Cocky Law Blawg

Click here to see the list of the Coleman Karesh Law Library’s new acquisitions for the month of March.

Consider checking out one of our excellent, new study aids:

• The Glannon Guide to Civil Procedure: Learning Civil Procedure Through Multiple-Choice Questions and Analysis
• The Glannon Guide to Constitutional Law: Individual Rights and Liberties: Learning Constitutional Law Through Multiple-Choice Questions and Analysis
• The Glannon Guide to Criminal Procedure: Learning Criminal Procedure Through Multiple-Choice Questions and Analysis
• The Glannon Guide to Property: Learning Property Through Multiple-Choice Questions and Analysis

There are also new books on the Fifth Amendment, intellectual property law (trademarks, patents, and copyright), expert witnesses, and much, much more!

The Wilson Center’s Digital Archive: International History Declassified contains once-secret documents from various governments and organizations around the world.  These materials, now declassified, are a rich body of historical information.  With 71 collections, covering topics from the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games to the Cuban Missile Crisis to “Stalin and the Cold War,” the Digital Archive supports the research aims of three Wilson Center projects: The Cold War International History Project, The North Korea International Documentation Project, and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.  As such, most of the document collections are focused on these areas.

You can check out the collections here.

Here’s all the latest news on Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenged to the constitutionality of California’s ban on same-sex marriage:

To listen to the oral arguments, go here.

To read the oral arguments, go here.

For argument recaps, go here, here, and/or here.

The bottom-line seems to be that Justice Kennedy is questioning whether the Supreme Court should rule on marriage at all.  Kennedy, who’s often the court’s swing vote, asked more than one time whether the best course would be not to rule in the case.

This week’s big legal news story is the same sex marriage cases being heard at the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday and Wednesday.   On Tuesday, the Court will hear oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, considering whether the Equal Protection Clause prohibits California from defining marriage as the union of a man and woman.  On Wednesday, the Court will turn from Prop 8 to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as it hears arguments in the case of United States v. Windsor.  There, the issue is whether Section 3 of DOMA violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws as applied to persons of the same sex who are legally married under the laws of their State.

There will be lots of coverage on these cases this week.  An interesting pair of articles were published on SCOTUSblog the last two days, looking at the arguments made in the amicus briefs for these two cases.  Part I of “Marriage and the Court’s ‘friends’” deals with the amicus briefs submitted for the Prop 8 case, while Part II looks at those filed in the DOMA case.

Click here to see the list of the Coleman Karesh Library’s new acquisitions for the month of February.

A few practice-focused books you might want to check out:

• So You’re Going to Try Your First Case: A Primer for Federal and State Jury Trials in South Carolina, by Warren Moise.
• Representing Clients in Mediation:  A Guide to Optimal Results Based on Insights from Counsel, Mediators and Program Administrators, by Spencer Punnet.

There are also new books on international human rights, South Carolina construction law, social media and the law, and much, much more!

On Thursday, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devices that can hold more than ten rounds.  The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 [S. 150] would prohibit the sale, transfer, importation, and manufacture of certain military-style assault weapons, specifically excluding over two thousands guns used for sport, and would also ban high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Last week, the Judiciary Committee also passed two other gun control measures, one requiring background checks for private gun sales and another renewing a grant to help schools improve safety.

On Friday, the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women ended with an agreement to adopt new measures to prevent violence against women.  The Agreed Conclusions adopted condemns the pervasive violence against females and calls for raising awareness using education.  It also pledges to address the many political, economic, and social gender inequalities that contribute to continued violence against women.

This comes just a few weeks after President Obama signed an updated version of the Violence Against Women Act into law.