On the Record

During my days in College Park, I accumulated a pile of free Terps T-shirts that I would wear to football and basketball games. Some may have been a little big, and roughly 5,000 other students would be wearing the exact same shirt, but hey, they were free.

I say this because we all probably did something similarly resourceful while in school to save a few bucks. Two recent stories about law school students have reinforced my point.

First is Julia Neyman, a student at Columbia Law School. Neyman has a blog, the cleverly-titled “Buns of Steal,” in which she chronicles her attempt to work out at health clubs in New York City for an entire year without paying once.

Neyman found gym memberships too expensive upon moving to New York to start law school but soon noticed gyms around the city gave out free passes and coupons. Enter her blog and her goal.

“Most people aren’t cheap enough to do this for a whole year,” she told The New York Daily News. “But I am.”

Next is University of Baltimore School of Law student Burke Miller, who posted an ad on Craigslist seeking tickets to Wednesday night’s Duke-Maryland basketball game in exchange for providing a certain number of billable hours to the seller upon passing the bar.

Miller told The Baltimore Sun one ticket seller contacted him but declined the offer.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said. “I’d sit down with [a seller] and make a contract and look at the standard billable rate for a young attorney. I’ve got full faith that I’d be a good attorney.”

I wish them both the best. (Incidentally, I’d be willing to part with some of my Terps T-shirts for a ticket to the game.)

I mentioned in my story in Wednesday’s paper a letter written by the Board of Visitors at the University of Maryland School of Law concerning former Dean Karen H. Rothenberg and the recent audit of the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Here is the letter in entirety. The board’s chairman, Paul D. Bekman, said the seven judges and one elected official (Sen. Ben Cardin) who are members were ethically precluded from endorsing the letter because of their positions. Otherwise, the letter represents the board’s unanimous position.

I wrote in today’s paper about the third lawsuit filed against Scott D. Shellenberger in his role as Baltimore County State’s Attorney.

That begs the question: What are the other two lawsuits? Glad you asked. The first one, filed in April 2008, came from a prisoner in Cumberland seeking to waive a filing fee prepayment, a request that was promptly denied.

The other one, filed last May, remains open and could have widespread ramifications. An Arbutus distributor of gaming devices has asked a judge to declare pull tab gaming machines legal in Baltimore County.  Acme Amusements argues the machines are not slots in part because the element of chance comes from the pull tabs, not the machine containing them.

“The machines at issue in this case do not read the pull tabs or any tickets electronically, do not alert the user to a winning or losing ticket and do not tabulate a player’s winnings or losses,” the company states. “As such, they fall outside the definition of ’slot machines’ and are not illegal devices.”

The company cites the Court of Appeals’ Chesapeake Amusement decision in 2001 to explain why it proceeded with its declaratory judgment action. The defendant in that underlying case was the Calvert County State’s Attorney.

Tim Maloney, Acme’s lawyer, said he expects lawyers from the Office of the Attorney General to argue the case during a hearing scheduled for April.

Parade Magazine had an interesting notebook item recently about jury duty. (And no, unfortunately, Howard Huge didn’t jump into a jury box thinking it was some sort of play space.)

The story reports many jurisdictions are experiencing an increase in the number of people “who say they can’t afford to serve or who simply don’t show up, causing cases to be delayed or even dismissed.”

The problem has been exacerbated by the recession; a Minnesota plumber was found in contempt of court and jailed for a day in November after saying during voir dire that he couldn’t afford to miss more than a day of work. “I don’t get paid when I’m not working,” he said, according to court records. “I could see myself just going with the flow to get it over with to get back to work.”

The American Tort Reform Association has proposed states pay jurors more, noting Arizona offers jurors $300 per day for trials lasting longer than five days.  By comparison, jurors in Maryland are paid between $15 and $30 per day depending on the jurisdiction.

So, what say you - is a larger per diem the best way to ensure citizens answer the call of jury duty? What else could be done to make the experience more palatable for potential jurors?

Has it really been more than seven months since I’ve noted the annotations in the opinions of Court of Appeals Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr.?

Sadly, it has.

I’ve been checking periodically since May, of course, but honestly I haven’t been as diligent as I should have been. (Anyone else smell a New Year’s resolution here?) So I did a quick review of the judge’s opinions since I last wrote about them. And while I didn’t see too many Harry Potter references, two opinions stood out.

Harrell referred to a zoning dispute between Baltimore City residents and a neighboring apartment complex as “the city’s version of the Hundred Years’ War” in a July opinion. Not only does Harrell give a brief description of the Hundred Years’ War in a footnote, he includes this gem:

The Hundred Years’ War gave history Joan of Arc. The instant case also has a central figure named Joan (one of the Petitioners), who, like her saintly antecedent, faithfully presses her cause, having battled the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore numerous times. Although Joan of Arc suffered an unfortunate fate, her principals… ultimately succeeded.

One month later, Harrell went from the historical to the philosophical. He began a majority opinion holding the state can regulate noise from a shooting club in Allegany County with a question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Harrell notes many attribute the question to 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

The judge then partially answers the question. “An existentialist likely would decline to confront the riddle because human impact expressly is excluded by the query,” he writes. His footnote offers a crash course in existentialism:

Most existentialists treat the human subject as the starting point for philosophical thought. Thus, this riddle likely would be deemed by them to be too abstract and remote from the concrete human experience to be worthy of serious contemplation.

