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Education Law

House committee drops information request about law clinics amid ‘ongoing negotiations’ with Northwestern

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 14, 2025, 10:59 am CDT

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Workforce has withdrawn its request for information on law clinics at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, citing “ongoing negotiations” with the university and an intent to pursue “other means of inquiry.”

The committee withdrew the request Thursday during an emergency hearing in federal court in Chicago, a day after two law professors filed a lawsuit challenging the request.

A letter filed with the court April 10 said the withdrawal was based on the committee’s “ongoing negotiations with Northwestern University” related to alleged antisemitism, Law360 reports.

“We expect to pursue other means of inquiry in coming weeks as part of Congress’ oversight authority under the U.S. Constitution,” the April 10 letter adds.

The committee had initially sought information in a March 27 letter that expressed concern about antisemitism and funding of “left-wing advocacy with its institutional resources,” raising “significant concerns about the university’s role as a steward of taxpayer dollars.”

The suit alleged that the information request violated two clinical law professors’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech and association and their right to petition for redress of grievances. The suit also alleged retaliation for expression of First Amendment rights and violation of their clients’ Fifth Amendment and Sixth Amendment rights.

“Here, defendants threaten federal funding to Northwestern based on the viewpoints and associations of plaintiffs and their clients,” the suit said. “Defendants are leveraging funding to regulate speech on the basis of viewpoint and content.”

The committee’s request for information from Northwestern University was one of five information requests sent to colleges March 27, according to a press release announcing the committee’s retreat.

The suit plaintiffs are Sheila A. Bedi and Lynn Cohn, who work with programs operating within Northwestern University’s Bluhm Legal Clinic. Bedi is the director of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, while Cohn is a clinical law professor at the Center on Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice.

Jon Yates, a Northwestern University spokesman, previously said Bedi’s civil rights clinic represents clients across the political and legal spectrum, and cases chosen by the clinic don’t necessarily reflect the views of the school.

Yates also said the school is collaborating with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law “to fight antisemitism.”

The case is Bedi v. U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Publications covering the dropped request, in addition to Law360, include Reuters and the Daily Northwestern.

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3. Meet the federal judge labeled ‘radical left…

Judiciary

Meet the federal judge labeled ‘radical left lunatic’ by Trump, derided by DOJ for ‘micromanaged’ request

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 20, 2025, 8:50 am CDT

A federal judge facing President Donald Trump’s ire because of his rulings on deportation authority was once a housemate with Brett Kavanaugh, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, at Yale Law School.

Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, 62, of the District of Columbia “has a history of bipartisan support,” the Washington Post reports, having been nominated to the District of Columbia Superior Court by a Republican president and to the federal court in Washington, D.C., by a Democratic president.

He also appears for speaking engagements at Yale with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, where they emphasize a commitment to rule of law, according to NPR.

But Boasberg is being targeted by Trump, who wrote on social media that the judge is a “radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached.

Boasberg is overseeing a lawsuit challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. Boasberg ordered the administration not to use the law for deportations and told Department of Justice lawyers Saturday that planes carrying the deportees should be turned around.

Three planes carrying 238 immigrants reached their destination in El Salvador in Central America, the New York Times reports. Boasberg gave the administration a Wednesday deadline to provide details on the flights, which was met with a government request for a stay that said the judge’s quest for information was a “micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expedition,” NBC News reports.

“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the executive branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the DOJ said.

In a March 19 order, Boasberg agreed to provide the government an extra day to decide whether to invoke the state secrets privilege, “although their grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive.” Rather than engaging in a fishing expedition, he said, he was seeking information “to determine if the government deliberately flouted” his orders.

Boasberg grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, according to the New York Times.

He attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he played basketball and also obtained a master’s degree in history from the University of Oxford. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1990.

After graduation, Boasberg worked as a law clerk for a federal appeals judge, as an associate at two law firms, and as a homicide prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. He was appointed to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2002 by former President George W. Bush and to the federal bench in 2011 by former President Barack Obama. He also served a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

On the bench, Boasberg “is something of a stickler for footnote brevity,” according to a prior ABA Journal story. He has tossed briefs in several suits for violating a local court ruling banning excessive footnotes.

He is also known “for his booming baritone voice and for peppering legal opinions with colorful language and pop culture references,” according to Reuters. In one opinion, Boasberg “cited a Star Trek reference to the Borg catchphrase ‘Resistance is futile,’” the article reports.

He has also been involved in other cases involving issues of importance to Trump.

“In his 14 years on the federal bench,” the Associated Press reports, Boasberg “has resolved secret grand jury disputes that arose during the special counsel investigations into Trump, oversaw improvements after the Trump-Russia investigation in how the Justice Department conducts national security surveillance, and handled his share of sentencings for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

One of the rioters called Boasberg a “clown” and a “fraud” during a court hearing. Boasberg “calmly listened,” according to the AP.

