The Kentucky Family Organization suprisingly ranks top on the yahoo search engine. However, much of the information found there is unuseful, as it is outdated and misleading.

VIENNA, Austria – He’s now got a human name — Matthew Hiasl Pan — but he’s having trouble getting his day in court. Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria’s Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp’s behalf.

The association, which worries the shelter caring for the chimp might close, has been pressing to get Pan declared a “person” so a guardian can be appointed to look out for his interests and provide him with a home.

Group president Martin Balluch insists that Pan is “a being with interests” and accuses the Austrian judicial system of monkeying around.

“It is astounding how all the courts try to evade the question of personhood of a chimp as much as they can,” Balluch said.

A hearing date for the Supreme Court appeal was not immediately set.

The legal tussle began in February, when the animal shelter where Pan and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years filed for bankruptcy protection.

Activists want to ensure the apes don’t wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.

Their upkeep costs about euro4,800 (US$6,800) a month. Donors have offered to help, but there’s a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive personal gifts.

Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Pan, whose life expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But they contend that only personhood will give him the basic rights he needs to ensure he isn’t sold to someone outside Austria, where he’s now protected by strict animal cruelty laws.

In April, a district court judge rejected a British woman’s petition to be declared Pan’s legal guardian. That court ruled that the chimp was neither mentally impaired nor in danger, the grounds required for an individual to be appointed a guardian.

In dismissing the Association Against Animal Factories’ appeal this week, the provincial court said only a guardian could appeal. That doesn’t apply in this case, the group contends, since Pan hasn’t gained a guardian.

There is legal precedence in Austria for close friends to represent people who have no immediate family, “so he should be represented by his closest friends, as is the case,” said Eberhart Theuer, the group’s legal adviser.

“On these grounds we have appealed this decision to the Supreme Court in Vienna,” he said.

Until this summer, the chimp was known simply as Hiasl. However, in the latest court documents, he was identified with a little more dignity — if not humanity — as Matthew Hiasl Pan, with the last name derived from “chimpanzee.”

The Association Against Animal Factories points out that it’s not trying to get Pan declared a human, but rather a person, which would give him some kind of legal status.

Otherwise, he is legally a thing. And with the genetic makeup of chimpanzees and humans so strikingly similar, it contends, that just can’t be.

“The question is: Are chimps things without interests, or persons with interests?” Balluch said.

“A large section of the public does see chimps as beings with interests,” he said. “We are looking forward to hear what the high court has to say on this fundamental question.”

The state’s top Alcoholic Beverage Control official resigned Tuesday after his arrest on drunken-driving charges.

Christopher Lawrence Lilly, 51, of 218 Broadway in Nicholasville was arrested around 11:59 Saturday night by Nicholasville police on southbound U.S. 27, just prior to Ashgrove Road, according to the arrest report.

The arresting officer noticed Lilly’s 1999 Ford Explorer had one operational headlight. After positioning himself behind the SUV, the officer observed Lilly’s vehicle “driving very slow and weaving in the lane before swerving into the emergency lane,” according to the report.

Lilly told the officer he had three beers in the hour before his arrest.

Lilly registered a 0.181 on a blood alcohol test administered at the Jessamine County Detention Center, more than three times the legal limit of 0.08.

“I didn’t feel like I was a danger on the road,” Lilly told WKYT-TV in Lexington, Monday. “I’m just sorry.”

He was booked into the detention center and later released on a $1,000 surety bond. Lilly is scheduled to appear in district court at 9 a.m. on Oct. 18.

In December 2006, Gov. Ernie Fletcher appointed Lilly as executive director of the Office of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Prior to his appointment, Lilly served as commissioner of the Department of Public Protection and executive director of the Office of Charitable Gaming.

Lilly is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and received a law degree from the University of Kentucky.

The ABC regulates the alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries in the commonwealth through licensing, education and enforcement of Kentucky’s alcohol and tobacco laws.

A western Kentucky man spent the night in jail for wearing an inappropriate T-shirt to court.McCracken District Judge Chris Hollowell said he was conveying a message Tuesday when he sent James Hinman to jail for wearing what he felt was an obscene shirt to court.

