Two people from my high school got into the same college I did. We were all in the top 10 of our class, but none of us were in the top 5. One was a white guy who was a brilliant piano player. The other was a white girl who excelled at sports. Then there was me. I had the “does lots of activities” application. You know the type of d-bag kid I’m talking about: debate this, mock trial that, sports, school plays, bands.
Also, I’m black. Do you think that might have had something to do with it? I hope it did, since it seems to me that my race is at least as much of a factor in what I may add to an incoming college class as whether I could play the piano or dominate in field hockey.
Of course, saying race can be a factor in college admissions is controversial. A certain segment of the population gets all bent out of sorts when a “deserving” white student potentially gets “passed over” because a college official gave a person of color “extra points” when making up the entering class of students.
I find these arguments totally irrational. If the top five students from my high school were passed over — three Jews and two Asians (you know, the real victims of affirmative action, if there are any) — then who exactly “took” their spots? Me, or the sports chick? And if an Asian guy “takes” my spot, but I bump down the piano player who didn’t score as well as I did, and the piano player takes the spot of some poor Hispanic kid who has never seen a piano in real life, would everybody say that we all got what we deserved?
Coming up with an effective way to balance all of the relevant factors in college admissions is hard. But when race is involved, people don’t want to deal with “hard,” and they don’t want to hear “complicated.” They want simple rules and a few platitudes they can recite on television. After yesterday’s Fifth Circuit decision upholding affirmative action at the University of Texas, the only question is whether the Supreme Court has the will and intellectual rigor to think through something hard, or whether the majority will want to fall back on truisms and clichés…
Continue reading “Fifth Circuit Upholds Affirmative Action, But Is It Begging for SCOTUS Intervention?”
* What is the difference between abortion and infanticide? [WSJ Law Blog]
* The House votes to repeal Obamacare. [Politico]
* Today’s decision by the Supreme Court in NASA v. Nelson dodges a big constitutional question — much to the chagrin of Justices Scalia and Thomas. [SCOTUSblog]
* Just like Monica Goodling, Danielle Chiesi admits to “crossing the line.” This afternoon Chiesi pleaded guilty to charges arising out of the Galleon Group insider trading ring. [Dealbreaker]
* Speaking of Wall Street-watching, check out this neat new website, ProxyMonitor.org. As James Copland of the Manhattan Group explains, the site’s comprehensive database of shareholder proposals sheds light on trends in corporate governance. [Point of Law; Proxy Monitor]
* Professor Glenn Reynolds wonders if his fellow Yale Law School graduate, Rep. David Wu (D-OR), has “undergone some sort of personality change.” [Instapundit]
* Congratulations to Amy Chua: she can haz her own internet meme. [BuzzFeed]
* Texas attorneys, you should pay attention to this proposed rule change. [Infamy or Praise]
In 2010, music superstar Lady Gaga earned an estimated $64 million. Meanwhile, legal superstar Lady Kaga — aka Justice Elena Kagan, of the United States Supreme Court — earned considerably less.
For the part of 2010, the Divine Miss K served as Solicitor General, earning an annual salary of $165,300. After her confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, she got a raise, to $213,900 a year — a healthy income, but less than the base salary of a fifth-year associate in a law firm (or the total compensation in 2010, bonus included, of a fourth-year associate). Her income as a justice is also much less than her salary of $437,299 as Harvard Law School dean.
Still, even though Justice Kagan might not be filthy rich, she has done well for herself. At the time of her nomination to SCOTUS, she reported a net worth of around $1.8 million. Given this rosy financial picture, as well as her six-figure income and great job security — it’s rare for a federal judge to be impeached, Judge Porteous notwithstanding — it’s not surprising that Her Honor was recently spotted checking out some pretty pricey D.C. digs.
Where was she looking? And what seems to be her homebuying budget?
Continue reading “Lawyerly Lairs: Justice Kagan Goes House Hunting”
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Last month, the Boston Globe reported on an arbitrator’s finding that Goodwin Procter overcharged a real estate client by more than $540,000. (We mentioned the Globe story here and here.)
Alas, some claim that Goodwin isn’t letting that extra gravy trickle down to its associates….
Continue reading “Associate Bonus (and Salary) Watch: Goodwin Procter”
Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.
