Sideways Society

WVUA hosts LawCall every week on Thursdays at 6:30 p.m.  This week the topic will be ”Love and the Law.” Bob Prince will host the show and Attorney Leif Hampton will be the guest.  Please email us your legal questions anytime at lawcall@wvua7.com.  Each week, questions will be answered on the air.  LawCall can be found on channel 6 if you have Charter Cable, or channel 3 if you have Comcast Cable and live in the Tuscaloosa area.  It can also be found on channel 23 if you have satellite and live in the surrounding areas.

The Supreme Court announced Thursday that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery in New York City for recently discovered pancreatic cancer. Ginsburg, 75, had what she described as a “long bout” with colorectal cancer in 1999, but recovered and has worked at full strength since.

If attorney Marc S. Dreier gets his way, he soon will be released from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to his own midtown luxury apartment. But first, he has to convince federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who said the relatively rare issue raised two questions: Is it appropriate to permit “people with means or access to means” to effectively create their own “private prison”? And do armed private guards have the same ability to prevent a defendant’s flight as a U.S. marshal or a prison guard?

A Minnesota accounting firm has been hit by lawsuits alleging that it failed to detect problems in two separate Ponzi schemes — the purported $50 billion investment scam by financier Bernard Madoff and the $3.5 billion alleged “electronics” scheme by Thomas Petters. The suits against McGladrey Pullen and similar suits stemming from the Madoff scandal against accounting firms KPMG, Ernst Young and BDO Seidman point up the likely spread of litigation as financial victims attempt to recover massive losses.

After years of aggressively lobbying for salary raises, chief justices and court administrators in five states are backing off as unprecedented budget cuts have forced judges to accept pay freezes. Those states are Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio and Rhode Island. In some cases, judges have spoken out against lobbying for pay increases during a major financial crisis. But judges in other states, such as Hawaii, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, have in varying degrees resisted proposed freezes.

Work-life balance discussions, once so prevalent among firm management and young lawyers alike, have been overshadowed by the current economic environment. But have the initiatives been completely relegated to the back burner? Some say yes, that the recession could be bridging the gap between Generation X and the baby boomers, with both sides focusing more on office time and billable hours. But others see the harsher environment as an opportunity to bolster flex-scheduling or telecommuting programs.

Last year, the Bush administration allowed 20 political appointees to transform themselves into career civil servants. “Burrowing” is the longstanding phenomenon of political appointees, who should leave with the out­going president or be forced to compete for positions to stay, instead converting to career posts at the end of a presidential administration. But the practice is illegal and has to stop, writes Jesselyn Radack, homeland security director for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project.

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Federal contractors can expect to face more scrutiny from the federal government this year — and stiffer fines for discriminatory practices. So predict corporate defense counsel, responding to recent statistics that show that the Department of Labor won a record $67.5 million in settlements in 2008 for an unprecedented 24,500 workers who were discriminated against by federal contractors. The figure reflects a 133 percent increase over financial remedies obtained in 2001 by the DOL.

Where others fear to tread, Sarah Jeck, a 20-year-old college student, boldly stepped forward Tuesday to ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a question he did not like during a public appearance in Florida. “That’s a nasty, impolite question,” said Scalia, himself an expert on tough questioning, and he at first refused to answer it. So what did Jeck ask that caused the volatile justice to erupt?