The deportation suit is J.G.G. v. Trump.

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Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have hit back at Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd, for successfully motioning to get tests done on heart and fluid samples on file from Floyd’s autopsy, saying “it defies belief” that he’d ask.

“No legal basis exists for Defendant’s discovery requests,” prosecutors charged Tuesday in a motion to reconsider after U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson granted Chauvin’s legal team access to the samples a day earlier. “It defies belief that, if Defendant had been aware of a weaker medical defense theory than the one already rejected by his state jury, he would have chosen trial again, in the face of overwhelming evidence and a Guidelines sentence of life.”

Chauvin, 48, is looking to run tests on Floyd’s heart and fluid samples to see if it was a heart condition that ultimately led to his death and not Chauvin’s knee being on Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, per prosecutors. His lawyers believe Floyd may have died due to a “catecholamine crisis when his paraganglioma secreted excessive levels of catecholamines,” according to the discovery motion filed by them on Dec. 13, with a “pulmonary edema” possibly being caused by Takotsubo’s myocarditis, which is described by Chauvin’s legal team as a type of a heart attack or acute heart failure.

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3. Lawyer accused of stealing over $31K from…

Criminal Justice

Lawyer accused of stealing over $31K from jailed woman after she signed power of attorney at his request

By Debra Cassens Weiss

November 13, 2024, 9:51 am CST

A lawyer in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, has been accused of stealing more than $31,000 from an imprisoned woman awaiting a competency hearing after she agreed to sign an agreement giving power of attorney to his employee.

Lawyer John Allen Roth, 69, of Pennsylvania is accused of using the stolen money to support his gambling habit, according to a Nov. 7 press release.

TribLive (here and here) and WJAC-TV are among the publications with coverage.

Roth has been charged with nine felonies, including theft, financial exploitation, deceptive business practices and receiving stolen property.

In a preliminary arraignment last week, Roth asked to be released without cash bail.

Roth said he was struggling financially after losing clients because of a cancer diagnosis, according to TribLive’s coverage.

“I don’t have money to be able to post anything at all, I don’t even have $1,000 to post,” he said. “Cancer has ruined my life, and it has made it impossible for me to even make a living.”

Pennsylvania Judge Chris Flanigan set bail at $250,000. Roth has since sought a bail reduction and a venue transfer from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

The 70-year-old jailed woman told detectives that Roth visited her in prison and offered to represent her for $2,500, even though she already had a lawyer. He returned a few days later and allegedly asked the woman to sign the power of attorney. The woman signed the form in March, according to the press release.

Fourteen withdrawals ranging from $100 to $5,000 were made from the jailed woman’s account, court records indicate.

Roth’s “Player’s Club” account at the Live! Casino indicated that he made more than $382,000 in transactions at the casino from April to September, according to the press release.

The employee with power of attorney sometimes accompanied Roth to the casino, she told investigators. She is also facing charges in the case.

Roth was disciplined in 2016, receiving a public reprimand for alleged conflicts of interest in two cases. In one, Roth filed a divorce case against a client he was representing in a civil matter, the reprimand said.

In another, Roth filed a bankruptcy for a woman, even though he represented her husband in their divorce case. The husband was listed as a co-debtor for various creditors, the reprimand said.

A certain level of mystery has been injected into a long-running lawsuit between former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Hunter Biden in a flurry of back-and-forth motions filed on Friday. Still, the animus in the case is clear.

The precise nature of the latest legal dispute is necessarily being kept under wraps because of how the motions practice occurred.

Attorneys for the presidential son filed an ex parte motion “for an Order Granting Sanctions Against Defendant and/or an Adverse Inference Instruction” under seal along with 26 exhibits.

The businessman’s attorney quickly fired back to protest the request and the approach taken by the plaintiff in an opposition motion.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered Rudy Giuliani to appear for an in-person hearing next month after the two Georgia election workers he defamed requested he be held in contempt of court for allegedly repeating the lies about the 2020 election that resulted in a $148 million judgment against the former New York City mayor.

The motion for civil contempt was filed Wednesday morning after Giuliani made several pleas last week for public donations, saying he couldn’t afford to feed himself as a result of debt he owes to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss.

The presiding judge in Georgia’s election interference case over the 2020 presidential election has rejected Rudy Giuliani’s request for more time to file pretrial motions.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee on Friday denied the former New York City Mayor’s motion for an “indefinite extension” of the court’s motions deadline, reasoning that his attorneys failed to provide any reason as to why they had been unable to get through the discovery materials provided in the case.

“The Defendant moves for an indefinite extension of the January 8th motions deadline citing
his incomplete review of voluminous discovery,” McAfee wrote in the 1-page order. “Defendant does not articulate exactly what discovery must still be reviewed, or why the review has not been completed in the approximately four months that have passed since arraignment.”

