We all know that the right of free speech has its limits. There is no right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Those limits apply even in settings most closely associated with the free exchange of ideas, such as colleges and universities. In that academic setting, limits also exist even for speech that takes place off campus, such as on a social networking website, but that is connected to a student's academic program. A student in a state university's mortuary science program learned these constitutional law lessons the hard way when the university gave her a failing grade in an anatomy class and imposed other sanctions against her … [Read more...]

Strong public policies support the appropriate use of arbitration over litigation in settling legal disputes and in fact, such policies underlie the federal Arbitration Act that said, an agreement to arbitrate disputes is subject to well-established principles rooted in the law of contracts. This means, among other things, that courts will step in and declare void an ostensible agreement to arbitrate if its effects are too heavily weighted in one party's favor. Two recent examples of this overreaching by the more powerful party illustrate the point. In the first case, a former employee sued his former employer under the Fair Labor … [Read more...]

At the eleventh hour Congress averted the tax side of the ominous "Fiscal Cliff" that it faced as 2012 drew lo a close, late end result of the intense negotiations was the American Taxpayer Relief Act ol"20l2 (ATRA). The most publicized part of ATRA prevented scheduled federal lax rate hikes from going into effect for most taxpayers in 2013, while raising taxes on America's highest earners. ATRA also keeps in place many expiring in-come tax breaks and revives some tax increases that had expired over the past several years. Individual Tax Rates Low tax years beginning after 2112. ATRA makes permanent almost all of' the federal income … [Read more...]