Lawyers Have Worked in Amazon-Style Conditions For Decades

Over the last several weeks, many have learned of the workplace experiences of white collar workers at Amazon. How they cry at their desks. How they are given little time off even when sick, or to recover from a health issue. That workers are expected to respond to e-mails they receive late into the night. Add to that the conditions of blue collar workers at Amazon warehouses, and one gets the distinct impression that Amazon may be a pretty bad place to work.

Supreme Court Exempts Lawyers From Part Of Money-Laundering Law

OTTAWA - Sections of the federal government's anti-terrorism and money laundering financing law are unconstitutional because they violate solicitor-client privilege, the Supreme Court of Canada declared Friday.

In a 7-0 ruling , the court carved out an exemption for lawyers from the federal government's 2000 law that targets money laundering and terrorist financing. The law still applies to other professions, such as financial institutions and accountants.

UK intelligence agencies spying on lawyers in sensitive security cases

The intelligence services have routinely been intercepting legally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients in sensitive security cases, according to internal MI5, MI6 and GCHQ documents.

The information obtained may even have been exploited unlawfully and used by the agencies in the fighting of court cases in which they themselves are involved, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has been told, resulting in miscarriages of justice.

N.S.A. Scandal: God Save Us From the Lawyers

As the repercussions of Edward Snowden’s leaks about domestic surveillance continue to be debated, law professors and lawyers for the Bush and Obama Administrations are out in force, claiming that the spying agencies have done nothing wrong and it’s all much ado about nothing.

In the Financial Times, Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations, argued that the National Security Agency, in sweeping up a big part of the nation’s phone records, was upholding the law rather than subverting it. At the influential Lawfare blog, Joel F. Brenner, a legal consultant who between 2006 and 2009 was the head of counterintelligence at the White House, trotted out similar arguments and claimed that the United States “has the most expensive, elaborate, and multi-tiered intelligence oversight apparatus of any nation on Earth.” On the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General in the Bush Administration, questioned whether there has even been a meaningful infringement of privacy, writing, “The claims of pervasive spying, even if sincere, appear not merely exaggerated, but downright irrational.”