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New Jersey's Third Medicinal Marijuana Dispensary To Open December 4, 2013 in Woodbridge

Per The Star Ledger:

"New Jersey's third medical marijuana dispensary, located in Woodbridge, is expected to open on Dec. 4, according to a company spokesman.

"The state Department of Health announced today it issued a final permit allowing Garden State Dispensary to open whenever it is ready.

"Between today and Dec. 3, Garden State's staff will be testing the security, computer and sales systems to make sure they work, said Yale Galanter, a Florida attorney and a spokesman for the dispensary."

***

"The indoor growing facility and sales office is located on Route 1 North near Routes 35 and 9 in a building that housed a Sixth Avenue electronics store. The parking lot is now paved and signs are posted, Galanter said."

Full article after the jump...

New Jersey Senate Unanimously Approves Faustino Fernandez-Vina To New Jersey Supreme Court

Per The NJ Law Journal:

"The New Jersey Senate on Monday unanimously approved the appointment of Faustino Fernandez-Vina to the state Supreme Court.
Fernandez-Vina, 61, a Republican from southern New Jersey, will be sworn in on Tuesday and begin hearing oral arguments that day.

"He fills the seat vacated Oct. 26 by Justice Helen Hoens, also of the GOP, thereby keeping the court’s political balance.

"A native of Cuba who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, Fernandez-Vina will be the second Hispanic justice on the state’s high court."

Full article after the jump...

From The Wayback Machine - Justice Clifford Eviscerates Footnotes (IN RE OPINION 662 OF THE ACPE - 133 N.J. 32 (1993))

From In re OPINION 662 OF the ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON PROFESSIONAL ETHICS.

Argued March 16, 1993.
Decided July 8, 1993.

CLIFFORD, J., concurring.


The Court's otherwise-impeccable opinion relegates to footnote status an important observation. Sounding an entirely appropriate note of caution, the Court expresses doubt about the proposition, floated by the Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics, that a government attorney's involvement in the drafting of an ordinance or statute or crime-prevention program will always disqualify that attorney from participating in a proceeding for the enforcement thereof. Ante at 29-30, 626 A.2d at 1088 & n. 2. I share the Court's doubt, but I deplore the use of a footnote to express it.

In fact, I deplore resort to footnotes not only in this case in particular but in judicial opinions generally. They distract. They cause the reader to drop the eyes; to absorb what is usually a monumental piece of irrelevancy or pseudo-scholarship but is sometimes-as here-a significant pronouncement that rightly belongs in the text; and then to return, without skipping a beat, to the point of departure on the upper part of the page. The whole irritating process points up the soundness of John Barrymore's observation that “[reading footnotes is] like having to run downstairs to answer the doorbell during the first night of the honeymoon,” quoted in Norrie Epstein, The Friendly Shakespeare 75 (1992).

And so the footnote in the Court's opinion represents yet another setback in my woefully-ineffectual campaign to abolish footnotes from our opinions. Of course, an exception to that hard-and-fast rule crops up occasionally, as illustrated by footnote 1 of Judge Kozinski's recent opinion for the Ninth Circuit in United States v. Snider, 976 F.2d 1249, 1250 (1992), which reads as follows:

1 We do not (except in the caption) follow the appellant's counsel's interesting practice of writing the names of the people involved in CAPITAL LETTERS. Neither do we follow the appellee's counsel's practice of writing appellant's name in BOLD-FACED CAPITAL LETTERS. Nor do we intend to write all numbers both as text and numerals, as in “eleven (11) loose teeth, two (2) of which were shattered[;] [m]oreover, her jaw was broken in three (3) places.” Appellee's Brief at 7. Finally, we will also not

“set off important text”

by putting it on

“separate lines”

and enclosing it in

“quotation marks.”

See id. at 10. While we realize counsel had only our welfare in mind in engaging in these creative practices, we assure them that we would have paid no less attention to their briefs had they been more conventionally written.

Subject to the foregoing observations I join the Court's opinion.

In re Opinion 662 of Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics 133 N.J. 22, 32-33 (1993).

Bergen County Priest Defrocked By Consent Judgment After Violation of Probation - State v. Fugee

Per NorthJersey.com:

"In a sweeping agreement that legal experts said is unprecedented in its scope, the Bergen County prosecutor announced Friday that he has taken over the job of monitoring a former Wyckoff associate pastor who confessed to fondling a 13-year-old boy because he does not trust church officials to watch him.


"The prosecutor, John L. Molinelli, said law enforcement authorities “no longer have confidence” in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark to abide by a 2007 agreement that barred the Rev. Michael Fugee from working with children. He also pointed to recent statements by Archbishop John J. Myers, who said the church is not equipped to monitor priests and never should have signed the agreement.


"In exchange for prosecutors dropping a criminal charge of violating a court order, Fugee admitted to violating the agreement by going on youth retreats and hearing children’s confessions, according to a consent order filed on Nov. 1 in Superior Court in Hackensack.


"He also agreed to be defrocked, a process known as laicization that removes him from the supervision of church officials and permanently strips him of priestly authority. And he acknowledged that he was telling the truth when he confessed to fondling a 13-year-old parishioner of the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary years ago. He previously alleged that his confession was coerced."

More, including the consent order, after the jump...