In a Google Hangout conversation (placed on YouTube; see below) Monday February 25, three Republican attorney generals, including Georgia’s AG Sam Olens, took questions from the public and reporters, and discussed the various ways they plan to challenge the Obama administration. Said Olens:
We are going to go against an administration that doesn’t follow constitutional mandates.
Olens also expressed concern about the constitutionality, and seeks an “overhall”, of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which holds any proposed changes to Georgia’s (and eight other states with a history of voter discrimination) voting laws accountable to the U.S. Justice Department or a 3-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit.
At 16:47 on the video Olens states:
It’s very different in 2013 than it was in 1964. And it is time for Section 5 to be found unconstitutional, and for Section 2 to be the standard by which all 50 states have to seek fair elections.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge by Alabama on Wednesday, February 27, to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Attorneys, professors and students will gather at the University of Georgia Law School March 2 for the Eighth Annual Working in the Public Interest Law Conference.
An announcement on the UGA website says the event will address gun control, homelessness, affirmative action and alternative courts.
The daylong event starts at 9 a.m. in the law school’s Harold Hirsch Hall. It will highlight “dynamic, creative ways to combat social injustice through the vehicle of the law,” says conference organizer and third-year law student Cari Hipp, in a news release.
The conference concludes with a keynote address by Aimee Maxwell, executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, 6 p.m. at the Melting Point in downtown Athens.
Registration is $10 for the public and free for university faculty, staff and students. CLE credit is available.
JONESBORO, Ga. (AP) — Members of a high school mock trial team have been trying to get back to Georgia after being stranded in New York City during Hurricane Sandy.
The Clayton News Daily reports that the Jonesboro High School team placed fourth in an international competition in New York City this weekend. They were stranded in a Brooklyn hotel on Tuesday.
One of the judges, Clayton County State Court Solicitor General Tasha Mosley, said Tuesday the students were trying to make arrangements to get out of town on a charter bus or a train.
Mosley said the team has been safe and warm on the 12th floor of their hotel. She said her biggest concern is price gouging. She said she spent $55 on 21 bottles of water.
A homeowner’s association in an Augusta suburb is going to the mat to stop a display of kid-friendly colors painted on a backyard playhouse, according to the Columbia County News-Times:
The color (of the playhouse) is not “keeping in tradition with the neighborhood,” said attorney Wright McLeod, who represents the association.
A homowner within the suburb, and a former board member of the homeowner’s association, built the tot-sized structure as a gift for a 4-year old grandchild last Christmas, and a not-so-cute legal squabble has been brewing over the pastel color scheme ever since. From MSNBC:
Rogers-Peck’s contention is that the playhouse does not fall under the definition of a backyard structure like a shed or a garage that would be subject to the association’s rules, so she can paint it any color she wants. Pink is the favorite color of her granddaughter, Aubree, and the playhouse cannot be seen from the street in front of the house.
As it now stands according to the News-Times story, Ms. Rogers-Peck has 30-days to respond to a suit by the homeowner’s association filed on Sept. 5, and lawyers she’s sought counsel from don’t offer much hope that the current paint job can (legally) remain on the mini home.
The grandmother lamented her playhousing situation by telling the News-Times,
‘It’s really disheartening. I feel like I live in Russia, … where I can’t do anything on my own property without (the association’s) permission.’
The Daily Report has been unable to confirm rumors the playhouse is a portal to Diagon Alley.
With the Olympic Games opening ceremony just two days away, and no scores to report on yet, retrospective stories of past Olympics are prevalent in the press right now.
Sports Illustrated takes a look back to the 1996 Centennial Park bombing in Atlanta during the Olympics here, through the recollections of participants, from the confessed bomber Eric Robert Rudolph, Olympic organizer Billy Payne and the mother of Richard Jewell, who discovered the bomb but initially was suspected of planting it.
The bomb, which killed one and injured dozens, spawned negligence litigation against Olympic organizers and defamation claims by Jewell against the news media.
Rudolph, serving a life sentence in federal prison, gave a May 2012 phone interview to Sports Illustrated, saying:
The plan was to clear the park, and hopefully after clearing the park and the explosion, this would create a state of instability in Atlanta, potentially shut the Games down or at least eat into the profits that the Games were going to make. The idea was to use them as warning devices, not to target people. … In retrospect, it was a poor decision.
On the Rise awards will spotlight up-and-coming, young Georgia lawyers – those under 40. The deadline for nominations is also Friday, June 8, and the On the Rise nominating form is here.
It’s one of those unspoken Southern social rules; one just does not treat one’s Masters tickets like a commodity. If shared at all, the coveted passes to Augusta National are gifted only to a business associate first, then perhaps to a friend or family member.
Standing out alongside the road hawking one’s Masters tickets? Inconceivable. Yet it happens, and Augusta takes the re-selling of Masters tickets matter very seriously – going so far as to assign narcotics agents to work undercover during the tournament to assist in ferreting out the ill-mannered.
According to the August Chronicle, selling and buying of Masters tickets was so prevalent this year that more than 30 cases of “disorderly conduct” associated with the tickets landed on the desk of Harry B. James, the solicitor for the Richmond County Magistrate Court. And other than the case of one senior seller, a Jasper B. Sojourner of Port St. Lucie, Fla., James has said to all the others so charged… see you in a Georgia courtroom.
The newspaper reports: “As for the others with outstanding cases, James said they will have to show up in Magistrate Court next week if they intend to fight the charges. He said it didn’t matter that some lived as far away as Canada and California.
“‘If they don’t show up the judge can issue a bench warrant or they can forfeit their bond,’ he said.”
Emory law professor, Frank Alexander, is part of an exhaustive Frontline four hour series on the global financial crisis. Alexander appears in the segment about Atlanta neighborhoods taking the brunt of the subprime lending meltdown, starting around 9:40 into this clip.
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Contributor: Grayson Daughters in Breaking News, Misc, U.S. Supreme Court | 
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