“We should encourage all the people who live here to get all the benefits of living here … and one of those is knowing English.” So said Idaho Representative Mack Shirley upon passage in the House of S. 1172, which will make English the official language of Idaho on July 1, 2007 (assuming, safely, […]

Today is the beginning of Sunshine Week, a US event started, run, and paid for by the newspaper industry to press for open government. Idahoans can find out how much they know about Idaho freedom of information and open meetings laws by taking a quiz in today’s Statesman. All Americans can take some […]

By the way, currently the Idaho Women’s Commission law guide is available in English and Spanish. No more, if S. 1172 (which has passed the Idaho Senate and is now on to the House) becomes law. This bill, which according to its sponsor is “not for shutting people out,” would require every state […]

Today is International Women’s Day. I’ve spent some of today puzzling over why the Idaho Women’s Commission is about to get its state appropriation slashed by 20% from last year. The governor’s request called for an increase in funding. Since minutes from JFAC (the Idaho legislature’s budget-setting committee) are not available online […]

Here’s an interesting insight on the status of the legal profession that I noticed today.  Percentage of in-house counsel who said in 2003 that they’d fire an outside law firm because of “personality issues”: just 16%.  Percentage in 2004: 37%.  Percentage in 2005: 48%!  That’s a tripling in just three years!

I’m living in the most popular country in the world, we learn today. The Montréal Gazette, though, reports that folks might be so enamored with Canada merely because they have no idea what in the hell it actually does.

Everyone once in a while, a poll will come out revealing how few Americans understand the rights guaranteed us by our Constitution.  Today, upon dusting off a 1975 American Bar Association handbook on law-related education, I finally found the survey results I’d suspected for a long time: “If the Constitution and the Bill of Rights […]

Members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, who have been physically blocking logging companies’ access to their lands since 2002, are in the midst of a 2,000 mile journey from their home in northwestern Ontario to confront Weyerhaeuser at its headquarters in Federal Way, WA. The blockade is the longest running in recorded Canadian […]

The overall quality of congresspeople’s and congressional committees’ websites is “disappointing” according to a new report from the Congressional Management Foundation. Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s website got a “Silver Mouse Award,” though. Still, for keeping track of the federal legislative branch I didn’t think anything could beat GovTrack—and then yesterday brought OpenCongress, and the […]

S. 1172 showed up in the Idaho Senate today. It is the second attempt to make English Idaho’s official language (S. 1469 in 2002, which died in committee, was the first). This year’s version, co-sponsored by 18 Republican members of Idaho’s 105-member legislature, would require all government meetings and transactions to be solely in […]