Category: Legal Update

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) permanent labor certification (PERM) program requires employers to conduct specific recruiting activities to ensure that hiring a foreign worker will not displace qualified U.S. workers. The process includes placing PERM advertisements in printed newspapers. Specifically, the ads must be placed in “two different Sundays in the newspaper of general…
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Q. We sent a public records request to our county manager asking for copies of any records related to county requests for Attorney General opinions concerning land development regulations. The CM responded that the estimated cost to compile and produce the records would be $500 and asked if we wanted to proceed as submitted or…
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Q. Is there any sort of standard legal policy about deleting social media comments that range from untrue in some cases to hate speech in others? We would never want to impinge on freedom of speech, and in the past have only deleted comments that are outright hateful, racist or similar. But recently, our editorial…
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Q. I’m curious; when did it become the rule that the media can’t get crash reports until 10 days after the crash? I remember the delay for those who weren’t victims of the crash, but I thought there was an exception for the media. We had a horrific bicycles vs. pickup crash over the weekend…
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Q. We received a request from a lady to remove her name from the sheriff’s “jail report” i.e., list of arrests published in our digital newspaper. We did not run a story on her, and her mugshot is not in our newspaper. She is stating that by court order we must remove her name from…
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Q. We received a classified ad for an apartment rental: “1 bed, 1 bath apt for rent. Rent based on income. Women and children only need apply.” Is there an exception for apartments owned by domestic violence shelters that would allow us to run this discriminatory language? A. The Violence Against Women Act provides housing…
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Q. Do you have any legal concerns about accepting ads for CO2 powered pistols? A. To the extent such pistols could be considered “firearms,” which I don’t think is the case (see below), I am not aware of any statutes or cases which would prohibit the running of classified advertisements for firearms in a newspaper,…
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Q. I have a question for you regarding the Sunshine Law and whether a meeting involving governmental officials can be kept private or if it is public. It appears a town resident who is the wife of a major hotel operator in town is organizing a meeting, or roundtable discussion, at a different hotel regarding…
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Q. Question from a city-hall meeting regular: our city added a sign-in sheet in the first-floor lobby to attend council meetings and workshops, held in the council chambers on the second floor, a month or so ago. Today, the police required an ID to go upstairs to attend the workshop meeting. She was told she…
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Q. We have a young university student who has written an article about shark fishing. She has included screenshots from Instagram, most in positions not condoned in the industry or outright harmful to the shark. When we asked about them, she said some are from ‘fake accounts’. My guess is it isn’t up to us…
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