WJI's Daily Reads (and Livestream) for Sept. 6, 2022

Wisconsin Supreme Court: Listen in to SCOW oral argument in WJI's case challenging the April 2020 constitutional amendment today at 9:45 a.m.

Above the Law: Federal court in the Southern District of Florida bars attorneys from bringing in phones and computers, telling them to pay the lingerie shop next door to hold them. 

The Trace: Suggesting the idea of gun insurance paid for by gun owners just as automobile insurance is paid for by drivers and car owners.

A 2017 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimated that the U.S. spends $2.8 billion per year on medical treatments for gun violence survivors. Many survivors find themselves struggling with co-pays and deductibles if they are insured, and with mountainous medical bills if they are not. An insured person who has been shot can easily find that they are responsible for $20,000 of a $100,000 bill. Only 12 percent are able to pay their medical bills in full, per the study. In any case, Americans subsidize the gun industry and gun owners by picking up these unpaid bills through our taxes or increased insurance premiums.  

This approach to the medical needs of gun violence survivors is cruel, irrational, and unjust. A saner, fairer model for paying such costs is staring us in the face: automobile insurance. 

Balls and Strikes: Originalists' use of corpus linguistics is concerning.

But of course, we wouldn’t be talking about corpus linguistics if there weren’t serious problems with judges cosplaying as linguists. Defenders of legal corpus linguistics argue that using a database prevents a lawyer from cherry-picking historical sources or dictionaries to get the result they want. But some databases are so limited in scope that the cherry-picking is baked in to the process: For example, one analysis of COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) found that “the vast majority” of its identifiable authors are men, and that men outnumber women by “several orders of magnitude.” Another found that a whopping 30 percent of COFEA (Corpus of Founding-Era American English) was written by six people: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton.

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Woman personally impacted by juvenile-court scandal in Pennsylvania urges vigilance to protect youth from the justice system.

People are so shocked by the dollar amounts involved that they neglect the awkward truth: (Mark) Ciavarella’s court practices were unethical long before he began accepting money. It is much easier for many people to accept that the judges who took advantage of a vulnerable population were unique exceptions instead of questioning the system that allowed for them to thrive. This willful ignorance is an unfortunate reflection of the attitudes our nation has toward the rights of children.

JDSupra: Failure to provide deaf person qualified ASL interpreter during criminal proceedings was disability discrimination, says Fifth Circuit.

Star Tribune: Federal case underway over Minnesota's ban on gun permits for those under 21 years old.