By Carlyn Kolker

The Medium is the message

5/2/12

Tuesday, as we reported, was Law Day, and many judges and lawyers took to old school forms of communication - the podium, the newspaper opinion pages - to reach out to citizens about the importance of the rule of law. So we have to hand it to two judges on the District of Columbia Superior Court and the D.C. Court of Appeals, Lee Satterfield and Eric Washington, for taking to Twitter. The judges spent an hour on the social media site on Tuesday, the Blog of Legal Times reports, answering questions about everything from cameras in the courts (not allowed) to -- talk about meta -- whether tweeting was allowed (unclear). And for the record: Law Day does not mean the other days of the year are about lawlessness (a reporter asked if that was the case). "Just like Mother's Day, Law Day is one day to be thankful that the rule of law is cherished in this country," the judges Tweeted.

Lesson learned?

5/2/12

One of the biggest and complex pieces of litigation right now is an environmental lawsuit by indigenous Ecuadoreans against Chevron. The case, which alleges that the energy giant contaminated the Amazon jungle, has spilled out across two continents and dragged on for years. So when the highest court in Chile last week suspended government approval for a mining project in the north of Chile, the news caught our attention. The court's reasoning was particularly resonant: because Canadian mining group Goldcorp failed to consult indigenous groups on the enviornmental impact of the project, a requirement of Chilean law, according to the Santiago Times. Goldcorp, in a statement quoted by the newspaper, said it would work with the Chilean Environmental Evaluation Service to "ensure deficiencies are fully and appropriately addressed."

You've got mail

5/2/12

We have to admit, when it comes to corporate behemoths versus the executive branch, we tend to think of the big companies of the world versus the usual suspects: the DOJ, the SEC, etc. But it turns out that there has been a fight brewing for years between tech giants Google and Microsoft and the Department of Interior. At issue was which company the agency would choose for some of its contracts for email systems, according to NetworkWorld. In 2010, Google sued Interior over the systems contract, saying the parameters unfairly favored Microsoft. Google dropped the lawsuit the following year, but it looks like the search engine giant now has won the war. According to NetworkWorld, the Interior Department chose Google for a $35 million, seven-year contract.

The big uneasy

5/2/12

The New Orleans prison system, as we've previously reported, has been under the microscope. Not only have non-profit legal groups been suing the system over allegedly unfair conditions, the U.S. Justice Department, too, has taken the prison warden to task for conditions at the local jail. The DOJ's New Orleans dismay is not limited to the jail: Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech in Little Rock last week and said his agency is taking an "overall look" at criminal justice system in New Orleans, including the police department and possible prosecutorial misconduct, according to the Times-Picayune. The justice system is "a system that is in trouble right now," Holder said. In other words, stay tuned for some possible DOJ action about New Orleans cops, courts, prosecutors and jails.

Lawyers targeted

5/2/12

Who's gunning for lawyers in Fort Wayne, Indiana? We don't know, and apparently neither does the local police. Two corporate attorneys from law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, a large Midwestern-based law firm (it is the recent product of a merger between Minneapolis-based Faegre & Benson and Indianapolis-based Baker & Daniels) have had their homes shot at in separate incidents over the past month-and-a-half, the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne reports. Neither attorney has been injured, and the police department is struggling to find a connection between the two incidents. The law firm will have a "police presence" going forward, the paper reports.

Starry rights

5/2/12

File this under legal questions we had never pondered before: can a company claim legal rights to the asteroids it mines?

Yes, you read that one right. The question has been prompted by the recent announcement that Planetary Resources, a company backed by Google founders, has set up a plan to mine asteroids. But what proprietary rights a private entity has to space's precious resources is murky, Wired magazine notes. To get to an answer, one must look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (a treaty Summary Judgments didn't know existed), which says outer space is "not subject to national appropriation." But, the treaty doesn't specify what individual rights are, and other provisions of the treaty and some international laws actually support some property rights. "Customary international law has essentially recognized property rights based on possession," Wired writes - the "founders' keepers" approach to the law.

So what does all this mean for one company's asteroid quests and the future of outer space jurisprudence? (What circuit would have jurisdiction over that issue?) Who knows - those may be questions for my progeny to deliberate over.

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