Today Law News

On a Monday in late November, I had breakfast with Nick Wurst, a conductor on the CSX railroad, at a diner in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts. We met before dawn, and Wurst, a bearded twenty-six-year-old, was wearing a reflective Carhartt shirt and a knit hat for his 7:30 AM shift at the freight terminal in Framingham, about thirty miles away. his union, SMART-TD, which represented railway conductors and engineers, had just voted down a proposed contract meant to resolve a three-year-long standoff over wages, scheduling, and benefits. The agreement had been drafted not in the usual course of collective bargaining between the twelve rail unions and the National Carriers’ Conference Committee but by fiat, at the best of President Biden. The Administration had impanneled an emergency board, which whipped up a contract in less than a month to prevent a strike.

Each union had a chance to

each year, the US News & World Reports‘s rankings of top colleges, law schools, and medical schools land to a chorus of groans and cheers. The rankings began in 1983, and were originally drawn solely from peer reviews of institutions. Did the provost at Brown think better of the University of Virginia than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Since then, the publication has tinkered with the rankings several times—taking into account factors such as how many students an institution rejects each year, how much it costs to attend, and the student-to-faculty ratio—to give more rigor to its methodology.

College leaders have mixed feelings about the listing. They criticize the formula for the things it doesn’t count—such as aid for low-income students and graduation rates—while simultaneously lauding their institution’s own position on the leaderboard, at least for those at the top.

But in recent months, even some

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ALI Elects New Members

The American Law Institute has elected new members who will bring their expertise to ALI’s work of clarifying the law through Restatements, Principles, and Model Codes.

“As 2022 comes to a close, I am pleased to welcome our final group of new ALI members,” said ALI President David F. Levi. “In 2023, ALI will celebrate its 100th anniversary. We are moving into our second century at a time when the United States is divided on many issues and many Americans are skeptical of all institutions, including our courts and legal system. This makes our work all the more important, and our new members are essential to that work. It is only through the efforts of our talented, diverse and dedicated membership body that we can continue our work protecting and preserving the rule of law. I look forward to our new members joining us in

Conservative donors poured tens of millions of dollars of anonymous “dark money” into groups supporting Republican lawmakers in a supreme court case that could upend American election law.

The donors backed several groups that have filed supreme court amicus briefs in support of North Carolina legislators in Moore v Harper, according to a recent analysis. They are pushing for a ruling that would take ultimate decisions about voting rights and congressional gerrymandering away from state courts and hand those powers to state legislatures, of which Republicans now control the majority.

Eight conservative groups that submitted amicus briefs in the supreme court case have received close to $90m from dark money donors since 2016, according to Accountable.US, a liberal leaning watchdog group that tracks government corruption.

Several of these conservative bastions are also champions of restrictive voting laws.

Conservatives want the supreme court to adopt the independent state legislature theory, a