Can you say Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (affiliate link)? I’ll be “fear,” given my generally anxious personality, and Elie can be “loathing,” since he’s so good at it.
Greetings from Sin City. Elie and I are in town for a debate we’re participating in tomorrow on the future of legal education. The debate will take place on Monday at noon in room 102 at UNLV Law School. The event is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided, so please come if you can. Thanks to the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society for co-sponsoring. (You can check out the event flyer here.)
While in Las Vegas, in addition to stimulating the local economy by losing money at craps and poker, I paid a visit to the site of a major Above the Law story: the alleged bird beheading that resulted in criminal charges for two Berkeley law students. Here are my observations and photographs….
October first is the start of the new Supreme Court term!
If, like many readers, you’re a few years out of law school, this may strike you with a mild sense of dread. You remember the heady days of law school when you followed every argument, opinion, and cert grant from One First Street Northeast with an excitement rivaled only by your enthusiasm for the starting salaries for first-year associates.
Alas, the years since law school haven’t been kind to your pants size or your level of engagement with the Supreme Court.
Now, I suspect, you worry that soon — at a family dinner, dropping off your kids at preschool, or anywhere else you interact with non-lawyers — someone will recognize that you are a lawyer, and ask you what to make of the new Supreme Court term.
You have three options for how to deal with this, now, before the media frenzy over the new Supreme Court term starts.
First, you can admit to yourself that you’re no longer the gunner you used to be. You can tell people that just don’t follow the Supreme Court anymore, since you’ve gotten really interested in your exciting new life doing document review for a municipal bond arbitration.
But you’re not going to do that. If you were that good at being honest with yourself, you aren’t likely to be the kind of person who went to law school in the first place.
Second, perhaps, you can wade through the volume of information out there about the new term. Go through SCOTUSblog with the same passion you now spend tracking whether your friends from law school have better careers than you do. Maybe go to one of the OT 2012 preview events that clog every convention hall and small town library starting in mid-September.
That takes time and energy. Tom Goldstein sometimes uses really long paragraphs, and you really wanted to spend more time Googling for topless pictures of Kate Middleton.
Instead, you could let me to one of those events for you. For the truly efficient, follow the jump, sit back, and enjoy Kaiser’s Guide To Bluffing Your Way Through Knowledge About the Supreme Court’s New Term to Non-Lawyers….
* What price can you put on freedom (or lack thereof)? Jeffrey Deskovic, who served 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, sued a whole host of defendants after his exoneration — and won more than $5 million. [Cruel and Unusual]
* One way of dealing with opposing counsel is to grope them and expose yourself to them. I didn’t say it was a “good” was to deal with opposing counsel. [New York Personal Injury Law Blog]
* George Zimmerman’s wife was arrested for perjury. Good thing she wasn’t wearing a hoodie while she allegedly lied, ’cause you know how that goes. [Orlando Sentinel]
* When studying for the bar, you have to at least pretend that there’s going to be a job afterwards. Don’t torture yourself with reality. [Law Riot]
* As a boy with a girl’s name, I’m always worried that something like this will happen to me. Trust me, my son will not have this problem. I’ll call the kid Mars Glock The Penismightier Mystal or something. [The Daily Dolt]
* Is the NFL going to end up like Big Tobacco? [Forbes]
* I’ll be moderating a panel at this year’s American Constitution Society National Convention. That means I’m coming to D.C.! If you want to hang out, I’ll be drinking with Marin at Off the Record — which is downstairs at the Hay-Adams — starting at about 8:30 tomorrow night. [American Constitution Society]
Rover's last wish was to have his ashes sprinkled over a pile of money.
