The Substantially Similar Weblog

The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the White House’s appeal in Walters v. Conant, a case Altshuler, Berzon (the firm I’m currently working for) has been working on for several years. The case involved the question of whether the federal government can punish doctors for recommending or discussing marijuana with their patients. The Supreme Court’s denial of cert means that the Ninth Circuit opinion stands, upholding a permanent injunction preventing the federal government from punishing physicians where the basis of the punishment is solely the physician’s professional recommendation of the use of medical marijuana. This is a major victory for the medical marijuana movement here in California and elsewhere.

I’ve started using blosxom to generate this weblog, rather than my own home-spun code. I considered making the transition invisible by keeping an identical layout, but the calendar looks better on the right. I’ve also spruced up the stylesheet a bit. I’ll be working in more stuff over the next few weeks, but most of the archives from the old weblog should already be here.

Immediately visible improvements include an RSS feed for those of you who prefer to read this weblog through an aggregator, as well as the ability to comment on individual posts.