June 3, 2010 BY RUMANNA HUSSAIN AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters

A Cook County prosecutor was hospitalized this morning after being choked in a hallway of the 26th and California criminal courthouse, allegedly by an assistant public defender, authorities said said.

The 50-year-old assistant state’s attorney was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and was in good condition, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The incident happened after an argument spilled out from Judge Clayton Crane’s courtroom on the sixth floor, authorities said.

The two disagreed over when to set the next court date on a post conviction hearing for convicted murderer Derrick Neal.

“We could just set a date on Aug. 5. I don’t see a problem. . .,” the public defender said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The prosecutor responded, “I didn’t say there was a problem. I’m trying to be convenient to everybody, including myself and the court.”

The prosecutor “left the courtroom and was in the hallway when the public defender came up to him and resumed the argument. That led to a physical fight where the public defender had to be pulled off of the state’s attorney,’’ Cook County Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Patterson said in a statement. It took two deputies to separate the men, he said.

The public defender put the prosecutor in a “choking headlock,’’ police said. The public defender allegedly  told a bystander he did it because he was “sick of him mocking him,” the bystander said.

Someone called 911 from the courthouse at 11:09 a.m. and the victim was taken by ambulance to Mount Sinai, police said. A sheriff’s deputy also suffered a minor injury.

Patterson said the incident remains under investigation and no charges had been filed as of this afternoon.

The suspect works in the legal resources division of the Cook County Public Defender’s office, handling post-conviction appeals and appellate court matters, sources said.

Divorce attorneys catching cheaters on Facebook
By Stephanie Chen, CNN

(CNN) -- Before the explosion of social media, Ken Altshuler, a divorce lawyer in Maine, dug up dirt on his client's spouses the old-fashioned way: with private investigators and subpoenas. Now the first place his team checks for evidence is Facebook.

Consider a recent story of a female client in her 30s, who came to Altshuler seeking a divorce from husband. She claimed her husband, an alcoholic, was drinking again. The husband denied it. It was her word against his word, Altshuler says, until a mutual friend of the couple stumbled across Facebook photos of the husband drinking beer at a party a few weeks earlier.

It was the kind of "gotcha moment" Altshuler knew would undermine the husband's credibility in court. His firm presented the photos to the judge, and the wife won the case in April, he said.

"Facebook is a great source of evidence," Altshuler said. "It's absolutely solid evidence because he's the author of it. How do you deny that you put that on?"

Social media stalking skills have become invaluable to the legal world for divorce cases in particular. Online photo albums, profile pages, wall comments, status updates and tweets have become gold mines for evidence and leads. Today, divorce and family law firms routinely cull information posted on social media sites -- the flirty exchanges with a paramour, unsavory self-revelations and compromising photographs -- to buttress their case.

Posting hugging and kissing photos online can show a happily married relationship, or it can expose a secretive affair. At least 80 percent of attorneys surveyed by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers cited a growth in the number of cases that used social media over the last five years. The study was released earlier this year.

Divorce attorneys say social media sites have opened windows for infidelity because it's become easier to rekindle romance with an old flame or flirt with a stranger. And the posted, shared, and tagged evidence of infidelity is precisely the type of evidence attorneys look for online.

"You need to familiarize yourself with privacy settings to ensure there is no way personal information can be accessed," said Adam Ostrow, editor in chief of Mashable.com, a social media guide.

Facebook -- where attorneys find most of the evidence and leads -- has gradually relaxed privacy settings over the last year. Attorneys say that enabled some members' personal details to be leaked without the user realizing it, attorneys say. On May 26th, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem and, in a blog, announced new tools making it easier for users to tighten privacy settings and block outside parties from seeing personal information.

"It's becoming all but impossible to protect your information unless you spend hours and hours figuring it out," said Lee Rosen, a divorce attorney in North Carolina, who added he reaped the benefits of the tricky privacy controls in a recent case.

Rosen was investigating a North Carolina husband in his 40s accused of cheating on his wife. The husband failed to set privacy controls on his Facebook wall, an area where users can post information. Rosen noticed a suspicious message from the husband's younger female co-worker. The post was the hunch he needed to steer him in right direction.

Rosen reports about a quarter of his divorce cases use information found on social media sites.

Finding the Facebook profiles is so simple that Rosen says anyone could do it. He goes to a site called Flowtown.com, a site intended for marketers but is useful for attorneys, too. Type an e-mail address and the site generates various social media profiles. If that fails, Rosen hires a private investigator.

