Judge blocks license suspensions of poor due to unpaid fines
FLINT, Mich. (AP) — A federal judge is blocking the state of Michigan from suspending driver’s licenses of people who say they can’t afford to pay traffic fines.
U.S. District Judge Linda Parker on Thursday issued a preliminary injunction, writing that there’s “a strong likelihood” that those who sued will show that the law violates the right to due process.
Secretary of state spokesman Fred Woodhams says in an email the office is reviewing the judge’s opinion and believes Michigan’s traffic safety laws “are equally applied to all drivers.”
The lawsuit filed by Equal Justice Under Law, a civil rights group, accuses the secretary of state of running a “wealth-based” scheme in which people too poor to pay fines are having licenses suspended.
Arguments are expected later on whether to permanently block the practice.
ABA website updates data on law school admissions, tuition and other matters
Information about admissions and other matters reported by American Bar Association-approved law schools to the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and required to be made public under Standard 509 of the Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools is now publicly available.
The material is collected by the section, which requires law schools each year to disclose data and information covering matters of interest to potential law students and others with an interest in legal education, including admissions and enrollments, tuition and living costs, financial aid, curricular information, faculty demographics, employment outcomes, bar passage and other areas. The data can be easily searched and sorted, allowing for school-by-school comparisons and analysis and should be useful to prospective law students, pre-law advisors, media outlets and others who study and write about legal education.
The spreadsheets, explanatory information and the ABA’s database of Standard 509 reports are available at www.abarequireddisclosures.org. Some of this information has been collected and summarized in the News and Announcement listings on the section’s website and in its Legal Education Statistics section. The section’s 509 available reports go back only to 2011 although other historical statistics are available through the statistics link. There are several changes to the reports this year, and those changes are summarized here.
Employment outcomes and, for the first time this year, bar passage outcomes, are reported in separate questionnaires. The section expects bar passage data to be available in March 2018. Employment outcomes, reporting employment for the class of 2017 as of 10 months following graduation, should be available in April.
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