Legislative Immunity

It's official:  what differentiates us from chimpanzees is not our intelligence, our ability to deal with the abstract, or our ability to tell jokes. According to the decision of a five-member New York state appellate panel yesterday, "Unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, …

I did stop and and try to invoke legislative immunity, but the camera would have none of it. —State senator Steve King of Grand Junction, CO, a career police officer, said jokingly about a red-light-camera ticket he received in Denver. He voted against banning red-light cameras in Colorado's munici…

Update: May 27, 2011 (see below) Last week, I wrote about a temporary restraining order (TRO) placed on the publication of a Wisconsin bill that was allegedly passed in violation of the state's open meetings law. However, the court placing the TRO took four legislative leaders off the complaint on …

According to articles on the WKOW TV (Madison, WI)  website, this morning a Wisconsin judge placed a restraining order to stop a controversial budget repair bill from becoming law. The principal cause of action was a violation of the state's open meetings law. However, the names of four legislative…

Here's a curiosity relating to local official legislative immunity. According to an article in statehousenewsonline.com on Friday, Virginia state senator Chap Peterson sponsored a bill to give local officials in Virginia legislative immunity. The bill would have added the following provision to the…

I listened yesterday to the testimony of Kevin Powers, a member of the Nevada Legislative Counsel's office, to the House Committee considering the legislative immunity amendment I discussed in yesterday's blog post. He was very impressive, with all the facts and laws at his fingertips. But his defe…

The Nevada legislature is really going out of its way to make sure that its members, and no one else in the state, is protected by legislative immunity with respect to the state ethics commission. For a body that was afraid, without a court's blessing, to exclude its members from the state ethics c…

The Nevada legislative immunity appellate briefs have been filed, and they are worth reading for those interested in the intersection between government ethics enforcement and legislative immunity, an intersection where, in the last year, there have been a few collisions harmful to the cause of gov…