A case going to trial next month raises some, er, probing questions. From the NYT's City Room:

Under what circumstances can a patient in an emergency room be forced to submit to a procedure that doctors deem to be medically necessary? That question — and the notion of informed consent — is at the heart of a civil case that is about to go to trial next month in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Brian Persaud, a 38-year-old construction worker who lives in Brooklyn, asserts that he was forced to undergo a rectal examination after sustaining a head injury in an on-the-job accident at a Midtown construction site on May 20, 2003. Mr. Persaud was taken to the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where he received eight stitches to his head.

According to a lawsuit he later filed, Mr. Persaud was then told that he needed an immediate rectal examination to determine whether he had a spinal-cord injury. He adamantly objected to the procedure, he said, but was held down as he begged, “Please don’t do that.”

C'mon, Brian. Why not have a more open mind (among other things)? Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

As Mr. Persaud resisted, he freed one of his hands and struck a doctor, according to the suit. Then he was sedated, the suit says, with a breathing tube inserted through his mouth.

After Mr. Persaud regained consciousness, he was arrested, then taken — still in his hospital gown — to be booked on a misdemeanor assault charge. Gerrard M. Marrone, who was Mr. Persaud’s lawyer, got the criminal charges dropped, then helped Mr. Persaud file a civil lawsuit against the hospital.

For more discussion -- including additional facts about the case, legal discussion, and comment from the hospital -- check out the full post, by the indefatigable Sewell Chan.

Update: More about involuntary rectal exams from Slate (via WSJ Law Blog).

Forced Rectal Exam Stirs Ethics Questions [City Room / New York Times]
But I Don't Want a Rectal Exam! [Slate]

We understand there are various websites -- websites that we won't mention by name or link to here -- in which people seeking hook-ups or other sexual encounters can meet similarly minded individuals. Site visitors typically post pictures or images of certain body parts, in order to entice other visitors into arranging an encounter.

Anyway, by clicking on the box below, you can see a funny photograph that was posted on one such site. We're inferring that the individual depicted is (1) horny and (2) a law student (maybe even a law review editor).

Please note that this image is NOT completely safe for work. Although it probably won't set off automated porn filters, since it's not a link to a pornography site, you do NOT want your co-workers to be around when you access it. Be sure to do so in the privacy of your own office. If you're in a cubicle, wait until nobody else is around.

Also, please note that this image was sent to us by a reader. We did NOT find it on our own, and we do NOT visit the website from which it was taken. Thank you. [FN1]

[FN1] Yes, we fully expect this to be received with skepticism by the peanut gallery of commenters. That's okay; serving as a piñata for anonymous commenters is part of our job description.

Update: In response to this comment, yes, the usual rules apply: please don't identify this individual in the comments (if, for some disturbing reason, you actually recognize him).

Regular readers are very familiar, perhaps more than they'd like to be, with Adriana Dominguez. She's the third-year student at Brooklyn Law School who appeared nude in a video for Playboy TV. You've seen a lot of her [quasi-NSFW] in the pages of ATL.

We recently had an interesting telephone conversation with a source inside Playboy concerning Ms. Domginuez. Our source had this to say:

"This is really a non-story. So she posed naked while still in school -- big deal. It's not like she was getting triple anal!!!"

Guess that's the "gold standard" of the porn industry. If you're reading this over lunch, our apologies.

"This has no relevance to her bar admission. What bar would bother looking into this? All she has to do [to be admitted] is pass a test and not perjure herself."

Our tipster thinks this is all much ado about nothing -- a trumped-up story. And a story, our tipster speculates, that was manufactured by Adriana herself:

"Adriana wanted to get a little notoriety, sell a story. She was reaching out for fame.... [The New York Daily News] didn't call her; she hired someone to call them."

Very interesting. More from our source at Playboy, after the jump.

