PSJD Public Interest News Digest – July 27, 2018
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives 
Hello there, interested public! Immigration and refugee issues continue to dominate the news this summer. Another noteworthy story is in the “Civil Rights” section, where reporting out of New Mexico looks at stalled efforts at reforming civil asset forfeiture in the state.
See you around,
Sam
Immigration & Refugee Law
- Bloomberg News profiled the contributions Lawyers for Good Government have made in recent weeks to addressing issues related to the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
- In Alexandria, VA, [t]he Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition, Legal Aid Justice Center, and Muslim Advocates announced they have “filed a class-action lawsuit…to challenge a new and fundamentally unfair policy that keeps immigrants detained after they win their cases, violating the basic tenets of due process.”
- In Tuscon, AZ, KVOA (a local news station) reported on the “whirlwind of confusion” surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts to meet the court-determined deadline for reuniting children and families separated by the administration’s border policies.
- In Texas, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) “received a $20 million donation from a Facebook fundraising campaign started in the wake of the separations.”
- In Milwaukee, WI, the Milwaukee Independent reported on the difficulties immigration lawyers in the state have meeting the current demand for their services.
- In Connecticut, Yale Law School and Connecticut Legal Services helped reunite two Central American children with their parents, in what Yale professor Muneer Ahmad says is the first challenge to the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border brought by children, rather than their parents.
Legal Technology
- In Vermont, the Associated Press reported on Norwich University’s decision to join a number of other colleges now offering undergraduates “income share agreements, in which colleges receive a percentage of the student’s future salary, in place of some student loans.”
Legal Technology
- In Montreal, QC, Lawyersdaily reported that “[t]he Cyberjustice Laboratory launched an Autonomy through Cyberjustice Technologies (ACT) research partnership in June 2018 that brings together 45 researchers and 42 industry partners in a six-year project [concerning] AI’s impact on conflict prevention, conflict resolution and governance and policy.”
- According to lawsitesblog.com, “[l]egal directory Avvo is shutting down its controversial…service that provides fixed-fee, limited-scope legal services through a network of attorneys.”
Civil Rights
- In New Mexico, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that three years after the state became the first in the country to ban civil forfeiture “the effort..appears stalled.”
Access to Justice – Civil
- According to Ability Magazine, a new report from the Global Initiative for ICTs (Information & Communication Technologies) “finds that people with disabilities lack fundamental access to the legal system…not just in developing countries but in developed ones as well.”