Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart violated the 1st Amendment rights of Backpage.com when he sent a letter to the executives of Mastercard and Visa pressuring them to refrain from processing credit card transactions between Backpage and its advertisers, ruled the 7th Circuit on November 30 in a sweeping free speech opinion by Circuit Judge Richard Posner. Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 20728, 2015 WL 7717221.
Wrote Posner, … <Read More>
New York Supreme Court Justice Anil C. Singh rejected a motion by an “image distributor” to dismiss a model’s lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the unauthorized publication of her picture in a public service advertisement placed in print media by the New York State Division of Human Rights to inform people living with HIV about legal protection from discrimination. The March 6 ruling was published in The New York Law Journal on March … <Read More>
A Colorado Administrative Law Judge ruled on December 6, 2013, that a bakery had violated the state’s public accommodations law when its owner refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay male couple on July 19, 2012.
Colorado does not have same-sex marriage, and only enacted a civil union law open to same-sex couples early in 2013. Back in 2012, however, Coloradans Charlie Craig and David Mullins planned to get married in Massachusetts and … <Read More>
On October 7, the first day of its October 2013 Term, the Supreme Court announced that it had denied petitions for certiorari in two pending LGBT-related cases, MacDonald v. Moose from the 4th Circuit and Dixon v. University of Toledo from the 6th Circuit.
In MacDonald v. Moose, 710 F.3d 154 (4th Cir. 2013), cert. denied sub nom Moose v. MacDonald, No. 12-1490, 2013 WL 3211338, the 4th Circuit … <Read More>