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October 14 · Issue #3 · View online
Legal news everyone should know
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We’re leading off this week with the lawyer-letter version of a challenge-slap from the duels of old. Whether you support Trump or not, the will-he-won’t-he of his oft-threatened defamation suits against women accusing him of varying degrees of sexual harassment and assault raises honesty and First Amendment issues. So far, Clinton has only been assailed on one of those fronts, and it ain’t the free speech front. Tempers and tension are only accelerating as we come within less than a month of Election Day.
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sportsgrid.com
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Photo: Reuters
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Photo: Reuters
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The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump - The New York Times
This is the letter David McCraw, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times, wrote in response to a request from Marc E. Kasowitz, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to retract an article that featured two women accusing Mr. Trump of touching them inappropriately years ago, and issue an apology.
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But putting aside all of the politics, seeing letters like this from one lawyer to another is to law nerds as watching UFC fighters do that weird forehead-touching pre-fight intimidation dance.
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Photo: Reuters
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Churches file motion in federal court to enjoin transgender law
If you don’t want to let people use the restroom appropriate to their actual gender please unsubscribe. The M2F woman who wants to use the ladies room has no interest in creeping on you. She wants to
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Comcast is being punished for charging customers for channels they didn’t want - The Washington Post
It’s the biggest civil penalty ever levied on a cable company.
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The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump
This is the letter David McCraw, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times, wrote in response to a request from Marc E. Kasowitz, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to retract an article that featured two women accusing Mr. Trump of touching them inappropriately years ago, and issue an apology.
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The Virtuous Corporation
This article asks what induces corporations to pursue social agendas and provides an initial taxonomy for corporate social motivation, showing that the incentives to normative corporate conduct are often rooted in the business purpose itself. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, famously said in reply to a shareholder demanding pure profit motives, “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody” return on investment, Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” Public companies are traditionally considered pure income generating machines for shareholders, but many corporations are bucking that trend. Tim Cook later said in an interview that companies should have values just like people have values. Seems reasonable: after all, if we’re going to call corporations people, we should be consistent.
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Indonesian man arrested for suspected billboard porn video 'hack' - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
A man accused of hacking into billboard and streaming a pornographic video for five minutes in south Jakarta is arrested, as footage of the bizarre incident sweeps social media.
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Paterson council rejects $1.6M deal in US Supreme Court case on campaign sign
In the middle of Paterson’s worst fiscal crisis in years, the City Council, in a split vote, shot down a $1.6 million settlement proposal in a former cop’s political retaliation lawsuit, ignoring warnings that to do so could end up heaping even greater costs on taxpayers.
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Police Use Surveillance Tool to Scan Social Media, A.C.L.U. Says - NYTimes.com
A Chicago company has marketed a tool using text, photos and videos gleaned from major social media companies to aid law enforcement surveillance of protesters, civil liberties activists say.
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Deadlock at the Security Council on Syria: A Legal Perspective
This weekend marked the fifth time that Russia has used its veto power on a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution on Syria since the country’s uprising began on March 15, 2011. The veto blocked a French-introduced resolution that demanded a halt to airstrikes in Aleppo and called for access to humanitarian aid.
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Doe v. Backpage.com LLC
Issue: Whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that no internet service provider “shall be treated as the publisher or speaker” of internet content that was “provided by another,” precludes a civil lawsuit against a website owner and operator based on its own criminal conduct any time online content created by a third party was part of the chain of causation leading to the plaintiff’s injuries. Human traffickers love them some Backpage.com, but does the service’s popularity with piece-of-garbage traffickers outweigh the Section 230 protections of the CDA?
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Death sentence overturned for Cleveland man convicted in 1985 murder
Percy “June” Hutton, 62, was convicted in 1986 of fatally shooting Derek “Ricky” Mitchell and trying to kill Samuel Simmons in a dispute over a sewing machine. He was sentenced to death in 1987.
In a 2-1 decision, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Hutton’s sentence saying the judge who presided over the trial did not give the jury proper instructions before it deliberated on a recommended sentence.
Guilty or not, that’s a long time to live under the threat of the death penalty if it wasn’t constitutionally applied.
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A true crime podcast by some random guy...
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Have a great weekend, and remember to share ML with a friend!
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