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Illustrations by Daniel Frost
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While most of us don’t spend our days in a courtroom, the law touches our lives in myriad ways—and the need for an attorney can crop up at unexpected times. The matter might be a dispute with a neighbor over property lines, a clarification of employee benefits, a question about a loved one’s living will. It’s important to know where to turn. To help with that search, Woodward/White, publisher of The Best Lawyers in America®, confidentially surveys attorneys and asks them to rate their peers; SLM then publishes the portion that’s pertinent to the St. Louis region. And to help with another part of our daily lives—making sense of current events—we asked local legal experts to unpack the news.
UNPACKING THE NEWS
Teens’ Rights: Up In the Air?
In September, Mayor Alvin Parks of East St. Louis, Ill., issued an executive emergency curfew that gave police authority to arrest and jail kids under 18 if they were on the streets during school hours, after 10 p.m., or without an ID. The curfew also allowed police to do random searches for drugs, alcohol, and guns, and forbade males to wear royal blue or bright red. “The color rule has already been rescinded because of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment, says SpearIt, a Saint Louis University School of Law prof. “But the others are still problematic. Random demands for ID—you can’t stop someone without probable cause.” Compared to more reasoned, protective curfews in other cities, SpearIt says, the East St. Louis attempt was…juvenile.
If at First You Don’t Secede…
After the 2012 presidential election, nearly 1 million people—across all 50 states—filed petitions to secede from the Union. It was probably just a tantrum for the media’s benefit, but what if they meant it? There’s nothing spelled out about it in the Constitution. “Their state legislature would have to pass a bill, and probably some court would strike it down,” says Mike Wolff, former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and now a law professor at SLU. “The Constitution doesn’t say, ‘We the states’; it says, ‘We the people.’ And we did have a Civil War that settled the issue.”
The Law Goes to Pot
Most people hear about states legalizing marijuana and either groan or reach for a brownie. But what intrigues Greg Magarian, a professor at Washington University School of Law, is the clash between states and the feds. A state can decide not to prosecute for possession or use, but federal law still criminalizes cultivation, distribution—pretty much anything to do with marijuana. “Initially, I think the federal government is going to push back and say, ‘Look, you guys are rogue states,’” Magarian says. “If they have an opportunity for a major drug prosecution in Colorado, they’re going to do it. But I expect that over time, assuming more states do this, a consensus will emerge.”
Meth and Methodology
Law classes are about things like contracts and torts—and Methland. SLU law professor Anders Walker is using this book, by St. Louis author Nick Reding, to teach about crystal meth’s history, manufacture, distribution, policing, sentencing, and societal impact. The spring 2013 course will move from criminal law into health law—because, Walker says, “One big question about meth is whether it makes more sense to regulate the pharmaceutical industry or to increase penalties.” Guest speakers will provide insights from public health, social work, addiction psychology, economics, and immigration. Walker wants students to see “that what appears to be a fairly straightforward legal issue relates to many different areas—and controlling the substance requires understanding these other areas.”
Causing Friction
Automated social media is so 2012. At least that’s the thinking of Neil Richards, a privacy law expert and Washington University law professor. In a recent special edition of Wired magazine’s UK publication, he argued that “frictionless sharing”—that is, automated social media that lets others know what content you’re perusing—is on the decline. “Frictionless sharing of our reading and viewing habits threatens what legal scholars call ‘intellectual privacy’—the zone we need around our reading and watching so that we can think for ourselves without being affected by the often too-harsh judgment of the crowd,” he writes. As a result, some people are uninstalling social-reader apps and changing their social-media settings to limit sharing. Richards believes this trend will continue as social-media users grow more savvy.
Putting Out Fires?
In November, some firefighters rejoiced when the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that certain veteran firefighters could live outside the city, as long as its schools lack full accreditation. But while the decision answered some questions, it raised others, one legal observer notes: Is it fair that other municipal employees are still required to live within city limits? With the state Supreme Court acknowledging that St. Louis has home rule over compensation, what will the decision mean for firefighters’ public pensions? There could be more legal fires down the road.
Where’s Missouri Insurance Heading?
In November, Missouri voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition E, which prohibits the governor or any state agency from setting up state-based health-insurance exchanges without citizen or legislative approval. (For those unfamiliar with the term “exchange,” it’s basically an Internet-based insurance market—like Expedia for health insurance.) So what impact will it have on this legislative session? “I don’t think Prop. E will have any real impact, although I’m sure it will be talked about a lot,” says Sidney Watson, a law professor with SLU’s Center for Health Law Studies. As of early December, approximately half the states were working toward state or partnership exchanges. And Missouri? It seemed to be taking a wait-and-see approach.
Sidebars by Jeannette Cooperman and Jarrett Medlin
