donal brown

As it sometimes happens, a banal incident or unsympathetic person leads to an important Supreme Court decision upholding free speech rights. Today the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that a high school student was punished wrongly for using the f-word on Snatchat to protest her failure to make the varsity cheer leading team. (NBC News, June 23, 2021, by Pete Williams) Writing the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said the court was not establishing that the

The European Union moving toward transparency with rules requiring multinational companies to reveal figures of revenue and taxes paid in the Union and how much in tax havens. Oxfam said the EU’s list of tax havens was incomplete so many tax haven countries would evade scrutiny. (Reuters, June 2, 2021, by Jan Strupczewski) Companies with over 750 million Euros annually would have to provide details of the taxes they pay in member states and in

The Justice Department is appealing a federal judge’s ruling ordering the release of a 2019 legal memo that then-Attorney General Bill Barr said justified not pursuing obstruction of justice charges against then-President Donald Trump after the Mueller Report came out. The DOJ said part of the memo covered the “deliberative process privilege,” protecting policy-making processes. (Law & Crime, May 25, 2021, by Jerry Lambe) Law professor Neal K. Katyal, The New York Times, May 26,

Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan, June 6, 2021, criticizes President Joe Biden’s Justice Department for continuing the Trump administration’s spying on reporters. Ryan said the department continued to solicit subpoenas of phone records and only stopped the practice when news reports revealed its efforts. The Biden administration scrambled to reverse the practice after The New York Times reputed that there was a gag order preventing them from revealing a court fight over attempts to obtain