Dear ATL:
I work in a fairly specialized litigation sub-field in a suburban market. The bar of attorneys who do what I do around where I am is therefore a pretty small and cutthroat group that hasn’t exactly emphasized “civility” in recent years.
I found out that a lawyer who’s one of my firm’s regular adversaries recently died. It wasn’t a big surprise; he’d been sick and in the hospital for some time, plus he was pushing 65-70. The thing is, he was (and his law partner still is) a gigantic asshole. He’d engage in frivolous tactics to rack up billables and then cut clients loose as soon as they couldn’t pay anymore. He’d insult other lawyers, including judges, in correspondence and at depositions. He’d condescend to women and junior attorneys. He even once wrote a smear piece about my firm as an op-ed in the local bar newsletter.
All this is to say, I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I’m not exactly grieving. There’s going to be a memorial service, but I’m not exactly sure what to do in this situation. Should I go and at least make an appearance, and duck out at the earliest opportunity? Would it be bad form not to go, because the legal community in my practice area is so small? Should I just send a card? Or should I go and secretly gloat?
– Left Behind
Dear Left Behind,
When it comes to death and funerals, there is no right or wrong. People grieve in their own way, and sometimes not at all, particularly if the deceased was a truly horrible person…
Continue reading “Pls Hndle Thx: Requiem for a Rival Attorney?”
The record in such cases, although voluminous, often fails to precisely reflect the relationships between the parties and to include the documents (particularly with respect to who owns the loan) that are necessary to evaluate the claims. Such failures are a disservice to both the parties and the court, and, in other circumstances, may undermine a party’s claim or defense. Were I forced to delve fully into the merits of this case, I am not certain that it would be possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
— Chief Judge Joseph Goodwin (S.D.W.Va.), writing about recent cases involving the home loan industry, in Delebreau v. Bayview Loan Servicing, LLC.
Ed. note: This post is by Will Meyerhofer, a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney turned psychotherapist. He holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work, and he blogs at The People’s Therapist. His new book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy, is available on Amazon.
I was chuckling with a client the other day about the insanity of trying to please a partner with a piece of written work.
The trick, she said – I’ve heard this before – is to adopt the voice of the partner. That’s what he wants – something that sounds like him. It doesn’t matter if your style is better than his. He wants to hear himself.
My client can imitate the writing styles of five partners. That includes whatever quirks – run-on sentences, rudeness, biting sarcasm, unnecessary adjectives, circuitous explanations – capture that partner’s unique gift. It’s a piece of cake: assemble substance, add ventriloquy, and voila! – a happy partner…
Continue reading “Your Dark Lord”
What kind of world are we living in where people post their 1L grades on Facebook? I guess that after years of status updates about your latest biological function, you can fool yourself into thinking that people actually care about your Civ Pro grade. The world is full of navel-gazers.
Companion question: What kind of world are we living in where people get “offended” because somebody posted his 1L grades on Facebook? I know law schools are hyper-competitive places, but at the end of the day, the only thing you can control is your own academic performance. Getting mad because somebody is boasting about his grades is a colossal waste of energy — energy better spent studying for the current semester (or at least trying to steal his girlfriend). Don’t get mad, get even.
I’m not really on either side of the current ridiculousness going down at Boston University School of Law over one guy’s Facebook page. You see, I live in a world where it’s perfectly acceptable to kind of hate everybody….
Continue reading “Posting Your 1L Grades on Facebook Makes You A …?”
Investigators looking at surveillance footage from the Tucson attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords say that Chief Judge John Roll died a hero. According to the New York Times, the video shows that Judge Roll apparently died while helping to save the life of Ronald Barber, a Giffords staffer. Barber, who was shot twice while standing near Congresswoman Giffords, survived the attack and has since left the hospital.
The descriptions of Judge Roll’s actions during the shooting are amazing…
Continue reading “Judge John Roll Died A Hero”
* Twenty six states hate health care Obama. This law might be more screwed than someone with a pre-existing condition. [Los Angeles Times]
* Handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten, and begging to be deported. I think the Justice Department forgot the safe word. [Mother Jones]
* Thomas Jefferson School of Law has a great connection to paleontology. Dinosaurs are extinct, and so are jobs for fourth-tier law grads! [National Law Journal]
* J. Crew has to find someone to buy all of its overpriced clothing for more than $3 billion. Haven’t these shareholders heard of the clearance rack? [DealBook / New York Times]
* Hey 1Ls, Baker Botts is hiring, but only diverse candidates need apply. I’m guessing that diversity is based on bra size and skin color. [The Careerist]
* Lawyers who go to rehab are “terminally unique” — they’re self-centered a-holes. So what? Lawyers who don’t go to rehab are a-holes, too. [Huffington Post]
* When the Supreme Court refused to overturn gay marriage in D.C., gay couples and wedding planners alike were thrilled. Redundant? [Belief Blog / CNN]
Judge Wesley Brown will be 104 in June.
