Landmark United States Supreme Court Cases

Landmark United States Supreme Court Cases

Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)

Issue: Does the First Amendment prohibit public school officials from barring students’ from wearing black armbands to symbolize anti-war political protest?

Result: According to the Court, yes. The Supreme Court held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech…at the schoolhouse gate.” Consequently, the Court found that the students’ speech could only be prohibited if it actually disrupted the educational process. Because there was no evidence of such a disruption, the school was in violation of the First Amendment freedom of speech.

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Roe v. Wade (1973)

Issue: Does the Constitution prohibit laws that severely restrict or deny a woman’s access to abortion?

Result: Yes. The Court concluded that such laws violate the Constitution’s right to privacy. The Court held that, under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, states may only restrict abortions toward the end of a pregnancy, in order to protect the life of the woman or the fetus.

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Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

Issue : Can an institution of higher learning use race as a factor when making admissions decisions?

Result : The Court held that universities may use race as part of an admissions process so long as “fixed quotas” are not used. The Court determined that the specific system in place at the University of California Medical School was “unnecessary” to achieve the goal of creating a diverse student body and was merely a “fixed quota” and therefore, was unconstitutional. The decision started a line of cases in which the Court upheld affirmative action programs. In 2003, such academic affirmative action programs were again directly challenged in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. In these cases, the Court clarified that admission programs that include race as a factor can pass constitutional muster so long as the policy is narrowly tailored and does not create an automatic preference based on race. The Court asserted that a system that created an automatic race-based preference would in fact violate the Equal Protection Clause.

Legal Outsourcing and its growth in India

Legal Outsourcing and its growth in India

This article analyze the emergence of LPO in India, as well as its future growth. The outsourcing originally denoted the practice of sending work to third party companies in the U.S., it gradually expanded to include sending work abroad, a practice that eventuallyeclipsed domestic outsourcing. Offshore outsourcing is not a new phenomenon.  Companies have been referring work to foreign third parties for many years. In the 1990's, as organizations began to focus more on cost-saving measures, they started to outsource those functions necessary to run a company but not related specifically to the core business.

The service industry now known as “Business Process Outsourcing” (“BPO in a relatively short period of time, global outsourcing has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Since the turn of the 21st century, growth has snowballed, going from approximately $119 billion in 2000 to approximately $234 billion in 2005. By the end of 2008, revenues are projected to rise to around $310 billion. The United States is one of the biggest consumers of outsourcing services. Approximately 59% of the global trade in outsourced work originates in North America. The next closest consumer is the European Union, which consumes approximately 27% of the market. Love it or hateit, offshoring is here to stay, and the trend appears to be for more offshoring, not less.

Legal Process Offshoring (“LPO”) was developed as a KPO service set for the legal industry. LPO can be traced back as far as 1995, when the law firm Bickel and Brewer first opened a satellite office to processadministrative. The most modern incarnation of LPO dates back to 2001, when GE created a captive center in Gurgaon, India to absorb in-house legal work. The usefulness of captive LPO centers was initially limited because it was difficult to get workflow to and from the captive centers in a timely fashion. Over the last couple of years, technological advancements have enabled service providers to make LPO more responsive—and potentially more useful—to law firms in primary markets such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Top ten points before Outsourcing legal Services

Top ten points before Outsourcing legal Services

Part I - As various state and city bar associations have blessed offshore legal process outsourcing subject to compliance with many specific ethical considerations. The ethics opinions frame the minimum standards for lawyers to avoid losing their licenses.

Beyond such ethical and disciplinary considerations, the big question is how to make LPO effective and within the ethical framework and suggests some business management issues that require individual attention by corporate counsel and law firms considering significant levels of LPO.

Avoid Unauthorized Practice of the Law

Ethics opinions of bar associations generally hold a lawyer hiring or supervising an LPO provider responsible for facilitation, by action or inaction, of the unauthorized practice of the law.  The Florida’s Bar Association attempted to provide some clarity to this concept by suggesting a rights-based analysis whether an activity constitutes the practice of law.  The bar opinions generally refrain from concluding that any particular LPO constitutes “unauthorized practice,” leaving that issue open for the attorney and the courts to decide in each case.

Avoid Malpractice

There is nothing unethical about lawyer outsourcing legal and nonlegal services.” But to be legal, the lawyer who outsources any legal or nonlegal function must render legal services to the client with the “legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation. This is sometimes referred to as the “duty of competency.  A lawyer engaging others to deliver non-legal or legal services must make “reasonable efforts” to ensure that the third-party service provider, if a lawyer, conforms to the Rules of Professional Conduct and, if not a lawyer, delivers the services in a manner that is compatible with the professional obligations of the lawyer.

Bankruptcy Petition filing steps

Bankruptcy Petition filing steps

Take a file folder and put a statement from every creditor that you owe in it. In case you do not receive a every month statement from the creditor, put the following information on a sheet of paper and put it in your file:

• Name and complete mailing address of who you owe;
• Your account number (if applicable);
• The name of who owes the debt (husband, spouse or both);
• The total amount you owe this creditor;
• How much your every month payments are;
• The date you originally went in to debt with this creditor if you do not remember the exact date, an approximate year i.e., 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. will do;
• If the debt is for a credit card, record the last date you charged on this credit card. In case you charged less than 90 days ago, you need to write down the amount you charged and the reason for the acquisition.)
• In the same file folder, also put in the following documents:

 Your current pay check stubs :

• In case you are unemployed, include copies of documents showing any income you receive(d) from unemployment, workers compensation, infant support, SSI, social security, retirement, estate, etc.
• Mortgage and deed in case you own or are purchasing a home or other actual property (i.e., land, apartment complex, etc.).
• Copies of your automobile, boat, motorbike, mobile home or other titles to motor vehicles.
• Copies of your tax returns.
• Copies of any court proceedings filed against you.