In 2008, Britney Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, established a conservatorship for the famous pop star after concerns that her mental health was deteriorating.  A conservatorship is a legal arrangement in which the court appoints a “conservator”—which can be an individual or an organization—to manage the affairs of the “ward,” an individual who the court finds can no longer manage his or her own affairs.  In Britney’s case, the court appointed her father as conservator to manage Britney’s estate and physical well-being and L.A. attorney Andrew Wallet as co‑conservator to assist in managing her finances. Britney’s conservatorship largely stayed out of the headlines until April 2019, when the #FreeBritney movement was…

James Brown, who died in 2006, left a will most notable for seeking to establish a charity that could distribute millions of dollars via education scholarships to poor and underprivileged children in South Carolina and Georgia, with his family largely left out of the estate plan.  A major issue regarding the distribution of Brown’s estate was his children and grandchildren’s desire to share in the proceeds of Brown’s songwriting copyrights.  Also at issue was the value of Brown’s estate (estimated by some at up to $100 million) and the validity of Brown’s marriage to backup singer Tommie Rae Hynie, who acted as Brown’s widow following his death, until the Supreme…

On June 24, 2021, part of a 12-story beachfront condo building tragically collapsed in Surfside, Florida, sending apartments to the ground below and trapping many residents in the rubble.  As of July 13, 2021, the death toll reached 95 after the recovery of another victim, with 85 of those victims now identified, and 14 more potential victims yet to be pulled from the wreckage. Following the collapse, a report surfaced regarding a previous inspection of the condo building that flagged major structural issues almost three years before the collapse, citing “design flaws and failing waterproofing that would lead to ‘exponential damage.’”  The report specifically cited the areas underneath planters and…

Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple, Inc., was sued by a Connecticut business professor for allegedly stealing the business idea for Woz U, a technology school established to “help create the innovators of tomorrow and narrow the technology skills gap in the U.S. by working with Learners, Higher Education Institutions and Corporations.”  In the lawsuit, Ralph Reilly accused Wozniak of theft of intellectual property and copyright infringement, demanding $1 million in compensation.  Reilly claims he revealed the idea for the technology school to Wozniak in 2010 and asked Wozniak if the school could bear his name.  According to Woznick, however, Reilly was merely a fan Wozniak met briefly during a…

On June 23, 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Pennsylvania high school violated a student’s First Amendment rights upon punishing her for using profane language on social media that criticized the school. From NPR: At issue in the case was a series of F-bombs issued in 2017 on Snapchat by Brandi Levy, then a 14-year-old cheerleader who failed to win a promotion from the junior varsity to the varsity cheerleading team at her Pennsylvania school. “I was really upset and frustrated at everything,” she said in an interview with NPR in April.  So she posted a photo of herself and a friend flipping the bird…