When I clerked on the Ninth Circuit years ago, one of the judges on the court at the time was extremely old — and didn’t seem very “with it.” His law clerks seemed to take on a large amount of responsibility. One of his clerks that year, a law school classmate of mine I’ll call “Mary,” would negotiate over the phone with Ninth Circuit judges over how particular cases should come out — a responsibility well beyond the legal research and opinion drafting done by most clerks.
On one occasion, a vote on whether to rehear a case en banc emanated not from the judge’s chambers account, but from Mary’s personal email account. Even more embarrassingly, it was written not on behalf of the judge or the chambers, but in the first person: “I vote YES to rehearing en banc.” A law school classmate of mine who was also clerking for the Ninth that year remarked, “I thought only judges did that. When did Mary get her presidential commission?”
Some of us jokingly referred to that chambers as Weekend at Judgie’s. What appeared to be going on over there reminded us of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s famous quip to his clerks: “If I die, prop me up and keep voting!”
We joked about this delegation of Article III authority to a newly minted law school graduate. But as Joseph Goldstein suggests, in a very interesting article just published by Slate and ProPublica, the issue of superannuated jurists is no laughing matter….
Continue reading “What Is To Be Done About Super-Old Judges?”
* UVA Law grad Corwin Levi used his law school notes as his artistic canvas. I bet he has a really snazzy collar. [Ex-Lawyers Club]
* Not all professors are lazy. Professor Ilya Somin hops on the “make new exam questions” bandwagon. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Professor Stephen Bainbridge has another theory on how “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua got hired by Yale; there’s always more than one way to skin a cat. [Professor Bainbridge]
* FCC approves the merger between Kabletown (sorry, Comcast) and NBC. [Huffington Post]
* Miss America 2011, Teresa Scanlan — who wants to be a Supreme Court justice, then president — opines on WikiLeaks. [Jezebel]
* What, do you want Apple’s quarterly filings to include reports on Steve Jobs’s colon? [WSJ Law Blog]
* You can’t make a law that favors one religion over another. But, in Alabama at least, it’s perfectly okay for the governor of the state to talk about how everybody should prefer his religion over all others. [Gawker]
* It’d be great if everybody remembered Martin Luther King’s essential message of non-violence. [A Public Defender via Blawg Review]
Thomas Walkley
There’s a history of lawyers pulling down their pants to make a point. Some of you may recall former Covington & Burling partner David Remes, who dropped trou in Yemen a few years back. Remes, who was representing several detainees at Guantanamo Bay, explained that he stripped down to emphasize the humiliation inflicted upon detainees by inappropriate body searches.
Now another attorney is claiming that he exposed himself for educational reasons. Ohio lawyer Thomas Walkley, 52, was charged with exposing himself to two troubled teens on Friday. (They were troubled before they saw Walkley’s junk.)
Walkley, who founded and runs a coffeeshop for at-risk youth, claims that pants-dropping is part of his “mentorship” program. We wonder if they’ll try this in Oregon.
Unlike Remes, Walkley didn’t keep his underwear on. He removed his pants and his boxer shorts, letting it all hang out before two teenage boys….
Continue reading “Lawyer of the Day: A Peeping Trou-Dropping Tom”
Last time we checked in with Columbia law student Julia Neyman, she was sweating her way through a year-long exercise regimen. Her new year’s resolutions were similar to many: she resolved to exercise more and spend less money. Her unique inspiration, though, was to combine these two resolutions into one: she spent 2010 working out at gyms around Manhattan — gyms that usually charge a pretty penny — for free, taking advantage of promotions and trial memberships. She then blogged about her adventures on Buns of Steal.
