Hunt & Associates P.C.

Apr 6, 2016

Adventures in Urban Policy: Paying Ex-Cons to Pay Ex-Cons not to Hurt Ex-Cons under the Supervision of Ex-Cons

Have you ever wondered why we don’t just pay criminals to stop committing crimes?  If so, the City of Richmond, California has read your mind and come up with just such a plan. Richmond employs selected ex-cons from nearby San Quentin State Prison, paid by the City, to supervise and pay other convicted criminals not to kill each other; except that they sometimes can’t help themselves and kill each other anyway.

If you’re convicted of … Read more

Mar 1, 2016

When Administrative Agencies Break the Laws They Enforce Because Even They Don’t Know What They Mean – What Good Is Their “Expertise”?

Many laws give authority to administrative agencies to actually interpret and enforce particular laws. For instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) is empowered to interpret and to enforce federal laws prohibiting wrongful discrimination in employment. The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) is similarly responsible for the interpretation and enforcement of federal labor laws.

Agencies such as the EEOC and the NLRB often issue interpretive guidelines. Those guidelines are supposed to explain what the specific … Read more

Feb 17, 2016

All New Corporate and Biography Videos for Hunt & Associates, PC

We have FINALLY gotten around to getting a new corporate video done and ended up adding biography videos for both attorneys to boot! Check them out below:

Hunt & Associate PC’s 2015 Corporate Video:

Lawrence B. Hunt’s 2015 Corporate Biography Video:

Charles A. Ford’s 2015 Corporate Biography Video:

We owe a giant thank you to Hybrid Moon Video Productions for their creativity and talent in helping us realize our vision for the above videos! If … Read more

Feb 1, 2016

Do You Need an Anthropologist to Read a Quit Claim Deed? Perhaps in Oregon You Do

Surprisingly, a recorded deed of title may not be proof of ownership to real property in Oregon depending, among other things, on the cultural idiosyncrasies of the transferor and transferee as disclosed by the expert testimony of an anthropologist. At least that’s the upshot of the recent holding by the Oregon Court of Appeals in Hughes v. Ephrem, 275 Or. App. 477 (2015).

In Hughes the plaintiff obtained a judgment against its debtor and … Read more

Jan 28, 2016

Update to Fairness and Fares: The Challenge to the Independent Contractor in Oregon

In a blog post earlier this week we highlighted a recent Oregon Supreme Court decision which held that taxi cab drivers are employees, not independent contractors, of the cab companies they work with. We suggested that this holding implicitly threatened the business models on which companies such as Uber, Lyft and similar enterprises in the emerging “sharing economy” have grown. A recent article in the ABA Journal concerning the recently announced settlement of a California … Read more

Jan 27, 2016

Fairness and Fares: The Challenge to the Independent Contractor in Oregon

Law often lags behind reality. In Broadway Cab LLC v. Employment Department, the Oregon Supreme Court held that a taxi company’s drivers are “employees” and not “independent contractors”. Consequently, the company is obligated to pay unemployment insurance taxes on wages earned by its drivers in 2008 and 2009.

Broadway Cab argued that its drivers performed services only for the passengers who paid the drivers and not the cab company to which the drivers actually … Read more

Jan 4, 2016

Have You Ever Wondered: How Secure is the Private Information We Give the IRS?

We all periodically provide federal and state tax authorities with written summaries of our most personal financial information seldom thinking that our data will be used to inflict more pain than the applicable tax laws require. We still generally assume that the employees of federal and state taxing agencies adhere to general standards of integrity. That’s particularly true when the revenue agents handling our information are supposedly responsible for helping us.

The IRS has just … Read more

Dec 9, 2015

A Word to the Wise: Act like a Human First and Foremost

Unfortunately, there are some attorneys who are neither quite human nor professional.

The recent mass murders in San Bernardino demand the sympathy of every person for the victims and for the condemnation of their killers. The Farook family attorney, unfortunately, seems both incompetent and a bit less than human by going to the media to assert absurd attempts to defend the murderers as “normal”. Read the article here.

This attorney, like others who show … Read more

Dec 3, 2015

Now Mental Disability Should Never Disqualify a Student for Life as a College Undergraduate

While the reality of some interscholastic athletic programs may have diluted the pretensions of many colleges and universities as institutions of higher education, some schools and governmental agencies now seem intent on wholly abandoning even that charade. For instance, Portland State University and Concordia University have now both adopted programs to accept intellectually disabled students as undergraduates even though these students, generally scoring in the bottom 3% on standardized intelligence tests, will remain unable to … Read more

Nov 3, 2015

Mistaken Erosion in the Confidentiality of Taxpayer Information in Washington

INTRODUCTION

Small words can make big differences. For instance, when a court ignores an “or” and replaces it with an “of”, bad things can happen. A recent ruling by the Washington State Board of Tax Appeals (“the Board”) which guts Washington’s statutory provisions safeguarding the confidentiality of taxpayer returns and information shows why knowing the difference between “or” and “of” and demonstrating a basic level of reading proficiency should be required before anyone can interpret … Read more