Up in Canada, judges have no problem with cameras in the courtroom. As Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin explained in a recent discussion with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Canada’s high court has had cameras in the courtroom for over 20 years, and they haven’t caused any problems. [FN1]
Some Canadian judges don’t have a problem with cameras outside the courtroom, either. As reported by CBC News, naked photographs of a senior judge from Canada engaging in bondage, playing with sex toys and performing oral sex were previously posted on the internet. These nude pictures are now part of ethics complaints filed in July against the judge, Lori Douglas, associate chief justice of Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, and her husband, Winnipeg family lawyer Jack King.
And the pics are just the tip of the iceberg. The complainant, a 44-year-old computer specialist named Alexander Chapman, claims that Jack King, Chapman’s lawyer at the time, sexually harassed Chapman by pressuring him to have sex with King’s wife, Lori Douglas (still a lawyer at the time).
So… many… questions. Let’s learn more — plus ogle a bigger and better photo of Madam Justice Douglas….
Continue reading “Judge of the Day: Oh, Oh, Oh… Canada!”
Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com
Dear ATL,
I am just starting law school and I have a boyfriend from college who’s in a different state now going for a degree in architecture. I like him a lot, but now that I’m here I’m wondering if I should rid myself of the distraction (especially during 1L first semester) or whether I should just start with a clean slate and see what the guys are like here. You’ve been around law school guys, do you think they are worth my time or should I hang on to my current guy unless/until something better comes along?
– Sophie’s Choice
Dear Sophie’s Choice,
This reminds me of those people who roll up to college with framed pictures of their “serious” high school boyfriends / girlfriends (who invariably were still seniors in high school) and leave parties early to return to the dorm to fight on the phone with them at 2 a.m. The primary purpose of these relationships is to provide a security blanket just in case they don’t make any friends in college, and when they inevitably DO make friends in college, the college person breaks up with the high school bf/gf because they finally realize that dating someone from high school is embarrassing and lame and going to prom in the cafeteria via limo is simply out of the question. This applies to everyone except for my parents, who prudently stayed together through high school, college and graduate school, in order to bestow upon this planet myself and two inferior siblings…
Continue reading “Pls Hndle Thx: Upgrade U”
Thanks to this week’s advertisers on Above the Law:
If you’re interested in advertising on Above the Law or any other site in the Breaking Media network, download our media kits, or email advertising@breakingmedia.com. Thanks!
Ed. note: This post is by “The Gobbler,” one of the two writers under consideration to join Morning Dockette as a Morning Docket writer. As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.
Lawyers tend to define their careers by numbers (school rank, class rank, firm rank) – at least when the numbers are to their liking. Unfortunately for Larry Joe Davis, he does not have a good number (a 3.7 out of 10). He is angry about it and, like any good American, expressed his anger in the form of a lawsuit. Larry Joe’s rambling 21-page complaint, which he of course filed pro se, makes him the latest of several plaintiffs to take a shot at Avvo, the Zagat-esque rating website for the legal industry. I haven’t read the other complaints, but I’m still sure his is the worst of the group.
It reads like a Jack Kerouac novel, jumping around and running together, making it harder to follow than a screenplay-style blog post. The two main points seem to be that Avvo has a “routine business practice of publishing false and misleading information regarding attorneys” and that it coerces attorney participation via a “join-us-and-fix-it-or-else strategy” that “approaches actionable blackmail.” In other words, Larry Joe doesn’t like what’s on his profile and can’t figure out how to change it. His Internet ineptitude seems far-fetched at first, but given his statement in the complaint that web searching is a “new field,” maybe he really can’t figure it out.
So what “misleading information” is making Mr. Davis one of the mad ones?
Continue reading “Lawsuit of the Day: Why is This Guy So Angry with Avvo?”
Ed. note: This post is by “Juggalo Law,” one of the two writers under consideration to join Morning Dockette as a Morning Docket writer. As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments.
You might remember that a month ago, Caroline Giuliani was busted for stealing $100 worth of cosmetics from a Sephora store on the Upper East Side. Well, yesterday the swift hammer of justice came down upon young Miss Giuliani’s perfectly made-up head. And I think it’s fair to say that any young woman seeking to figure out her daddy issues by thieving beauty supplies will think long and hard before she goes on a crime spree:
The daughter of prosecutor and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani will have a shoplifting charge dismissed and her case closed and sealed if she completes a day of community service at the city’s sanitation department and doesn’t get arrested again in the next six months.
You read that right. A day. Just enough time to think long and hard about what she has… day’s over! Smell ya later, Sanitation Department! Seems like that gross of “Free Caroline” T-shirts wasn’t the good investment I thought it would be.
So what drove Caroline, a Harvard student, to commit such a frivolous crime?
Continue reading “All Made Up and Nowhere to Go — Except for Community Service”
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the decision by Philip Markoff, aka the Craigslist Killer, to take his own life. Today we’re seeing another version of that kind of thinking — less high-profile, less fatal, but still pretty harrowing.
The Dallas Morning News reports that a Texas man slashed his own throat — in the courtroom — after receiving a 40-year sentence for assault:
Marcial Michael Anguiano pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for cutting his niece with a butcher knife. After state District Judge Larry Mitchell announced Anguiano’s sentence, Anguiano cut himself with a razor blade.
“As soon as the judge sentenced him, I saw him do something with his right arm,” said Anguiano’s defense attorney, Juan Sanchez. “I turned and he cut himself with something he had brought into the courtroom.”
After Markoff offed himself, Professor Douglas Berman wrote on his blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, that from a utilitarian perspective we should be happy about Markoff’s suicide. But here Anguiano’s self-mutilation was a disaster, from a utilitarian point of view, for the state of Texas…
Continue reading “Man Takes Razor to Throat Instead of Sentence From Judge”
* The DOJ seeks justice for all, even community college job applicants who don’t have greencards. [Washington Post]
* The Seneca and Cayuga Indians won the right to sell New Yorkers cancer, tax-free of course, for at least two weeks. [New York Daily News]
* DOJ seeks stem cell stay. Now say that three times fast. [Wall Street Journal]
* Facebook is about sharing, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to play by his own rules. [ABC News]
* These Horace Mann parents want to trade a monetary bequest for their son’s clean academic record, proving that money can buy you anything. Well, anything besides class. [New York Times]
* Not so neutral now, are you, Sweden? Julian Assange of WikiLeaks gets screwed by prosecutors, again. [Bloomberg]
