Happy Leap Day! Catch up on some of last week’s legal news and miscellany:

• He’s crossed the threshold: Justice Thomas hasn’t asked a question during arguments for a decade (MSNBC)
• Since she clerked for Thurgood Marshall while the Supreme Court sat with only 8 justices, Justice Kagan is the only current justice to know what that’s like. Will the experience give her any special insights? (Bloomberg BNA)
• The best original screenplay award went to Spotlight last night. Will the statuette suffer the same legal odyssey Orson Welles’ did? (Above the Law)
• “The Department of Justice Has Taken an Interest in 50 Cent’s ‘Posing with Money’ Series on Instagram” (Dealbreaker)
• Why you could end up living on Greed Lane in Staten Island (City Lab)

This week’s Detours and Frolics really is a grab bag. Enjoy:

• Justice Scalia’s death has given advocates of Supreme Court term limits more fodder (Washington Post/Volokh Conspiracy)
• Apple is not happy with an order requiring them to unlock a phone at the request of the FBI (Al Jazeera)
• An 18-year-old in Florida had been treating patients at a sham clinic he created before he was caught in an examination of an undercover agent (Boing Boing)
• Here’s the story of a man who was kidnapped by crack-smoking, Dolly Parton-listening pirates (The Advertiser)
• And here are some screen captures of The Simpsons referencing the Supreme Court (Above the Law)

This week will be dominated by the news and implications of the passing of Justice Scalia. Here’s coverage from SCOTUSblog, which covers most of the salient questions.

Now, onto less weighty matters:

• My favorite copyright story of all time seems to be winding down: “Happy Birthday” is set to be declared in the public domain (Hollywood Reporter)
• Martin Shkreli is now dealing with a federal copyright suit surrounding that $2 million Wu-Tang album (WSJ Law Blog)
• A Chicago attorney and probably insane person ran 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days (WSJ Law Blog)
• The US Women’s National Soccer Team and US Soccer are duking it out over the existence of a CBA (Screamer)
• A fascinating read about an American lawyer in Afghanistan (Al Jazeera)

This week’s collection of legal news and miscellany is destined to be a classic:

• The FBI is investigating the Flint lead poisoning (The Atlantic)
• An Indian court ruled that women can be the head of a household (Jurist)
• It’s been nearly 10 years since Justice Thomas asked a question from the bench (NY Times)
• What’s the correlation between a justice’s birth order and her approach to jurisprudence? (SCOTUSblog)
• When Sean Penn’s character gets quoted back at him in an answer to a defamation claim (Above the Law)

Welcome to Detours and Frolics. We have some decent news on relatively grim topics this week (aside from the Arizona thing, which is this week’s outlier):

• The Supreme Court ruled that the ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders applies retroactively (The Atlantic)
• Arizona wants out of the Ninth Circuit (Office of the Arizona Governor)
• After last week’s note on Texas, Hawaii has joined the group of states that has determined that daily fantasy sports are illegal under state law (Deadspin)
• The founder of Bikram yoga, Bikram Chowdhury, must pay over $900,000 to a former employee over claims of sexual harassment and wrongful termination (LA Times)
• The “affluenza teen” is back from Mexico and residing in a juvenile detention facility for the time being (NPR)

After hibernating for a couple of months, Detours and Frolics is back with a collection of SCOTUS-heavy legal news and items of interest from the past week or so:

• When Ted Cruz clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist (NY Times)
• Robots are doing a pretty good job of figuring out who authors per curiam SCOTUS opinions (The Atlantic)
• This question is currently on the table: “Are rivers an important part of the national parks?” (SCOTUSblog)
• Hmmmmmm. 10% of college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court (CNN)
• Things are not going well for DraftKings and FanDuel, as Texas found daily fantasy sports illegal last week (ATL Redline)

This spring, a handful of the JMLS librarians will be teaching Advanced Legal Research. Taught by some of our very own legal research experts, this course will cover topics well beyond what you learned in LS I and LS II.

In this 14-week course, you will discover a world of resources that will prepare you for practice. It will meet on Thursdays from 10:00 to 11:50. Check out the course description (JD-057-1) for more information, and if you have any questions please feel free to email us at library@jmls.edu. Register now!

As the days get shorter and exams loom, let us now warm our brains at the hearth of recent legal news and miscellany:

• “Massive hack of 70 million prisoner phone calls indicates violations of attorney-client privilege” (The Intercept)
• The New York AG shut down FanDuel and DraftKings in the state (Deadspin)
• A man accused of planning the Lufthansa heist (you know, the one in Goodfellas) was acquitted (The Atlantic)
• A tribe of Santee Sioux in South Dakota burned its pot crop in fear of a federal raid (Al Jazeera)
• For all you Serial heads out there, Adnan’s case has been reopened (CNN)

A lot of things happened in the legal world last week. Here are some of them (plus some prison ramen):

• President Obama rejected construction of the Keystone pipeline (NY Times)
• A big week in marijuana: the Mexican Supreme Court decided that smoking pot is a basic human right, while Ohio voters rejected a bid to legalize the substance. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate to legalize across the country (Al Jazeera)
• Obamacare is heading back to the Supreme Court (WSJ Law Blog)
• The NCAA’s transfer rules for student athletes are under attack (ATL Redline)
• Ramen culture in prisons (NPR)