The presiding judge also took aim at Giuliani’s counsel, alleging that they made a false claim about the previously filed motion in their request for an extension.

“While defendant claims to have filed ‘many’ motions concerning discovery, none appear on the docket, McAfee wrote. “Extensions are only considered upon filing of a particularized motion containing a detailed, fact-based explanation of the need for the extension including the amount of time needed. The motion is DENIED. All deadlines remain in place.”

Giuliani’s 14 co-defendants in the case include high-profile names such as former President Donald Trump, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and “coup memo” author John Eastman. They have all entered pleas of not guilty.

The Judicial Branch updated its FY 2024 funding request to Congress by nearly $184 million as part of the regular budget process. But it continued to voice concerns about proposed appropriation levels that are too low to preserve federal courts’ ability “to administer justice effectively and efficiently.”

In March, the Judiciary requested $9.14 billion for FY 2024, an 8 percent increase over FY 2023. It now is seeking $8.95 billion, a 5.8 percent increase.

“Many courts and federal defender offices scaled back on critically needed hiring and other investments in FY 2023 because of the significant uncertainty about their ability to sustain those investments in FY 2024,” the Judicial Branch noted in a Nov. 8 letter (pdf) from Judge Amy St. Eve, chair of the Judicial Conference Budget Committee, and Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf, secretary of the Conference and director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. This spending restraint helped the Judicial Branch to reduce its budget request pending in Congress.

Even with the lower funding request, the House of Representatives’ FY 2024 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill (H.R. 4664) falls $270 million short of the Judicial Branch’s needs, while the Senate’s version of the bill (S. 2309) would leave a $387 million gap. The House and Senate funding proposals are inadequate to offset inflationary pressures, or to properly invest in IT and courthouse security, the judges wrote in a letter of appeal to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and subcommittees on Financial Services and General Government.

“A failure to adequately fund these basic costs will erode the branch’s ability to address its constitutional and statutory workload and support a strong judicial system that protects the rights and liberties of its citizens,” the judges wrote.

Without additional funding, the letter predicted staff reductions in clerk of court offices, probation and pretrial offices, and federal defender organizations.

“These shortfalls have significant real-world effects,” the judges wrote. “Without sufficient staffing, the Judiciary will be unable to … ensure court-appointed counsel for all eligible defendants, or properly supervise the thousands of additional incarcerated individuals who are eligible to be released in FY 2024 due to recent changes in the sentencing guidelines.” Judge St. Eve and Judge Mauskopf warned of similar impacts in a July 28, 2023 letter (pdf).

The Nov. 8 letter identified several especially pressing needs, even after the Judiciary scaled back its funding request:

• Salaries. A 5.2 percent pay increase has been proposed for all civilian federal employees effective January 2024. For the Judiciary, which has more than 30,000 employees, this would increase personnel costs by $192 million. At the current proposed appropriations, funding a significant salary increase would come at the cost of other priorities.
   
• Defender Services. A hiring freeze already is in effect in federal defender offices (FDOs), and both the House and Senate bills would require further downsizing of defender staff. “These on-board staffing losses would come at a time when the federal defender staffing formula calculates that FDOs need significant new staff to adequately address caseload and workload requirements.”  

  If the shortfall were instead applied to payments to private attorneys appointed by courts to represent eligible defendants, those payments would have to be suspended as early as July 23, 2024, well short of the Sept. 30, 2024 end of the fiscal year.
   

• IT Security and Modernization. The Judiciary is seeking funding to meet information technology (IT) requirements in the courts, including cybersecurity needs and broader IT modernization efforts, and the additional staff needed to execute and oversee these programs. 

  “We continue to need significant new investments to address an increasingly complex security threat environment,” the Nov. 8 letter said, including “the virtual security of our information technology networks and systems, and to mitigate the effects of aging and/or obsolete IT infrastructure.” At the House and Senate levels, the Judiciary would have to reduce planned spending on these activities by 15 percent.
   

• Judicial Security. The appeal level will allow for hiring of additional security officers, replacement of aging courthouse screening equipment, and continued expansion of the Judiciary’s Vulnerability Management Program to assist judges with the removal of their personally identifiable information from websites and online databases. This was authorized by the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which was enacted in December 2022. The House bill would essentially fully fund FY 2024 courthouse security requirements; the Senate level would require deferring $33 million in security spending.

The letter acknowledged the larger fiscal challenges facing the entire federal government, but it said the Judiciary’s needs require attention.  

“We understand that any request for increased funds puts significant pressure on the subcommittees when total available resources are being held constant or reduced,” Judges St. Eve and Mauskopf wrote. “At the same time, it is the duty of the Conference to advocate vigorously for the funds required to administer justice effectively and efficiently, consistent with our constitutional and statutory responsibilities.”