U.S. Attorney for the Western District Kevin G. Ritz today announced he has appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Smith as the district election officer for the Western District. Smith will oversee the district’s handling of election day complaints of voting rights concerns, threats of violence to election officials or staff and election fraud. The appointment is in connection with the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Day Program, which seeks to ensure public confidence in the electoral process by providing local points of contact for the public to report possible federal election law violations. Read the full press release.

Two attempts to block President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program faced setbacks yesterday, the ABA Journal reports. The first case, a challenge brought by the Wisconsin-based Brown County Taxpayers Association, was blocked by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who handles emergency requests from Wisconsin. Barrett acted without referring the matter to the full court. The suit had been tossed out earlier by a federal judge who said the taxpayers group did not have standing. In the second case, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Autrey of the Eastern District of Missouri dismissed a challenge filed by six Republican-led states. Autrey also cited a lack of standing in his ruling.

University of Tennessee College of Law Professor Maurice E. Stucke has begun a one-year term working as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. He is expected to use his expertise to help the largest consumer protection, privacy and antitrust agency set strategic direction, while offering advice to leaders on legal issues concerning law enforcement activities that relate to these legal areas. Stucke is an expert on the subject matter and is the author and co-author of five books and more than 50 scholarly articles on consumer privacy, antitrust and consumer protection. He is the school’s Douglas A. Blaze Distinguished Professor and has more than 25 years of experience handling a range of competition policy issues in both private practice and as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice. The law school has more on the story.

Former Belmont University College of Law professor Jeffrey Usman was sworn in as Tennessee’s 95th Court of Appeals judge on Tuesday at the law school. Prior to his confirmation, Usman served as one of the founding faculty members of the school. Gov. Bill Lee and Frank G. Clement Jr., presiding judge of the Tennessee Court of Appeals - Middle Division, made remarks at the ceremony. Belmont law professors Amy Moore and Elizabeth Usman; Dean Alberto Gonzales; and 20th Judicial District General Sessions Judge Marcus Floyd, a former student of Usman’s, also spoke, as did Nashville School of Law Dean and former Tennessee Supreme Court Justice William Koch. Read more from the law school.

The TBA’s 34th Annual Health Law Forum took place in downtown Nashville yesterday and today. It was the first in-person presentation of the program since 2019. Close to 300 attendees heard presentations on regulatory and health care fraud, medicare reimbursement principles, artificial intelligence, the future after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Dobbs case, home health and clinic trials. The program also included a legislative update and an ethics update. The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Morgan McDonald, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health. Section Chair Scott Shanker with Bass, Berry & Sims moderated the event, and at a luncheon today, passed the Section Cup to incoming chair Mark Ison with Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison.

Nashville club owner Joshua Smith this week pleaded guilty to illegally funneling $67,000 from a campaign committee to a national political organization in a conspiracy to benefit state Sen. Brian Kelsey’s failed 2016 Congressional campaign, the Nashville Post reports. Smith, who owns The Standard in Nashville, is scheduled to be sentenced in June. He faces a maximum of five years in prison. Kelsey is not seeking reelection to his Senate seat and is scheduled to go to trial in January on the federal charges.

A federal appeals court panel in Cincinnati on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case to determine whether an official at Tennessee’s Board of Professional Responsibility should be able to avoid a lawsuit by a lawyer who says his termination for tweeting about Muslims violated his First Amendment rights. Bloomberg Law reports that the appeal challenges a federal district judge’s decision that granted quasi-judicial immunity to the BPR’s Sandra Garrett, who had fired attorney Jerry Morgan following complaints about his anti-Muslim posts.

Nashville law firm Branstetter, Stranch & Jennings PLLC has opened an office in St. Louis with former circuit court judge, alderman and city prosecuting attorney John “Jack” Garvey at its head. Garvey’s daughter, Colleen Garvey, will also join the practice, which BS&J managing partner Gerard Stranch said he expects to grow to four or five attorneys within the next couple of years. “We see that there's a huge demand for legal services in St. Louis for the type of stuff that we do,” Stranch told the Nashville Business Journal. “With Jack being there, it's someone you can trust and someone you know who is going to do a good job."

The squabble over the Hamilton County Attorney position continued this week, with both County Mayor Weston Wamp and commissioners standing by their positions, the Chattanoogan reports. Wamp says that County Attorney Rheubin Taylor is no longer on the county payroll and his county email is blocked, while commissioners passed a series of resolutions in support of the embattled attorney and hired outside counsel. "The dizzying actions taken by the County Commission were not within what state law allows,” Wamp said, adding that he would not deal with Taylor or with the three remaining attorneys in the office. He said he plans to hire his own attorney.

What presumptions are common in workers’ compensation cases? Judge Brian Addington lays out the most common ones in his recent post to the From the Bench Blog presented by the Tennessee Court of Workers’ Compensation Claims. Among the most common: the opinion of the panel physician is presumed correct on the issue of causation; an employee is conclusively presumed to be at maximum medical improvement when the treating physician ends all active treatment; and a surviving spouse who was living with the deceased spouse before his or her death, and children under 16, are conclusively presumed to be wholly dependent. Read about other common presumptions and how the court might handle interplay between presumptions in Addington’s post.