In other words, the opposite of Harrell’s opinions.

The stereotypical sweet for cops is a doughnut, but that has changed in Maryland - at least until the New Year.

My colleague, Liz Farmer, passed along a press release from the state’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter announcing its fourth annual “Cookies for Cops” campaign. From now through Dec. 31, thousands of cookies will be delivered to law enforcement agencies throughout the state, a sugary way of thanking officers for their work.

There were 152 drunk-driving fatalities in Maryland last year, down from 178 in 2007, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

You can visit MADD’s Web site if you’re interested in contributing to the cause. (And if you need people to test the cookies you bake, feel free to send them to our office.)

Del. Norman H. Conway, D-Wicomico and Worcester, readily admits he was the lawmaker who added language to the state’s budget requiring the Maryland Disability Law Center to submit financial documents before receiving funding. (The funding was untied from the reporting requirement in the final version of the budget passed by the General Assembly.)

MDLC was the only legal services organization targeted, raising alarms in the legal services community. Conway, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said MDLC was selected because he had not seen an audit from the organization recently. (Virginia Knowlton, MDLC’s executive director, has noted that her organization undergoes financial audits at both state and federal levels to receive grant money, and Conway has access to those.)

Conway also points out that the documentation requirement is not uncommon. ”Throughout the budget, you’ll see all types of reports that are requested from a list of organizations and state agencies,” he said.

Scanning through the budget (PDF), I discovered more than a dozen similar documentation requirements. The Maryland Higher Education Commission and the state’s historically black institutions, for example, have to submit a report showing the effectiveness of programs to increase graduation and retention rates before receiving $1.5 million for that purpose. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is asked to submit a report on the “proposed closing of state-operated beds” at the Walter P. Carter in Baltimore City before receiving $10 million. And the Maryland Insurance Administration is to report on “an agreed upon practice for forecasting and tracking the premium tax” before receiving $100,000.

An analyst with the Department of Legislative Services confirmed the frequent use of documentation requirements for funding, and said the unusual thing here is that MDLC succeeded in getting them untied .

Conway indicated that the selected organizations are not being accused of or being investigated for wrongdoing. Rather, it’s a way for the legislators to make sure state funds are being used appropriately, particularly in the current economic climate.

“I like to focus on what the activities are,” he said. “The committee needs to understand these different expenditures.”

Whatever Conway’s motives, MDLC and other legal services agencies see it as a shot across their bow, according to this commentary by Legal Aid’s Joe Surkiewicz. What do you think?

Friday was the American Bar Association’s annual Law Day. This year’s celebration was titled ”A Legacy of Liberty” and honors the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln.

Janet Stidman Eveleth of the Maryland State Bar Association wrote about Lincoln the lawyer in our paper. And at the Baltimore County Bar Association’s annual Law Day breakfast, keynote speaker Harry S. Johnson noted a Maryland legal connection to Lincoln.

Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus was challenged by Lt. John Merryman, a Maryland soldier arrested for helping escort Union troops out of the state in 1861. The case, Ex Parte Merryman, was heard and decided by another Marylander, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who was sitting in a lower federal district. Taney, in finding Lincoln’s decision unconstitutional, wrote in one of his most famous opinions not named Dred Scott:

I can only say that if the authority which the Constitution has confided to the judiciary department and judicial officers may thus upon any pretext or under any circumstances be usurped by the military power at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a Government of laws, but every citizen holds life, liberty, and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.

Spotted in Annapolis near the city dock:

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I was a student at the University of Maryland a few years ago when “Deep Throat” was shown at the Hoff Theater on campus. While I was surprised 530 students attended (The Apex on South Broadway probably would kill for that kind of turnout), I didn’t think much else of it.

So when I read Hoff was going to screen another porn earlier last week, I wasn’t too shocked. But then a funny thing happened: the movie became a political cause in more ways than one. Legislators threatened to withhold funding from the university if the film went on as planned, and an on-campus political party hosted a screening of part of the film days before the Student Government Association election. Today, the state Senate thankfully rejected a silly budget amendment that would have withheld construction funds at state schools unless they developed a porn policy. Not since Mary Carey ran for governor of California have porn and politics been so closely tied together. 

As an alum, however, what bothers me most about this whole episdoe was the university’s decision to cancel the screening in the first place. The independent campus newspaper The Diamondback, in a spot-on editorial, summarized my feelings about university administrators:

They have encouraged short-sighted state legislators to make empty threats to meddle with the very information the university distributes. We simply don’t believe state legislators would shut down the most productive source of education, a gem of the state, because Hoff showed some bouncing breasts. But potentially worse, administrators have declared in unequivocal terms they don’t need student input before regulating the content supported by this university.

The apparent endgame to this is the University System of Maryland, which oversees the public institutions in the state, will now develop a porn policy for all state campuses. A USM official called the porn controversy a “tragedy.” I call it a self-inflicted wound.