At National Digital Forensics, Inc., a North Carolina company that mines digital sites for information, requests for social media searches from divorce lawyers have surged, says president and senior digital investigator Giovanni Masucci. The social media detective work requires different snooping skills, he says.

"For example, someone may be cheating, but they are married," Masucci explained. "If their status on the web page says single, that's a major red flag."

Masucci estimated about half the social media cases they investigate expose some kind of cheating.

The happy reality for divorce attorneys is that most clients are bound to be on Facebook or another social media site. Facebook is more popular than ever, drawing in 400 million users, the company reports on its website. Each user creates an average of 70 pieces of content monthly and has an average of 130 friends.

The most common way to gather information on Facebook relies on the battling couple's mutual online friends who still have access to the spouse's profile. Many times the spouse will "de-friend" a partner but forget about their shared friends, who can play detective and access information on their profile.

Another way of exposing damaging information is searching the profiles of the suspected "other man" or "other woman", says says Marlene Eskind Moses, a divorce attorney in Tennessee.

"It's amazing how people tell their life stories," said Moses, who represented a Tennessee woman who believed her husband was cheating on her. After the wife found herself blocked from her husband's Facebook page, she found the profile page of the other woman whom she suspected in the affair.

On that woman's profile page, a public album of photos taken on a romantic getaway appeared. Scenic shots of South Carolina's mountains. Her husband and another woman embracing in front of an art gallery. Portraits of the couple with their faces nuzzled close together.

Elizabeth K. Englander, professor of psychology at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, says people divulge information on social media because they believe no one will ever see the information they post.

"The sense online is sort of like the mob effect," Englander said. "You feel like you're one in a million, and so who will ever notice you?"

But when someone does notice, that's when some divorce attorneys pounce. Information copied from social media sites can sway the outcome of alimony payment disputes and custody fights, attorneys say. Some parents have even lost a child because of the behavior they exhibited online, the lawyers say.

The ultimate goal, after all, is to catch a spouse in a lie. Sometimes it's a wife claiming she can't afford child support payments but subsequently purchased expensive jewelry and posted photos of the items on Facebook. Or if a husband who claims he doesn't have anger problems while his social media profile is loaded with expletives. Once there is evidence of a person caught in an obvious lie, attorneys say, it undermines the rest of their credibility with the judge.

Attorneys advise users of Facebook and other social media who are headed toward a divorce or custody battle to edit their profiles, be cautious about updating statuses and double check to see who is really a "friend."

Or to make things easier -- at least until the trial is over or a settlement is reached -- just get off Facebook completely.

Senior Legal Counsel (Posted May 19)
Shell Oil Company, Houston, TX

This attorney would be a member of the Trading Gas and Power Group and would provide legal support and advice to Shell Trading in the U.S. concerning (1) natural gas trading contracts, energy services agreements and structured transactions and related transportation, storage and regulatory matters and (2) environmental products (trading NOx,Sox,RECs and landfill/dairy digester gas transactions ). Major customer segments for trading and origination include utilities, marketers, commercial and industrial end use customers and power generating facilities. In addition to providing representation on trading contractual matters,this attorney would be responsible for monitoring changes in market terms and updating contract provisions and negotiating and reviewing confidentiality agreements,guaranties,consulting agreements and other similar agreements related to the trading business.

Familiarity with industry standard gas trading contracts and FERC Order 712 important. Familiarity with California CEC requirements,state renewable portfolio standards,WREGIS and Green E helpful. FERC experience with respect to natural gas pipeline matters,rules and policies important. Understanding of transportation and gas storage basics required. Understanding of basic credit and security matters helpful.

Requirements:

• Must have legal authorization to work in the US on a full-time basis for anyone other than current employer
• To be considered for this position, a candidate graduating from: a tier I law school (rated as being in the top 50 law schools nationally), must have graduated in the top 40%; tier II law schools (51-100) must have graduated in the top 25%; tier III school must have graduated in the top 10%; and a tier IV school must have graduated in the top 5%
• Must be licensed to practice law in the state of Texas (or able to obtain license in six to nine months)
• Minimum ten years experience as a practicing attorney
• Minimum two years experience in handling matters involving FERC regulations concerning transportation, storage and related matters.
• Experience with structured transactions preferred

April 14, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor Our Fill-in-the-Blank Constitution
By GEOFFREY R. STONE     Chicago

AS the Senate awaits the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, a frank discussion is needed on the proper role of judges in our constitutional system. For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, his job is just to “call balls and strikes.” According to Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative jurists merely carry out the “original meaning” of the framers. These are appealing but wholly disingenuous descriptions of what judges — liberal or conservative — actually do.

