WJI's Daily Reads for Feb. 28, 2022

Fox II News (WLUK): Former Justice Michael Gableman expected to deliver final report today regarding November 2020 election.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Governor Evers cites busy schedule in response to question about meeting with homicide victims' families.

Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court hearing case on federal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Slate: Senators likely to hold Ketanji Brown Jackson to a higher standard than they apply to Clarence Thomas.

The Washington Post: Activism in the ten years since Trayvon Martin was killed.

Financial Times: U.S. lawmakers to work on legislation in response to court approval of "Texas two-step" bankruptcy move allowing companies to spin off liability.

“When you have massively profitable companies using this bankruptcy manoeuvre to avoid accountability to dying cancer victims, it’s clear that corrective action is needed,” (Senator Dick) Durbin told the Financial Times. . . .

On Friday a US bankruptcy judge threw out a motion by talc claimants to dismiss the bankruptcy of (Johnson & Johnson) subsidiary LTL Management in a ruling that critics warn could open the floodgates for other companies to use the bankruptcy courts to manage person injury and other tort claims.

The “Texas two-step” scheme utilises business-friendly laws in Texas that allowed J&J to split itself into two separate entities and ringfence all its talc liabilities within the LTL subsidiary. LTL then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which put a stay on talc claims.

Talking Points Memo: Five Texas district attorneys defy governor's order to investigate gender-affirming treatment for transgender youths.

The district attorneys of Dallas, Travis, Bexar, Nueces and Fort Bend counties condemned the directive in a statement issued Thursday. The group, which is comprised of five Democratic district attorneys, slammed (Gov. Greg) Abbott and (Attorney General Ken) Paxton’s characterization of gender-affirming care for minors as “child abuse.” They declared Abbott and Paxton’s recent rhetoric is an “onslaught on personal freedoms” that is on its face “un-American.”

“We also want to be clear: we will enforce the Constitution and will not irrationally and unjustifiably interfere with medical decisions made between children, their parents, and their medical physicians,” the district attorneys wrote. “We trust the judgment of our state’s medical professionals, who dedicate themselves to providing the highest degree of care not only for our transgender youth, but for all youth in our communities.”

The Guardian: Los Angeles district attorney revising his reforms on charging youths.

The Los Angeles district attorney’s handling of a sexual assault case and decision to backtrack on part of his reform agenda has caused political division and media outrage, in a case that signals the intensifying opposition to progressive prosecutors across the US.

George Gascón, who leads the largest local prosecutor’s office in the nation, had banned the practice of charging youth as adults at the start of his term in 2020. But over the weekend, in response to outrage over a sexual assault case, he announced he would shift his policy so that juveniles could be tried as adults “in the most extraordinary of cases”.