The Illinois Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state’s noneconomic damage cap in a decision the medical community called a major setback for the state’s health care system…[Peter] Flowers said the blame for physicians’ high liability costs lies with the insurance industry, not the judicial system. Courts already have the power to reduce jury verdicts if they are deemed excessive, American Bar Assn. President Carolyn B. Lamm said in a statement. The organization filed a brief in the high court case.

If ever Carol Gaetjens becomes unconscious with no hope of awakening, even if she could live for years in that state, she says she wants her loved ones to discontinue all forms of artificial life support. But now there’s a catch for this churchgoing Catholic woman. U.S. bishops have decided that it is not permissible to remove a feeding tube from someone who is unconscious but not dying, except in a few circumstances. People in a persistent vegetative state, the bishops say, must be given food and water indefinitely by natural or artificial means as long as they are otherwise healthy. … Although medical institutions are legally bound to respect patients’ advance directives, exceptions exist for providers who object by reason of conscience or religious belief, said Charles Sabatino, head of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging.

Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is shattering any illusions that his 18 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would make him sympathetic to Wall Street’s effort to weaken derivatives legislation. … Fighting over words is important because a couple of vague ones can undermine the bill, Gensler said. ‘I’m always up there to persuade,’ he said. ‘In terms of the ultimate legislation, the detail really matters.’ ‘The more transparent a marketplace is, the more competitive it is,’ he said in a Jan. 29 speech to an American Bar Association conference in Naples, Florida. ‘And the more transparent a marketplace is, the lower the costs for hedgers, borrowers, and ultimately, their customers.’

. Harry Reid, D-Nev., criticized the American Bar Association on Thursday, saying it should ‘get a new life’ in how it rates prospective federal judges, after one of his choices got a mixed review. In remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Reid said the bar association’s ratings board puts too much weight on whether judicial nominees have prior bench experience and overlooks ‘real world’ qualifications. Reid expanded his criticism to include the Supreme Court, whose makeup, he said, consists of ‘people who have never seen the outside world.’ ‘I have asked President (Barack) Obama, ‘Let’s get somebody on the court that has not been a judge.’ They need to do more than thinking of themselves as these people who walk around in these robes in these fancy chambers.’ Reid was set off by the ABA’s rating of Las Vegas attorney Gloria Navarro, who also appeared before the Senate committee as his choice and Obama’s nominee to become a U.S. district judge in Nevada.

Grady M. Garrison, of counsel at Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz PC, recently was appointed to serve as co-chair of the Intellectual Property Litigation Subcommittee for the American Bar Association Litigation Section. Garrison concentrates his practice in intellectual property and franchise law. He has experience in trademark, copyright, franchising, antitrust and trade regulation issues, as well as related licensing, litigation and transactional matters. Garrison has represented large companies in breach of contract cases and infringement actions, and has authored and co-authored works on intellectual property law.

The American Bar Association announced this week that it’s cutting the cost of dues for solo practitioners, government lawyers, judges and attorneys working for nonprofits as part of an effort to respond to lawyers’ differing financial circumstances and the effects of the economic downturn. The ABA said in a press release Tuesday that its House of Delegates at its midyear meeting in Orlando, Fla., had approved a new dues structure that will reduce costs by 50 percent for solo practitioners and by 25 percent for the other lawyers. The changes will take effect in May. The organization is also creating new installment payment options that will be offered by August.

A judge’s race or gender can have a significant impact on the outcome of cases involving racial or sexual harassment allegations, two recent studies suggest, prompting questions from judges and scholars about exactly how those reports should be used and interpreted. Details on the two studies certainly raised eyebrows at a panel examining diversity on the federal bench, held Saturday at the American Bar Association 2010 Midyear Meeting in Orlando, Fla. Federal judges on the panel noted how surprised they were by how much of a difference race or gender could make in those types of cases. One recent study done by Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law examined the impact of a judge’s ethnicity on the outcome of cases in the area of workplace racial harassment.

Spurred by last year’s announcement that U.S. News and World Report magazine is planning to rank law firms the way it ranks law schools, the American Bar Association has decided to study the way such rankings are compiled. The ABA‘s House of Delegates passed a resolution calling for the study at a meeting Monday in Orlando. The final version of the resolution deleted language from the proposal specifically mentioning U.S. News and asking lawyers to consider whether the rankings promote the “core values” of the legal profession. U.S. News announced in July that it was partnering with the Best Lawyers survey of lawyers to create rankings for more than 3,000 U.S. law firms, set to be published this fall. The magazine, which has ranked U.S. law schools for years, plans two separate lists: the best firms and the best firms to work for.

For over a year, the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration and the law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP engaged in a comprehensive review of the current removal process. The law firm poured over hundreds of articles, reports, legislative materials, and other documents, and interviewed scores of participants in the system, including lawyers, judges, advocacy groups, and academics. This study led them to conclude what many immigrants, their families, and immigration lawyers and advocates already knew and what many others suspected: the removal system is severely flawed and fails to afford fair process to all noncitizens facing deportation from the United States. The study details many of the deficiencies in the current system and makes a strong case for systemic reform.

Asylum hearings are ‘like holding death penalty cases in traffic court.’ That’s what San Francisco immigration judge Dana Marks, who also serves as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told The New York Times, as part of an article discussing the American Bar Association’s call to Congress to create a new and independent court for immigration cases. Immigration courts suffer under an increasing backlog of cases, a by product of the increased effort of the Homeland Security department to identify illegal immigrants.

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates today voted to ask Congress to make it easier for federal judges to receive cost-of-living pay increases when other federal employees get them. Passage of the change would remove a continuing source of friction between judges and Congress. The ABA governing body met at the association’s midyear meeting in Orlando, Fla.

U.S. News & World Report’s decision to start ranking law firms along the lines of its much-maligned law school rankings has prompted the American Bar Association to investigate the magazine’s methods. The ABA House of Delegates narrowly approved a resolution on Monday during its midyear meeting to ‘examine efforts to publish a national, state, territorial and local ranking of law firms and law schools.’ Although the final resolution did not specifically name U.S. News, officials of the New York State Bar Association, which sponsored the resolution, acknowledged that the magazine was the catalyst for the move. He noted, however, that the inquiry will look at a range of attorney and law firm rankings – not just the one by U.S. News.