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It’s a crime, and it deserves time. A federal appeals court has affirmed a judge’s three year prison sentence for Jordan Clarence Rogers, who repeatedly pointed a laser at a Kansas City police helicopter. Doing so temporarily blinded the pilot. Now it’s sent Rogers to federal prison. Lasers in the eye are a serious problem for aviation. It’s a fast way to cause serious, debilitating injuries to pilots, and puts an aircraft (and everyone inside or under it) in jeopardy....

So you want to be Taylor Swift and you wish you could live her life. Well, you probably can’t but you can peek at how the young superstar is living by taking a tour of her $25 million mansion. She shared her home and her thoughts with Vogue and now we all know that she advises getting a good lawyer and that she considers herself “a national lightning-rod for slut shaming....

The U.S. Department of Education has issued ratings on each state’s implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), as part of the on-going efforts to improve results for children with disabilities. According to the ratings, only nine states fully meet the IDEA’s requirements. (Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming). The IDEA guarantees the right to a “free and appropriate education” to students with disabilities, and provides federal funding to states and local school districts to help pay the costs of special education and related services such as speech and language therapy and physical therapy....

As we have noted before, the right to free speech has its limits. Threats, obscenity, and defamation can all be illegal. But what about disparaging remarks or racial slurs? And what about government sanction of that speech? The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a disparagement clause, allowing it to deny trademark applications that “may disparage … persons, living or dead … or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” But the Supreme Court today ruled the disparagement clause violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, a ruling that could have an enormous impact the limits of free speech in trademark cases....

A Taco Bell ad caused beef with 50 Cent. And we all know that having beef with 50 Cent never pays off. Bloomberg reports that the fast food chain recently settled a lawsuit by the infamous hip hop artist which claimed that Taco Bell used his persona and trademark to promote its new value menu. The settlement between the hip hop artist formally known as Curtis Jackson and the chain was made official by Judge Naomi Buckwald on Nov....

A federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted seven people on terrorism charges, alleging that North Carolina resident Daniel Boyd is a veteran of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan who, along with six others (including, apparently, two of Boyd’s children), conspired to commit violent jihad in support of terrorism, by murdering, kidnapping, maiming and injuring people. According to federal prosecutors, Boyd also conspired with other North Carolina residents to travel to the Gaza Strip in 2007 and introduce his son Zakariya to people in Gaza “who also believed that violent jihad is a personal obligation on the part of every good Muslim....

A judge out of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued an order to the state’s prisons to cool down the institutions to 88 degrees. Quoting the great Russian social fiction author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Judge Keith Ellison explained: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Entering a Texas prison, especially during the Summer, might not be much different than entering a sauna....

It’s that time of year again. No, not election season, but the time when the Top 10 Most Stolen Cars of 2010 list is released. Is your car on it? Let’s find out. The Highway Loss Data Institute collects and studies insurance data that shows the “human and economic losses resulting from the ownership and operation of different types of vehicles.” The Institute’s website lists which vehicles are this year’s most stolen cars....

School bomb threats can cause real panic even if the threat is a hoax, and the perpetrators can face real legal consequences. A bomb scare suspect at Harvard University, 20-year-old student Eldo Kim, found that out the hard way when the FBI arrested him Monday after setting the entire college campus on alert, reports Boston Magazine. Like many others who have made school bomb threats, Kim could face serious punishment if convicted....

Requirements under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Law will be relaxed for certain states, allowing them to differentiate between schools with chronic underperformance problems and those that are only lagging slightly, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced this week. The Department of Education states that the new “differentiated accountability” model “will allow states to target resources and interventions to those schools most in need of intensive interventions and significant reform....

Is the health care law constitutional? Though it’s far from a definitive answer, in the first of three appellate court decisions expected this year, the 6th Circuit ruled on Wednesday in favor of last year’s health care reform bill, finding that Congress does have the authority to mandate that citizens purchase insurance. As all of these cases do, it all came down to the Commerce Clause. Under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, Congress has the authority to regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce....

Last-minute deals and free shipping are leading many people to shop online this holiday season – even if those gifts won’t be arriving in time for Christmas. Of course shopping online isn’t without its hazards. Shoppers rarely read click-through agreements which are legally binding, and may fail to read the fine print about shipping or availability. But in general you can get everything on your list without having to set foot in a store....

How has Twitter gotten celebrities in trouble? Let us count the ways… Over the years, Twitter has become the unofficial medium for celebrities to air their (bad) news – and for all of us non-celebrities to gawk, point, and shake our collective heads at the stars’ all-too-human predicaments. So in honor of Twitter’s eighth birthday, here are eight memorable ways celebrities have landed in hot water over what they shared on Twitter:...

It may seem silly to ask a spy to register as a spy. Their operations after that point wouldn’t be so covert, would they? But under federal law, acting as a foreign agent without first telling the Attorney General can get you 10 years in prison. Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina is hoping a new plea agreement can lessen that possible penalty. Butina has been charged with working in the U....

Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of the bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love, wrote a sad note to fans on social media last week. Her love story with the man in that book has reached its conclusion, and the epilogue is now being written in the form of a divorce. Gilbert said she felt forced to share the intimate detail because this is what made her famous. Eat, Pray, Love is the account of a divorced woman traveling the world in search of meaning....

In Illinois man has filed a class action suit against two companies at the center of the auto warrranty robo-calling harassment which has drawn attention from federal and state governments. While a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) suit involved the millions of people robo-called despite being on the Do Not Call Registry, this suit involves what actually happens if you buy one of the warranty policies. Spoiler alert: the policies in addition to the sales tactics appear to have some problems....

Two years ago, as fourteen wildfires engulfed almost 250,000 acres in California during a historic drought, we wondered whether prison inmates should really be making up 30 percent of the firefighting force in the Golden State. This week, after 41 fatalities and almost 150,000 scorched acres in Napa, Sonoma, and Yuba counties, the question isn’t so much whether inmates should be fighting forest fires, but whether they should be paid more to do so....

What happens when you mess with viewers of the World Series? They file a class action lawsuit for nearly a half billion dollars. And who can blame them? This is America. I think it’s in the Constitution that you have to show the World Series. Or the Bill of Rights or something. Last night approximately 3 million Cablevision subscribers were unable to see the World Series because of a dispute between Cablevision and News Corp....

When it comes to child custody disputes, courts are generally going to be most concerned with what is in the best interests of the children. This usually includes figuring out which parent will provide a better, or more stable, household. When it comes to celebrity child custody disputes, sometimes how a celebrity publicly portrays themselves can have an impact on a court’s best interests inquiry. This is becoming rather clear in the recent Alex Jones child custody matter....

A Philadelphia man was convicted of unauthorized use of credit cards and identity theft in a string of Connecticut movie theater thefts. Anthony Johnson would purchase movie tickets to popular chick flicks. The 49-year-old man would then watch the women in the theater and see how they stored their pocketbooks, reports the Hartford Courant. When the movie began, Johnson would start working. He would slither up, down, and in between the movie theater seats stealing the women’s pocketbooks....