As noted earlier here and here, Tim Stanley and the folks over at Justia.com are developing some of the best and most useful legal search engines on the Web. I’ve been meaning to pass along a recent email from Tim, which introduces yet another cool tool:

“We have put online the Federal District Court case opinions and orders that are available using the opinion report in the Federal Courts’ ECF. These are updated daily. We have categorized the opinions by state, court, type of lawsuit and judge and combinations of judge and type of lawsuit. You can also subscribe to each of categories through RSS feeds to track a judge or court’s decisions on different issues. And we also give the cause of action for each case.
We are using Google’s hosted Business Custom Search Engine for the full text search. Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files that have images of scanned documents will be in most cases full text indexable and searchable. Like the OCR of Google’s Book Search. You will need to look at the cached copy to see the highlighted searched text though, and then find in the original PDF to be 100% that what you are reading is correct. Google should be doing a pretty good job of indexing and ocring these court decisions, although it may take a few days for a new document to show up in the index.
We have also noted on the federal district court case filing database when we have a judge’s opinion (you will see a little gavel. The case filings are at here.”

This Mary Floor/Harvey Rice-Chronicle article (related blog post here) reports tha U.S. District Judge Sam Kent of Galveston is taking a four month leave from his bench. Judge Kent, who runs a tight ship, was recently in the news as the judge in the lawsuit that Houston based Landry’s Restaurants, Inc filed and then settled with the holders of most of its bond debt. Interestingly, one of Landry’s attorneys in that case reportedly has advocated forum shopping for certain of his cases in the past. The Chronicle article clearly suggests that Judge Kent’s leave is not voluntary, but there is no suggestion that the leave has anything to do with the Landry’s case or any other case, for that matter. Such a leave is a bit unusual, though, so stay tuned.

Carrying too much cash is now probable cause of a crime?:

Anastasio Prieto of El Paso gave a state police officer at the weigh station permission to search the truck to see if it contained “needles or cash in excess of $10,000,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the federal lawsuit Thursday.
Prieto told the officer he didn’t have any needles but did have $23,700.
Officers took the money and turned it over to the DEA. DEA agents photographed and fingerprinted Prieto over his objections, then released him without charging him with anything.
Border Patrol agents searched his truck with drug-sniffing dogs, but found no evidence of illegal substances, the ACLU said. […]
DEA agents told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he’d have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales.
They told him the process probably would take a year, the ACLU said.

H’mm. I didn’t realize that one of the dangers of carrying a large amount of cash is now the federal government.

Jim Copland, the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, provides this particularly lucid analysis of the important legal and public policy issues involved in the pending Supreme Court case of Stoneridge Investment v. Scientific-Atlanta, which could seriously erode the longstanding Central Bank rule against holding financial institutions secondarily liable for damages in providing financing for a company that defrauds its investors:

Nothing in the securities laws as written enables private investors to file lawsuits over alleged frauds. Courts have inferred such ìprivate rights of actionî stemming from section 10(b)(5) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, but the Supreme Court limited such private suits to ìprimaryî violators in 1994 in a case called Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver. The court expressly declined to embrace liability for companies ìaiding and abettingî frauds that injured shareholders.
After Central Bank, Congress quickly jumped in to clarify that the Securities and Exchange Commission itself had authority over an entity that ìknowingly provides substantial assistance to anotherî in securities-related frauds. But Congress wisely decided not to extend such authority to private lawsuits.
If the Supreme Court decides to endorse such suits notwithstanding congressional inaction, the implications for U.S. competitiveness could be profound. Anyone doing business with a publicly listed American company would be subject to a potential lawsuit should that companyís stock price tank ó and would thus have to hire extra auditors and take out insurance policies to protect against such lawsuits. The disadvantages for listing on American stock market, already significant, would be that much more substantial.

And if you want an example of the absurdity of what would happen if the Central Bank rule is overturned or eroded, read this.