* Saying your dog ate something isn’t a creative enough excuse these days. Try this instead: “I kept the clients’ missing money in my car, which I left running in the parking lot to keep my dead dog’s ashes from freezing. Someone then stole the car, and now the missing client money is gone forever!” [Canadian Lawyer]
* Oh, to be a lawyer with the ability to tell opposing counsel that his client is a “spoiled, brainless twit.” It’s even better when opposing counsel’s client is Meghan McCain. [Spectacle Blog / American Spectator]
* Next time you feel like kicking the crap out of someone, make sure your twin is there, because there’s a high likelihood that you’ll both get off. [Legal Juice]
* A judge in Louisiana just threw a case out because he didn’t want to catch the flu from a witness. Elie was right: germaphobia is the real contagion! [Lowering the Bar]
* How would Jesus feel about guns in his church? He’d probably change them into dildos and tell the violence-bearers to go f**k themselves. [WSJ Law Blog]
* There’s been a lot of talk about personal branding for lawyers lately. This guy probably has the right idea, but you’ve got to wonder if he really wants to be known as the “Bald Lawyer” for the rest of his life. What happens if he decides to get plugs? [Legal Blog Watch]
* Are you applying to law school (or do you know someone who is)? Have Lat review the application essay — and support a good cause at the same time. [Kickstarter]
* What kind of “reasonable accommodations” are alcoholics entitled to in the workplace? A three-martini mojito lunch sounds good to me. [Overlawyered]
* Some thoughts from Henry Blodget on Groupon and the SEC-mandated “quiet period.” Any thoughts, readers, on Blodget’s take on attorney/client privilege? [Business Insider]
* Professor Ann Althouse on the exoneration of Justice David Prosser (noted in Morning Docket): “A justice is despised because his decisions do not please liberals, and so, without thought, they forgot about things liberals like to love themselves for caring about, such as fairness and due process.” [Althouse]
Is it wrong to find Justin Bieber totally hot? Just askin'....
* E-discovery is moving to the cloud. What are the opportunities and the risks? Ben Kerschberg and Bret Laughlin discuss. [Forbes]
* If you share Staci’s opinion that Justin Bieber “kind of looks like a girl,” here’s some support for your viewpoint. [Fashionista]
* The American Constitution Society is holding an online symposium in honor of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. [ACSblog]
One of [my handlers during my confirmation process] said, ‘You know, you might want to apologize for some of the things you wrote.’ I said to him, ‘Can we get one thing straight? I am not apologizing.’
I’ve lived the life I’ve wanted to live. I’ve said the things I’ve wanted to say. If you really want me to say I’m sorry, I’ll say, ‘I’m sorry that my life’s work has been misunderstood.’
– Harold Koh, current Legal Adviser to the State Department and former Dean of Yale Law School, in recent remarks he delivered at the American Constitution Society’s annual convention. (In the same speech, Koh voiced support for Yale Law graduate Goodwin Liu, whose Ninth Circuit nomination was successfully filibustered.)
As we mentioned this morning, a report from researchers at Berkeley Law suggests that legal education is a field dominated by white, male, elite liberals. The National Law Journal reports:
Law schools hire more openly liberal professors than openly conservative ones, but the plum jobs at the most prestigious schools don’t appear to be going solely to the liberals.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who analyzed the ideology of recently hired law professors. Their study, “Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring,” is the first to focus specifically on the political leanings of law professors.
Previous research concluded that law professors skew white and male, and tend to have completed their legal studies at top law schools.
There might be a liberal bias among law school professors? Shocking! Why are we just being informed of this?
But is it really as bad as the study makes it out to be? While the researchers determined that 52 of 60 professors showed a liberal slant, the report goes on to explain that the researchers couldn’t get a clear read on 60% of the 149 entry-level professors sampled.
And even if we agree that there is some liberal bias among law school professors, does the distinction matter? Is there really a “liberal” or “conservative” way to educate people about the law?
This sounds like an appropriate moment for an Above the Law debate. Editors David Lat and Elie Mystal sound off about whether law schools need to be more welcoming to conservatives. As always, we welcome your opinions in the comments….
Yes, we’ve been gone. Where we’ve been — poetry workshop, rehab, hiking the Appalachian Trail? — doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re back, and our team of interns has diligently kept track of the nuptial triumphs and travesties that have occurred in our absence. We’ve identified the very best of the best couples from this spring, and hereby present the top five pairings for your edification and enrichment:
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Can you say Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (affiliate link)? I’ll be “fear,” given my generally anxious personality, and Elie can be “loathing,” since he’s so good at it.
