Municipal & Local Govt law

The Hawaii Attorney General today issued a statement responding to the recently-announced changes in the Judicial Selection Commission Rules, whereby the Commission said that from here forward, it would publicly disclose the names on the list of judicial nominees at the same time it transmits those lists to the “appointing authorities” (governors and Chief Justices).

We’ve been kind of busy in the last few days with a couple of appellate briefs, so haven’t had a lot of time to post up the latest cases and articles of interest. But here’s what we are reading today, in between brief writing:

In this press release issued yesterday, the Hawaii Judicial Selection Commission  announced it has amended its rules so that from now on, the JSC “will release the names of the nominees transmitted to the Governor or Chief Justice at the time they are transmitted and will be permitted to disclose statistical and historical information

Here’s what’s going on:

  • The Honolulu Star-Advertiser‘s story on yesterday’s decision by Circuit Judge Karl Sakamoto in the Star-Advertiser’s lawsuit to compel Governor Abercrombie to cease keeping the names of judicial nominees from the public: Judge to gov: Make names public. We represent the plaintiff:

“We are extremely pleased,” said newspaper attorney

Filarsky v. Delia, No. 10-1018 (cert. granted Sep. 27, 2011) is not the typical case for this blog. It’s not a land use case, and involves a question of the immunities that lawyers may be entitled to claim in civil rights actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

But since section 1983 claims and defenses

In a ruling delivered today, Circuit Judge Karl Sakamoto ordered Governor Abercrombie to publicly release the list of names transmitted to the Governor by the Judicial Selection Commission earlier this year for the vacancy on the Court that was subsequently filled by Justice Sabrina McKenna. Star-Advertiser v. Abercrombie, No. 11-1-1871-08. We represent the newspaper

West Linn Corporate Park LLC v City of West Linn, No. 11-299 (petition for cert. filed Sep. 6, 2011), a petition we’ve been following that asked whether the nexus and “rough proportionality” tests for a regulatory taking in Nollan and Dolan are limited to government demands for land, has been denied.

California and

The big news in Hawaii this week is the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation international summit, currently underway in Honolulu. Waikiki is on lockdown as leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, including U.S. President Obama and a lower level functionary from “Chinese Taipei,” come to town for a confab on free trade and economic cooperation in the