebrates the 100th anniversary of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section, she also looks forward to facing the many challenges she sees in the criminal legal system. “Racial injustice is something that is on the minds and hearts of American people,” says Camara, the chair of the section.
Lawyers’ personal relationships with opposing counsels may create a conflict under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, according to a new ethics opinion from the ABA’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility.
The U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes for its new term on Oct. 5 with grief in the air after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a confirmation battle and election controversies swirling all around it and the court’s operations still disrupted by the pandemic.
After a gunman opened fire at Judge Esther Salas’ suburban New Jersey home in July, killing her 20-year-old son, she made an emotional plea. But she isn’t the only one sounding the alarm and asking for greater protections and privacy for jurists. Others in the federal judiciary are taking another look at privacy protections and security at judges’ homes.
A growing number of negligence suits are being filed across the country against nursing homes and other long-term care facilities by families whose relatives died from the coronavirus while living in such facilities.
“People who violate the norms get punished. Whether that is demanding equal pay, demanding to get the same quality of work as a nonminority or demanding to be spoken to with dignity, norm violators get punished. And for too long, women were expected to sit down, be quiet and follow the lead of men,” says Fitzgerald Bramwell, a Chicago litigator.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ramos v. Louisiana that split verdicts in state trials for serious criminal offenses violated the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, overturning a high court ruling in 1972 that upheld them. The effect of the court’s ruling in Ramos is that state courts will now vacate cases with split verdicts on direct appeal. Prosecutors will next decide whether to retry them. What is unclear is whether the ruling will apply retroactively.