To see why this is so, we need only look to the text of the Constitution. It defines our most fundamental rights and protections in open-ended terms: “freedom of speech,” for example, and “equal protection of the laws,” “due process of law,” “unreasonable searches and seizures,” “free exercise” of religion and “cruel and unusual punishment.” These terms are not self-defining; they did not have clear meanings even to the people who drafted them. The framers fully understood that they were leaving it to future generations to use their intelligence, judgment and experience to give concrete meaning to the expressed aspirations.

Rulings by conservative justices in the past decade make it perfectly clear that they do not “apply the law” in a neutral and detached manner. Consider, for example, their decisions holding that corporations have the same right of free speech as individuals, that commercial advertising receives robust protection under the First Amendment, that the Second Amendment prohibits the regulation of guns, that affirmative action is unconstitutional, that the equal protection clause mandated the election of George W. Bush and that the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to exclude gay scoutmasters.

Whatever one thinks of these decisions, it should be apparent that conservative judges do not disinterestedly call balls and strikes. Rather, fueled by their own political and ideological convictions, they make value judgments, often in an aggressively activist manner that goes well beyond anything the framers themselves envisioned. There is nothing simple, neutral, objective or restrained about such decisions. For too long, conservatives have set the terms of the debate about judges, and they have done so in a highly misleading way. Americans should see conservative constitutional jurisprudence for what it really is. And liberals must stand up for their vision of the judiciary.

So, how should judges interpret the Constitution? To answer that question, we need to consider why we give courts the power of judicial review — the power to hold laws unconstitutional — in the first place. Although the framers thought democracy to be the best system of government, they recognized that it was imperfect. One flaw that troubled them was the risk that prejudice or intolerance on the part of the majority might threaten the liberties of a minority. As James Madison observed, in a democratic society “the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended ... from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” It was therefore essential, Madison concluded, for judges, whose life tenure insulates them from the demands of the majority, to serve as the guardians of our liberties and as “an impenetrable bulwark” against every encroachment upon our most cherished freedoms.

Conservative judges often stand this idea on its head. As the list of rulings above shows, they tend to exercise the power of judicial review to invalidate laws that disadvantage corporations, business interests, the wealthy and other powerful interests in society. They employ judicial review to protect the powerful rather than the powerless.

Liberal judges, on the other hand, have tended to exercise the power of judicial review to invalidate laws that disadvantage racial and religious minorities, political dissenters, people accused of crimes and others who are unlikely to have their interests fully and fairly considered by the majority. Liberal judges have ended racial segregation, recognized the principle of “one person, one vote,” prohibited censorship of the Pentagon Papers and upheld the right to due process, even at Guantánamo Bay. This approach to judicial review fits much more naturally with the concerns and intentions of people like Madison who forged the American constitutional system.

Should “empathy” enter into this process? In the days before he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama was criticized by conservatives for suggesting that a sense of empathy might make for a better judge.

But the president was correct. If all judges did was umpire, then judicial empathy would be irrelevant. In baseball, we wouldn’t want an umpire to say a ball was a strike just because he felt empathy for the pitcher. But once you understand that the umpire analogy is absurd, it’s evident that a sense of empathy can, in fact, help judges fulfill their responsibilities — in at least two ways.

First, empathy helps judges understand the aspirations of the framers, who were themselves determined to protect the rights of political, religious, racial and other minorities. Second, it helps judges understand the effects of the law on the real world. Think of judicial decisions that have invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage, granted hearings to welfare recipients before their benefits could be terminated, forbidden forced sterilization of people accused of crime, protected the rights of political dissenters and members of minority religious faiths, guaranteed a right to counsel for indigent defendants and invalidated laws denying women equal rights under the law. In each of these situations, in order to give full and proper meaning to the Constitution it was necessary and appropriate for the justices to comprehend the effect that the laws under consideration had, or could have, on the lives of real people.

Faithfully applying our Constitution’s 18th- and 19th-century text to 21st-century problems requires not only careful attention to the text, fidelity to the framers’ goals and respect for precedent, but also an awareness of the practical realities of the present. Only with such awareness can judges, in a constantly changing society, hope to keep faith with our highest law.

This does not mean judges are free to make up the law as they go along. But it does mean that constitutional law is not a mechanical exercise of just “applying the law.” Before there can be a serious national dialogue about our Constitution, our laws and the proper role of our judges, that myth must be exposed.

Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, is an editor of The Supreme Court Review.

Yesterday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals released an unpublished opinion that contains the following paragraph about the usage of “and/or.”

The phrase “and/or” is semantically and logically contradictory. A thing or situation cannot be simultaneously conjunctive and disjunctive. Laypersons often use the phrase and, surprisingly, lawyers resort to it from time to time. It is an indolent way to express a series of items that might exist in the conjunctive, but might also exist in the disjunctive. It is a totally avoidable problem if the drafter would simply define the “and” and the “or” in the context of the subject matter. Or the drafter could express a series of items as, “A, B, C, and D together, or any combination together, or any one of them alone.” If used to refer to a material topic, as here, the expression “and/or” creates an instant ambiguity. Furthermore, as one legal-writing authority noted, a bad-faith reader of a document can pick whichever one suits him—the “and” or the “or.” Bryan A. Garner, Looking for Words to Kill? Start with These, STUDENT LAW., Sept. 2006, at 12-14. At the very least, this sloppy expression can lead to disputes; at the worst to expensive litigation.


The quoted paragraph is the last paragraph of the opinion.  The link to the 8-page opinion is here:  http://www.mncourts.gov/opinions/coa/current/opa091018-0406.pdf

The contract sentence the Court was trying to understand read:
"[the released claims are those that the parties] now have or may have in the future, and/or which were, should have or could have been brought in connection with the Litigation.”

Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.

The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.

“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.

Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming — fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.

In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 83 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from 9 percent in 1992. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid.

In California, officials have issued guidance letters advising employers whether they are breaking the law, while Oregon regulators have unearthed numerous abuses.

“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.

Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.

One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.

At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.

Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.

Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experiences in interviews.

While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.

Many less affluent students say they cannot afford to spend their summers at unpaid internships, and in any case, they often do not have an uncle or family golf buddy who can connect them to a prestigious internship.

Brittany Berckes, an Amherst senior who interned at a cable news station that she declined to identify, said her parents were not delighted that she worked a summer unpaid.

“Some of my friends can’t take these internships and spend a summer without making any money because they have to help pay for their own tuition or help their families with finances,” she said. “That makes them less competitive candidates for jobs after graduation.”

Of course, many internships — paid or unpaid — serve as valuable steppingstones that help young people land future jobs. “Internships have become the gateway into the white-collar work force,” said Ross Perlin, a Stanford graduate and onetime unpaid intern who is writing a book on the subject. “Employers increasingly want experience for entry-level jobs, and many students see the only way to get that is through unpaid internships.”

Trudy Steinfeld, director of N.Y.U.’s Office of Career Services, said she increasingly had to ride herd on employers to make sure their unpaid internships were educational. She recently confronted a midsize law firm that promised one student an educational $10-an-hour internship. The student complained that the firm was not paying him and was requiring him to make coffee and sweep out bathrooms.

Ms. Steinfeld said some industries, most notably film, were known for unpaid internships, but she said other industries were embracing the practice, seeing its advantages.

“A few famous banks have called and said, ‘We’d like to do this,’ ” Ms. Steinfeld said. “I said, ‘No way. You will not list on this campus.’ ”

Dana John, an N.Y.U. senior, spent an unpaid summer at a company that books musical talent, spending much of her days photocopying, filing and responding to routine e-mail messages for her boss.

“It would have been nice to be paid, but at this point, it’s so expected of me to do this for free,” she said. “If you want to be in the music industry that’s the way it works. If you want to get your foot in the door somehow, this is the easiest way to do it. You suck it up.”

The rules for unpaid interns are less strict for non-profit groups like charities because people are allowed to do volunteer work for non-profits.

California and some other states require that interns receive college credit as a condition of being unpaid. But federal regulators say that receiving college credit does not necessarily free companies from paying interns, especially when the internship involves little training and mainly benefits the employer.

Many employers say the Labor Department’s six criteria need updating because they are based on a Supreme Court decision from 1947, when many apprenticeships were for blue-collar production work.

Camille A. Olson, a lawyer based in Chicago who represents many employers, said: “One criterion that is hard to meet and needs updating is that the intern not perform any work to the immediate advantage of the employer. In my experience, many employers agreed to hire interns because there is very strong mutual advantage to both the worker and the employer. There should be a mutual benefit test.”

Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of a new study on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.

“A serious problem surrounding unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws,” she said.

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Does she give anything away?