Access to Justice

SATURDAY, JULY 22, 2023

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Section 8 Tenants Are Using New Laws To Fight Housing Bias

By Jack Karp

States and cities are increasingly passing laws barring discrimination against tenants who rely on housing assistance vouchers. Now tenants and their advocates are launching a growing number of lawsuits to enforce them.

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'Paper Abuse:' How Family Courts Feed Coercive Control

By Cara Bayles

Survivors' rights activists say that abusers use the courts to harass and exert control over their former partners. Some states have sought to pass laws curbing the practice. But the lines are tricky to draw, as they pit concerns about weaponizing litigation against due process rights.

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All Access

Judge Tatel On Returning To His Pro Bono Roots

By Alison Knezevich

Senior D.C. Circuit Judge David S. Tatel grew up wanting to become a scientist like his father was, but the 1960s "changed everything," he recently told Law360 as he prepares to retire from the bench.

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ACLU Says NJ Judge Safety Law Is Used To Chill Free Speech

By Marco Poggio

Days after he questioned the absenteeism of the Police Department director during a City Council meeting, Charlie Kratovil, a seasoned local journalist and self-described advocate in New Brunswick, a city in central New Jersey, received a cease-and-desist letter.

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Analysis

How Habeas Corpus Ruling May Condemn Innocent Prisoners

By Marco Poggio

To Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, it sounded absurd: Why would legally innocent people — convicted under interpretations of the law that the U.S. Supreme Court later found to be wrong — be denied a chance to seek release from prison?

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Justice Sotomayor Slams Decision To Execute Ala. Prisoner

By Rosie Manins

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor blasted her colleagues early Friday for allowing Alabama to use a death row inmate as a guinea pig following the state's "tortuous attempts" to execute other prisoners by lethal injection.

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Illinois High Court OKs 1st Law In Nation Abolishing Cash Bail

By Marco Poggio

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a 2021 state law eliminating cash bail and strictly limiting pretrial incarceration in the state is constitutional, overturning a lower court's decision that had put the legislation in limbo.

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Jersey City Advocates Leave Mark On Right To Counsel Laws

By Jake Maher

At eviction hearings nationwide, where a tenant's ability to stay in their home is at stake, an average of 97% of tenants come to court with a handicap — they don't have an attorney.

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Mich. Chief Justice Pushes For Diminished Capacity Defense

By Danielle Ferguson

The Michigan Supreme Court's chief justice said the state's ban on using a diminished mental capacity defense was misguided and urged the state Legislature to rethink an "all-or-nothing approach" that recognizes only legal insanity as a defense to criminal responsibility.

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Perspectives

How Public Defenders Can Use Social Media To Drive Change

In addition to their courtroom advocacy, indigent defenders should strategically use social media to develop a public voice that can counter police and prosecutor narratives, call attention to injustices and inspire policy shifts, say Russell Gold at the University of Alabama and Kay Levine at Emory University.

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Perspectives

5th Circ. Concurrence May Help Erode Qualified Immunity

A Fifth Circuit judge’s recent concurrence in Rogers v. Jarrett, highlighting new legal scholarship that questions the historical foundations of the qualified immunity doctrine, provides the basis for additional arguments for plaintiffs to secure legal recourse when government officials violate their rights, says Brian Collins at Van Naarden Spizer.

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