Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice Sharon Lee will be the commencement speaker at Tennessee Wesleyan College’s winter commencement tonight at 7 p.m. The Madisonville native was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2008 and elected by her colleagues this past September to serve as chief justice. The Daily Post Athenian has the story.

The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending package on Thursday that would fund most government operations for the fiscal year. The accord was reached just hours before the midnight deadline, in a 219-206 vote, amid the last-minute brinkmanship and bickering that has come to mark one of Congress’s most polarized — and least productive — eras, the New York Times reports. The legislation now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it in the coming days. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, was the only Middle Tennessee representative, Democrat or Republican, to vote for the bill.

The U.S. Supreme Court today said it would decide whether its 2012 decision prohibiting mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile murderers under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes is retroactive. After turning away a number of cases raising the retroactivity question since its decision in Miller v. Alabama, the justices agreed to hear arguments by George Toca, who was 17 in 1984 when he accidently shot his best friend during a botched armed robbery. The National Law Journal has more (sub. req.).

The Tennessee Supreme Court has granted review to five cases involving compensation of franchise and excise taxes, tolling agreements, workers’ compensation discrimination, voidability of default judgments and pre-suit notice requirements in healthcare liability actions The Raybin Perky Hot List has a summary and forecast of each case.

Under a spending bill introduced in the Republican-led House, wealthy donors would be allowed to give almost $1.6 million per election cycle to political parties and their campaign committees. The comparable limit for 2014's elections was $194,400. The effort is the latest bid to weaken campaign finance rules passed after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s and updated a decade ago. It follows three Supreme Court rulings that gave rise to free-spending super PACs, which can accept unlimited contributions from people and corporations alike, and an increased role for outside groups to shape the outcome of elections. The proposal has potential for both the Republican and Democratic parties. WRCB has more from the Associated Press.

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday dealt a blow to the government's success in insider trading prosecutions by reversing two convictions with a decision that also jeopardizes a third — and attempts to further define how far prosecutors can push the law in their quest to clean up Wall Street. The three-judge panel criticized the government for a blitz of Manhattan insider trading prosecutions that resulted in over 80 convictions since 2008, citing the "novelty of its recent insider trading prosecutions, which are increasingly targeted at remote tippees many levels removed from corporate insiders."  WRCB reports from the Associated Press.

The Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments in January in a case that could make races for judgeships “even more like contests for other elected offices,” Gavel Grab reports from Governing Magazine. In Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, the court will be asked to decide the constitutionality of state bans on judicial candidates personally soliciting campaign contributions. Lawyers for Lanell Williams-Yulee, a former judicial candidate, contend the Florida solicitation ban restricts free speech in an unconstitutional way. Justice at Stake Executive Director Bert Brandenburg said the prohibitions are among the only protections of the integrity of these contests that remain today.

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Most bills being proposed to regulate abortions in Tennessee probably won’t succeed, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey said today. Ramsey told reporters that despite passage of  a constitutional amendment giving the legislature more power to regulate abortions, the General Assembly will likely just focus only on restoring laws on mandatory counseling, waiting periods and clinic regulations that were struck down as part of a 2000 state Supreme Court decision. The Tennessean has more.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, and state Rep. John DeBerry, D-Memphis, have created the "Racial Profiling Prevention Act," a proposed state law requiring all law enforcement agencies to adopt a written policy by January 2016 banning racial profiling. The bill defines racial profiling as "the detention, interdiction, or other disparate treatment of an individual solely on the basis of the individual's actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, or national origin." The Tennessean has the story.