“I’m not trying to be the fashion police, but what he was wearing was extremely disrespectful and inappropriate,” Hollowell said.

The T-shirt used an altered spelling of an expletive that implied an obscene phrase.

In an interview with The Paducah Sun, Hinman said he “just grabbed a shirt when I got dressed.”

“The shirt isn’t really obscene, but it does imply something obscene,” Hinman said in a jailhouse interview.

Hinman received the sentence after appearing in court late on Tuesday a contempt of court charge for failing to pay a traffic fine. He apologized and said he had been in the wrong courtroom.

Hollowell said he could forgive that mistake and added, “What I’m most concerned about is the shirt you are wearing in my courtroom.”

Hinman asked if he could go outside and turn it inside out, but the judge refused and told Hinman to sit down. The judge then ordered Hinman to be taken to jail on a new contempt of court charge.

Hollowell did not set bond and Hinman stayed in jail until Wednesday afternoon.

Hinman’s sentence on the contempt of court charge was “time served,” Hollowell said.

Hinman, 27, said being sent to jail for the words on his shirt caused him to think about his constitutional rights of free speech, but he said he didn’t plan to take any action.

“I’m not really sure what rights a judge has regarding what people are wearing,” Hinman said. “But we do elect judges to make decisions even though we might not always agree with them.”

A legislator who filed a lawsuit against God has gotten something he might not have expected: a response. One of two court filings from “God” came Wednesday under otherworldly circumstances, according to John Friend, clerk of the Douglas County District Court in Omaha. Click here for the full article.

A man who paid $20,000 in child support for a baby that did not exist has been awarded more than $1 million in damages by an Albuquerque jury against the DNA testing company that gave him the phony results.A jury on Friday awarded Steve Barreras $1.2 million after Mobile Blood Services issued a false paternity test to him.

That test led to child support payments to Barreras’ ex, Viola Trevino.

Trevino remains in federal custody for lying about having a baby on her tax forms.

She also faces a criminal trial for fraud and kidnapping after she misrepresented a friend’s daughter as her own in court.

The owner of Mobile Blood Services, David Quintana, told Eyewitness News 4 that his company has always been honest. He said he feels betrayed by a former employee, Pamale Flores, who is accused of working with Trevino to falsify a DNA test.

Attractive nuisance

“[O]ne who artificially creates upon his premises any dangerous thing which from its nature has a tendency to attract the childish instincts of children to play with it is bound, as a mere matter of social duty, to take such reasonable precautions as the circumstances admit of, to the end that they may be protected from injury while so playing with it, or Franks v. S. Cotton Oil Co., 78 S.C. 10, 15, 58 S.E.2d 960, 961 (1907) (citing Seymour D. Thompson, 1 Commentaries on the Law of Negligence in all Relations § 1024 (2d ed. 1901) [hereinafter Thompson on Negligence]).coming in its vicinity.”

Ungaurded Dangerous Condition
Quite unlike its counterpart, unguarded dangerous condition disregards the element of attraction; both to the property and to the danger. See Everett v. White, 245 S.C. 331, 335, 140 S.E.2d 582, 584 (1965) (providing that although an artificial condition may not have special attraction for children, when the condition is left so exposed that children are likely to come into contact with it, and where their coming into contact with it is dangerous to them, the person exposing the dangerous thing should anticipate the injury that is likely to happen and is bound to take reasonable pains to prevent it); see also Franks, 78 S.C. at 15, 58 S.E.2d at 961.

A customer can sue a store for including her credit card expiration date on her receipt in violation of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, even though she suffered no actual harm and the store argued it didn’t act willfully, a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania has ruled.

Click here to read the full text of the opinion.

The Kentucky Law Review recently posted this rather peculiar story “regarding a criminal prosecution for practicing law without a license” of a man impersonating a lawyer.

Finally, in plain langauge, Bryan A. Garner, presents Legal Writing in Plain English, “organized under fifty principles.”