Well before Charney v. Sullivan & Cromwell was ever filed, the venerable law firm was dealing with some serious issues. As aptly summarized by New York Magazine's Intelligencer, "Sullivan & Cromwell lost about 30 percent of its associates in 2004 and 2005. It might take more than a raise to fix that."

From a fascinating rather interesting Wall Street Journal article by Peter Lattman (which we meant to write about yesterday, before we got swamped by all the pay raise news):

Faced with a surge in turnover of its associates, the prestigious law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP has been putting on a charm offensive to hold onto junior lawyers.

The crash course in etiquette went into high gear at a partners meeting last February. To deal with low associate morale and high attrition, a confidential slide presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal urged partners to say things like "thank you" and "good work" to associates they supervise.

What else should partners do? "Return associates' phone calls as quickly as you would a partner's or client's," said one bullet. "Be sensitive to not canceling associates' vacations," said another.

Additional bullet-points made these helpful suggestions:

"Don't tell gay associates that they like taking it up the ass (because they might be tops rather than bottoms)."

"Refrain from subjecting associates to profanity-laced tirades in which you tell them they should be fired."

Guess Eric Krautheimer and Alexandra Korry missed that meeting.

Discussion continues after the jump.

The lawsuit filed by an openly gay associate against his prestigious law firm, Charney v. Sullivan & Cromwell, has been picked up by the mainstream media -- big-time.

We expect that, after this rash of articles, the MSM will move on from this story. Rest assured, dear reader, that ATL will not.

We intend to cover the crap out of this case. If you have any information whatsoever about Aaron Charney, Sullivan & Cromwell's treatment of gay lawyers, or related subjects, please email us. No detail is too small to escape our interest. If you shared your apple juice with Aaron Charney in kindergarten, we want to hear about it.

Okay. We have carefully read this morning's coverage of the lawsuit by the New York Times, the New York Law Journal, and the Times of London -- so you don't have to. We've located the highlights, the juiciest details, and the money quotes.

The most notable news, as reported in the NYT and the NYLJ, is that Charney has been barred from the Sullivan & Cromwell offices while an internal investigation is underway. Considering the weirdness and tension that would have resulted otherwise, both Charney and the S&C partners are probably happy about his absence.

Excerpts and links to the full articles, after the jump (i.e., click on the "Continue reading" link below).

Are you a gay law student or lawyer? Are you thinking about possibly working at the New York powerhouse law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell?

Before you apply to S&C, you might want to first check out this complaint, filed today in the New York Supreme Court (a trial court, despite the misleading name).

Allegations of discrimination against gays AND Canadians (there's a difference); a headshot of the handsome plaintiff; and a link to the full complaint. All this and more awaits you, after the jump.

Apperances can be deceiving. The smiling woman above looks like a sweet old lady (or perhaps she's middle-aged).

But don't be fooled. This pleasant-looking woman opened a can of whoop-ass at the final panel discussion of the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. She rained hellfire and brimstone upon the audience, and placed at least two of the panelists on an express train to Hell.

As we mentioned earlier, that last panel "discussion" was insane. It was a no-holds-barred fight between the Federalist Society's two major constituencies: the social conservatives and the libertarians. It was a smart move to save this intra-societal slugfest until the end of the weekend.

The nominal title of the panel: "The Role of Government in Defining Our Culture." A more appropriate title for the panel: "Watch Libertarians and Social Conservatives Rant at Each Other About Gay Marriage."

The combatants participants:

Moderator cum lion tamer: Hon. Edwin Meese III, former Attorney General
For the libertarians: Dr. Charles Murray, AEI; Mr. Anthony Romero, ACLU
For the social conservatives: Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum; Professor Hadley Arkes, Amherst College
Kinda in between: Professor William Eskridge, Yale Law School
Kinda irrelevant: Hon. Walter Dellinger, currently of O'Melveny & Myers and Duke Law School (and former acting Solicitor General)

A blow-by-blow account of this intellectual battle royal, after the jump.