legal defense funds

(noun)

Legal defense funds provide funding for the legal defense for, or legal action against, individuals or groups related to their specific interests or target demographic.

Related Terms

Examples of legal defense funds in the following topics:

  • The Function of Interest Groups

    • Lobby groups work for a change to the law or the maintenance of a particular law and big businesses fund very considerable lobbying influence on legislators, for example in the U.S. and in the U.K. where lobbying first developed.
    • Legal defense funds provide funding for the legal defense for, or legal action against, individuals or groups related to their specific interests or target demographic.
    • This is often accompanied by one of the above types of advocacy groups filing Amicus curiae if the cause at stake serves the interests of both the legal defense fund and the other advocacy groups.
    • In cases such as public libraries, advocacy groups have been critical in lobbying for continued funding across the nation.

  • Interest Groups

    • Legal defense funds provide funding for the legal defense for, or legal action against, individuals or groups related to their specific interests or target demographic.

  • The Budgeting Process

    • Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.
    • Major categories of FY 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid ($802B or 23% of spending), Social Security ($768B or 22%), Defense Department ($670B or 19%), non-defense discretionary ($615B or 17%), other mandatory ($461B or 13%) and interest ($223B or 6%).
    • Social Security spending increased versus 2011 while Defense, Medicare and Medicaid spending fell.
    • Social Security and Medicare are sometimes called "entitlements," because people meeting relevant eligibility requirements are legally entitled to benefits, although most pay taxes into these programs throughout their working lives.
    • Non-defense discretionary spending is used to fund the executive departments (e.g., the Department of Education) and independent agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), although these do receive a smaller amount of mandatory funding as well.

  • Market Actors

    • Investors can include: pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, index funds, exchange-traded funds, and hedge funds.
    • The issuer is a legal entity that develops, registers, and sells securities for the purpose of financing its operations.
    • While there is no legal definition of mutual fund, the term is most commonly applied only to those collective investment vehicles that are regulated, available to the general public, and open-ended in nature.
    • Hedge funds are not considered a type of mutual fund.
    • A hedge fund is an fund that can undertake a wider range of investment and trading activities than other funds.

  • Models of Bureaucracy

    • The Department of Defense has historically competed to seek more funding than other federal departments.
    • Bureaucratization for Weber was the key part of the rational-legal authority.
    • Many aspects of modern public administration go back to him and a classic, hierarchically organised civil service of the Continental type is called "Weberian civil service". [98] As the most efficient and rational way of organising, bureaucratisation for Weber was the key part of the rational-legal authority and furthermore, he saw it as the key process in the ongoing rationalisation of the Western society.
    • The Department of Defense is allocated the highest level of budgetary resources among all Federal agencies, amounting to more than one half of the annual Federal discretionary budget.

  • The Shifting Boundary between Federal and State Authority

    • Another concern is the fact that on more than one occasion, the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from states that did not pass certain articles of legislation.
    • Any state that lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse, or both.
    • More recently, the issue of states' rights has come to a head when the Base Realignment Closure Commission (BRAC) recommended that Congress and the Department of Defense implement sweeping changes to the National Guard by consolidating some Guard installations and closing others.
    • After Pennsylvania won a federal lawsuit to block the deactivation of the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, defense and Congressional leaders chose to try to settle the remaining BRAC lawsuits out of court, reaching compromises with the plaintiff states.
    • Oregon, the Supreme Court ruled that the practice of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is legal.

  • Legal Advice and Protection

    • Corporations, for-profit or nonprofit, are almost the only entities that ever pay attention to complex legal issues in free software.
    • Individual developers often understand the nuances of various open source licenses, but they generally do not have the time or resources to competently handle legal issues themselves.
    • If your company has a legal department, it can help a project by assisting with trademark issues, copyright license ownership and compatibility questions, defense against patent trolls, etc.
    • If the project decides to organize formally, or to join an existing umbrella organization, your legal department can help with issues of corporate law, asset transfer, reviewing agreements, and other due diligence matters.
    • Some more concrete ideas of what sorts of legal help might be useful are discussed in Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents.

  • Making Policy

    • Examples of cabinet departments include the Department of Defense, State, and Justice.
    • Ideally, they bring in enough funds to be self-sustaining.
    • To help them make ends meet, Congress may give government corporations a legal monopoly over given services, provide subsidies, or both.

  • Marriage Equality and the Courts

    • Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court also ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 was unconstitutional because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
    • These decisions seem to allow legal challenges in all the states that persist in trying to block same-sex unions.
    • The outcome of the case was celebrated by gay rights advocates, who hoped that further legal advances might result as a consequence.
    • Department of Education ruled that schools receiving federal funds may not discriminate against transgender students, and a board within the Department of Health and Human Services decided that Medicare should cover sexual reassignment surgery.
    • Photo of gay rights advocates gathered on the steps of the United States Supreme Court building on the morning of June 26, 2013, hours before the court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act.

  • The Scopes Trial

    • John Thomas Scopes, the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925 was a landmark American legal case in which John Scopes was accused of violating the state's Butler Act by teaching evolution in a state-funded school.
    • The non-profit legal organization, whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States", financed a case to test the legality of the Butler Act in a court proceeding that would deliberately attract publicity to the issue.
    • Prominent attorney Clarence Darrow spoke in defense of Scopes by presenting the Modernist argument in favor of the Theory of Evolution.
    • By 1932, the ACLU gave up its legal strategy and the anti-evolutionary legislation was not challenged again until 1965.
    • Defense attorney Clarence Darrow, left, and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan argued the Scopes Trial in 1925, making opposing arguments regarding the teaching of evolution.