We thought it was a brilliant idea. (If nothing else, it seemed like a clever campaign to shame Columbia into upgrading its “dark and dank” student gym.) Others were more critical, calling her a “mooching” “gym grifter.” Neyman says, though, that gyms were “actually really on board with the project.”
Other potential grifters, we advise you start blogs. Neyman says: “I’ve consistently gotten emails and offers from gyms offering for me to come in and work out for free. It was a win-win because for the gyms, my blog was like free advertising.”
Well, now the year is up. Neyman had planned to buy a membership to her favorite gym — revealed after the jump — but instead she has fled to Paris for the semester, where she is helping to turn Frenchmen against lawyers…
Continue reading “Columbia 3L Julia Neyman Brings Her ‘Buns of Steal’ to an End”
Don’t watch nothing say him white. Him blacker than me and you.
— Buju Banton, the celebrated reggae musician, speaking about his lawyer, David Oscar Markus — whom he called up to the stage and hugged at a recent concert.
(Markus, who is also a legal blogger as well as a prominent criminal defense lawyer, is representing the Grammy-nominated Banton in an upcoming retrial on federal drug and firearms charges. Markus doesn’t look very black.)
Are you ready for some stop-gap measures?
Given that law schools keep pumping out more graduates than the market can handle, the state of Oregon is trying an interesting approach to deal with the mass of lawyers being unleashed into the system. Following in the footsteps of Georgia and Utah, Oregon will now require new lawyers to enroll in a year-long mentoring program.
People sitting for the February bar were informed that they will be subject to this new requirement. The goal of the program is to provide some guidance for all the unemployed law graduates, especially those who are thinking of going out there and hanging a shingle.
Because, you know, it’s not like three years in law school actually prepare you to start a career…
Continue reading “Forced Mentorship Is Latest Response to Broken Legal Education System”
You know, one of the biggest problems with law school is that it’s too much like high school. In college, you have a sense that people were sick to death of high school (I didn’t go to a state school) and are invested in actually growing up. College kids don’t handle things like adults, but at least there’s a sense that they’re trying.
By the time you get to law school, it’s like people have devolved or something. Law schools seem to be crawling with snide, backbiting saboteurs. Playground bullying is replaced by intellectual bullying, and all sense of collegiality falls prey to petty competition (I didn’t go to a state school).
You want to know how to cut through all of the pushing and shoving? Push back, hard. That’s what a Georgetown 1L did. He found himself the subject of a whispering campaign and decided to shout down the allegations against him — in an email to his entire section….
Continue reading “Georgetown 1L’s Awesome Section-Wide Response to Cheating Allegations”
Aaron Titus, are you in there?
When Washington, D.C., was buried in snow last week, one suburban Maryland school alerted parents via robocall that they would be opening two hours late. The call, hypothetically letting parents know that they could sleep in that day, went out at 4:30 a.m.
That angered privacy lawyer Aaron Titus. His well-told tale of revenge reverberated around the media last week, thanks to a story in the Washington Post. Titus went Robocop on the school, using an online robocalling company to place a 4:30 a.m. call to the home phones of nine school board members, the school superintendent, and the school’s chief lawyer the next day, letting them know he hadn’t appreciated the early morning wake-up call. (The school said it made a mistake in setting the time for the calls and that it should have gone out at the immensely more reasonable hours of 5 or 6 a.m.)
Titus tweeted that he was following the Golden Rule. Meanwhile, other laws were possibly ignored…
Continue reading “Privacy Lawyer Aaron Titus Playing Robocop Was Possibly Illegal, But Definitely Funny”
This is why we shouldn’t let people under the age of 18 speak in public. Ever.
The new Miss America, Teresa Scanlan, is just 17 years old. Why we live in a society that regularly parades minors out in public to be ogled (whether for their beauty or dunking prowess or whatever) is a subject for another blog post.
As you know, beauty pageant winners are often asked about their life ambitions — as if staying “off the pole” wouldn’t be a major accomplishment in itself. Scanlan’s ambitions are particularly funny, more like the stuff you’d expect to hear from a 7-year-old girl instead of a young woman of 17.
Under normal circumstances, the public wouldn’t be a party to these particular ramblings. But since her parents decided to allow Scanlan to be thrust into the public spotlight, everybody gets to chuckle…
Continue reading “Miss America 2011 Wants a Law Degree, and Then an Appointment to SCOTUS, and Then Election to POTUS”
