Missouri Lawyers Media Missouri legal news and public notices

Sheriff Joseph Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County prides himself on being “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” He also is America’s most litigious one. He has commenced a score of lawsuits and defended thousands. Most of the latter involve civil rights violations. His ...

Have you ever wished Congress simply would pass a law punishing an obviously guilty person or group and save the expense and delay of a trial? Conservative pundits had their wish fulfilled in September when Congress cut off all appropriations ...

Health care reform is the rage in Congress. Judging by the sound bites, you would think Congress is doing nothing else. Don’t be fooled. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported out a bill last week to extend and, ever so slightly, ...

Tagged with: health care

“Survivor” star Richard Hatch may have tamed the jungles of Borneo and won $1 million in 2000, but he has experienced many setbacks since. The greatest was failing to report his winnings on his income tax return. In 2006, a ...

Tagged with: due process free speech Tax Evasion

The detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been kept there for years. Only now are they getting hearings in federal district court to challenge the grounds for their detention. To date, a majority of the petitioners have prevailed. We have a ...

Tagged with: ACLU

On May 7, an appellate court in Wisconsin decided State v. Sveum. At issue was whether the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device on a person’s automobile, without a warrant, and the use of the device to continually track ...

Tagged with: Fourth Amendment

We now know that right after 9/11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct blanket surveillance on electronic communications without a warrant. The Federal Intelligence Security Act of 1978 created a procedure whereby he could have obtained a ...

Tagged with: ACLU National Security Agency

Imagine you are the parent of a teenager, who most likely possesses a cellphone and access to the Internet. Combined with raging hormones, you have a recipe for “sexting” – the transmittal of nude or seminude photos through a cellphone. ...

Tagged with: Facebook text messages

What do Graham Greene, Pierre Trudeau, Tariq Ramadan and Adam Habib have in common? They are scholars and writers barred from entering the United States of America. You may recognize Greene as a British novelist, and Trudeau as the flashy ...

Tagged with: terrorism

President Obama today finds himself in two civil liberty/national security dilemmas: The president wants to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, send most of its residents to their home countries and bring some to the United States for trial. ...

Tagged with: Guantanamo Bay

Some conservatives are critical of President Obama’s April release of four memorandums authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the CIA and the military. Critics should keep in mind, however, that prior to the president’s action, a federal judge ...

Tagged with: American Civil Liberties Union torture