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New York Parents Sue After County uses Son's Remains to Train Dogs

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Photo Credit: Clotee Pridgen Allochuku

The parents of a western New York man killed in a car crash are suing county officials after the coroner there took a piece of their son’s body for use in a dog-training exercise.

Roger Dunn, 32, died April 13, 2012, in an auto wreck in Cambria.

After his death, Niagara County Coroner Russell Jackman gave some tissue from the crash scene to a volunteer fire chief who was training a dog to sniff out human remains.

Both men later resigned and pleaded guilty to misdemeanors over their conduct. They also apologized.

Each was fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and write letters of apology to the Dunns.

Read more from this story HERE.

State Sues Florist Over Refusing Service for Gay Wedding

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Photo Credit: DeanieMichelleEvents

The state attorney general has filed a lawsuit in Benton County Superior Court against a Richland florist who refused to provide flowers for the wedding of longtime gay customers, citing her religious opposition to same-sex marriage.

The state’s suit against Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts, came just days after the Attorney General’s Office wrote to ask that Stutzman reconsider her position and agree to comply with the state’s anti-discrimination laws.

“Under the Consumer Protection Act, it is unlawful to discriminate against customers on the basis of sexual orientation,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “If a business provides a product or service to opposite-sex couples for their weddings, then it must provide same-sex couples the same product or service.”

JD Bristol, attorney for Arlene’s, said his client has many customers and employees who are gay and the claim that she is “discriminating on the basis on sexual orientation is nonsense.”

“This is about gay marriage, it’s not about a person being gay,” Bristol said. “She has a conscientious objection to homosexual marriage, not homosexuality. It violates her conscience.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Law Schools Sued for Misleading Applicants About Job Prospects

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Numerous lawsuits have been filed against law schools across the nation by former graduates who allege that the law schools deceived them about the success rates of their former students.

Five of the nearly 20 lawsuits have been filed against California schools, four of which are Southwestern, Golden Gate University, the University of San Francisco and San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson and California Western schools of law, all of which charge roughly $40,000 per year in tuition.

Some graduates have taken low-paying jobs such as working in hourly jobs in department stores and restaurants, or finding work in temporary or part-time legal positions. Southwestern Law School, for example, once asserted that 97% of its graduates found jobs within nine months of graduation.

Some of the reasons for the dearth of job prospects for newly-graduated lawyers are:

The advent of computer availability for legal work, including as substitution for law libraries, so that much work can stay in-house at firms which once farmed the work out, Internet companies that offer litigants legal documents and help, The simple staggering number of lawyers in the market. Joseph Dunn, chief executive of the State Bar of California, said, “I don’t think any of them rival the situation we are seeing today. The legal community in all 50 states is being dramatically impacted.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Conservative Scholar Denied New Trial In Lawsuit Against Law School

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A conservative scholar who sued a University of Iowa law school dean, saying she was denied promotions because of her political orientation, will not get a new trial.

Teresa Wagner, 48, had sought another trial after a federal jury found in October that the university did not discriminate against her. A mistrial was declared on a second count alleging the school had violated Wagner’s equal protection rights. A third count charging that Wagner’s due process rights had been violated was dismissed before the trial.

Wagner sought retrial on all counts.

Her lawyers asserted that the judge accepted the verdict without allowing attorneys to be present. That, they said, denied them the right to poll the jury, a process that helps determine if jurors were unduly pressured to render a verdict after lengthy deliberations.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt issued a ruling rejecting Wagner’s arguments and denying a new trial, The Des Moines Register reported. The judge also granted the law school defendants’ motion to dismiss the count that the school had violated Wagner’s equal protection rights.

Read more from this story HERE.

ACLU Sues To Force Removal Of Ohio Middle School’s 65-Year-Old Jesus Portrait

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTwo advocacy groups have gone to court to force the removal of a large portrait of Jesus Christ which has hung inside a rural southern Ohio middle school since 1947.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the Freedom from Religion Foundation filed the lawsuit on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Columbus, reports the Columbus Dispatch.

The suit claims that the portrait hanging in Jackson Middle School violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by endorsing Christianity.

“The maintenance and display of the portrait has the effect of advancing and endorsing one religion, improperly entangling the State in religious affairs, and violating the personal consciences of plaintiffs,” the lawsuit claims, according to Fox News.

There are three plaintiffs in the suit. One plaintiff is a student at the middle school; the other two are parents of children at the school. The plaintiffs are reportedly only identified as “Sam Doe.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Lawsuit Forces Chicago To Accept Anti-Jihad Bus Ads

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kiichiro SatoThe Chicago Transit Authority has agreed to display plain-spoken anti-jihad ads on city buses, following a lawsuit by the American Freedom Law Center.

City officials initially rejected the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s anti-jihad ads, even after the city accepted bus ads that advertized a sanitized portrayal of jihad as exercise and education rather than warfare. The ads will be attached to 20 buses for $10,000.

Each ad includes a tagline “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

The tagline is a direct response to a series of bus ads posted by a group of people affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Their December 2012 “MyJihad” public-relations campaign portrays Islamic war — jihad — as a peaceful exercise.

Read more from this story HERE.

Public School Teacher Who Mocked Female Student’s Romney T-Shirt, Accused Her of Supporting the KKK, Sued

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It’s not always fun and easy being a young Republican, let alone an enthusiastic Mitt Romney supporter. Whoa:

“The parents of the Charles Carroll High School student ridiculed and ordered by her teacher to remove a t-shirt supporting Mitt Romney sued the teacher and school district on Friday, claiming the act violated the girl’s civil rights.

Filed in federal court in Philadelphia, the suit says the district ignored Samantha Pawlucy’s right to free speech, let other students threaten and harass her and subjected her “to emotional distress, simply because she exercised her First Amendment rights.”

Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the district, said it would not comment on the lawsuit.

Pawlucy, a 16-year-old sophomore from Port Richmond, drew national headlines from the furor that erupted when she wore a pink “Romney-Ryan” shirt during a dress-down day at school in September.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Bristol Palin Wins Legal Victory Over Bar Heckler

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By Jennifer Madison. Bristol Palin has won her legal fight with a man accused of heckling her on her reality show Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp.

The 22-year-old was named in a lawsuit filed by Stephen Hanks, who was seen in an episode shouting obscenities about her mother, former U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, during an altercation with Bristol at a Hollywood bar.

Hanks claimed he never signed a waiver to appear on the show and that Bristol invaded his privacy by outing him as a gay man in filings naming the reality star and A&E network.

Bristol’s docu-series premiered in June of this year and followed her as she moved to Los Angeles with her three-year-old son, Tripp, whom she shares with ex-fiancé Levi Johnston.

In episode of the Lifetime network series shows a verbal argument erupting after Bristol is heckled while she rides a mechanical bull at the Saddle Ranch on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the full video of the heckling incident [caution: this is unedited; the heckler who sued Palin uses repeated profanities]: