* No Boomer, no! Judge refuses to help a Pennsylvania man become a dog. [Post Gazette]
* Women are breaking through the GC glass ceiling. [Corporate Counsel]
* Just a friendly flick? “Bottom-flicking” Georgia judge retires, while clarifying that he does not consider improper touching to be sexual harassment. [ABA Journal]
* This week in the law: Prop 8, Google and Verizon v. net neutrality, the broken justice system and the bad science which serves it. [Infamy or Praise]
* University of Chicago Law School antitrust professor Randy Picker jumps on the taco truck bandwagon. [Chicago Tribune]
* First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams takes on Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton, dog fighting, and freedom of speech. [Big Think]
* And you thought you had a hard time explaining a work gap on your résumé… [Piercing the Veil / Forbes]
* Before you exit Biglaw, make sure to check these 50 items off your bucket list. And then go ahead, deploy the slide and take a few brewskis for the road. [Technolawyer]
* Do you not understand that whole Google-Verizon net neutrality dealio? Here’s a guide. [Concurring Opinions]
* Career alternatives for attorneys: playwright? Arlene Violet, former Rhode Island attorney general, has written a musical about the Mafia that’s being produced. [Providence Journal]
* National security letter gag comes off after six years. Well, sort of. [Wired]
* Professor Brian Fitzpatrick wonders: Do class action lawyers make too little? [SSRN]
* Are you thinking about starting your own law practice, but intimidated by the administrative work involved? Read this. [NexFirm (sponsored content)]
* Judge John Walter (C.D. Cal.) has rejected Bill Lerach’s proposal to rack up community service hours by teaching law at UC Irvine. [National Law Journal via WSJ Law Blog]
* The American Bar Association (ABA) has come out in favor of marriage equality (i.e., same-sex marriage). [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Former Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) — who was a lawyer (Harvard Law 1950), and who created a lot of work for his lawyers, at Williams & Connolly — was killed in a small plane crash. Senator Stevens, R.I.P. [Washington Post]
* Is attractiveness an asset or a liability for women searching for jobs? [Reuters Life]
* And what about if you’re a professor — is pulchritude a plus or a minus? [TaxProf Blog]
* Speaking of professors, they’re getting fed up with plagiarism — but their schools don’t want them to flunk students for the offense. [ABA Journal]
Our recent suggestion that Justice Clarence Thomas consider a presidential run in 2012 has caused some chatter in the legal and politicalblogosphere (as well as the ATL comments section, where the commenter “President Obama” took all comers). Despite this healthy buzz, CT has not yet indicated any plans to slap a campaign poster on his RV this summer.
We submitted inquiries about our proposal to Justice Thomas, through the Supreme Court’s Publication Information Office, and to Mrs. Thomas, through Liberty Central, her new conservative nonprofit. Neither had any comment. We hear through the grapevine, however, that the idea of “Thomas for President” has been proposed to the justice by clerks in years past (and not embraced by the justice; apparently His Honor is content to remain a justice, despite his conspicuous silence from the bench).
Law professors had interesting things to say about our idea of a Thomas presidential run. George Mason law professor Ilya Somin took us very seriously (perhaps a little too seriously). Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet pointed out that Charles Evan Hughes isn’t the only SCOTUS justice who has previously given up a seat at One First Street for a shot at the Oval Office. And although we suggested that Thomas shed his robes to make his run for the Republican presidential ticket, UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge noted that CT could keep them on…
A source at QE recently sent us an email with this dramatic subject heading: “A rapist among us.. Quinn Emanuel.” Here’s the allegation:
[Earlier this month] our Records Manager, [name redacted - hereinafter "Got-a-Record Manager"], was fired. He’s been employed at Quinn for over 2 years. Termination Reason: He was a convicted rapist. He’s been convicted since 1987. He was charged with sodomy and first degree rape. I shudder to think that we had a rapist among us and the firm who claims to do background check on employees did not even catch this. An employee did a simple Google search on him and came up with it…. How did the firm miss this?
The tipster provided links to Got-a-Record Manager’s (1) LinkedIn profile, showing his employment at Quinn Emanuel as a “Records Manager,” and (2) a sex offender profile on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement website, containing Got-a-Record Manager’s name and photo. If you enter Got-a-Record Manager’s (uncommon) name into Google, the first result in his sex offender registration and the third result is his LinkedIn profile.
How did this come up? According to our source, “People just like to Google others for fun, and this time someone got a surprise.” Indeed.
Was Got-a-Record’s criminal record “a surprise” to the powers-that-be at QE? We reached out to the firm for comment….
In his speaking tours around the country, Clarence Thomas has a lot to say — sometimes critical things to say, about his fellow justices’ approach to oral argument and the lack of alma mater diversity among the Court’s clerks, for example.
But when Thomas is back at One First Street, sitting on the bench, he gets quiet. Very quiet. He hasn’t spoken a word during oral argument in over four years. He’s said before that it’s because he doesn’t see the point in badgering the attorneys arguing before the High Court. But we think there may be another reason: he hates his job. He’s suggested it himself.
In the Washington Post, we set forth a proposal for him: step down. And seek the Republican presidential nomination for 2012.
A bit about our reasoning, and a reader poll, after the jump.
Now that the question of Elena Kagan’s sexuality has been settled (kind of), critical attention seems to be turning to her lack of judicial and litigation experience. Although ABA President Carolyn Lamm tells NBC that she doesn’t think “not being a judge is particularly persuasive one way or the other,” some Republican senators have expressed concern over the fact that she’s never warmed a bench.
It’s not as if Kagan doesn’t know what a courtroom looks like, though. She clerked on the powerful and prestigious D.C. Circuit, for the legendary liberal J. Abner Mikva, and then spent time at One First Street, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall (OT 1987). As solicitor general, she’s argued before the High Court a half dozen times (although she wasn’t able to win over the Five of the Nine in Citizens United v. FEC).
But hey, at least she has a law degree. Not that she needs it to sit on the bench at One First Street…
Gerald Ung, the Temple University law school student arrested in January for shooting another man five times in front of the Old City Fox TV studio, this morning was ordered to stand trial on attempted murder and aggravated assault charges.
Philadelphia Municipal Judge David Shuter dismissed two gun charges because Ung had a legal permit to carry a gun from his native state of Virginia.
The article contains some additional (and apparently new) details about the underlying incident….
Today Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill to testify before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, regarding the Court’s budget. It started out jovially, with Justice Thomas poking fun at Justice Breyer for agreeing with him for the very first time (at the 15 minute mark, regarding taking questions from the committee).
But an hour in, things got testy between the congressmen and the justices. Josh Blackman brought to our attention that the issue of Supreme Court clerk diversity came up. Congressman Ander Crenshaw asked the Justices why the members of the Elect are overwhelmingly graduates from Yale and Harvard. He delicately asked if they’re more qualified or if there are a disproportionate number of them applying for clerkships.
This led to a fifteen-minute discussion about clerkship diversity that started with alma maters, then moved to ethnic diversity. In response, Thomas threw the other SCOTUS justices under the bus (e.g., “MY clerks are diverse”), then threw feeder judges under the bus, and then threw law schools under the bus (e.g., “that pool comes from the law schools”).
But then Congresswoman Barbara Lee hit him with the bus…
UC-Berkeley once again topped Michigan in the (leaked so still unofficial) U.S. News law school rankings. Boalt Hall also dominated the Wolverines this month when it comes to secret society activity.
Whereas, members of Michigan’s “Barrister’s Society” threw their dirty laundry o’er the rooftops, resulting in campus-wide derision, recent activities by Berkeley’s “Gun Club” have left their fellow students appropriately mystified and intrigued.
A Boaltie tells us:
Last week, flyers featuring John Yoo’s face, with the phrase “I’m sorry, for everything” were posted around Boalt Hall.
Everyone assumed it was just the usual torture-memo protesters who flock to Berkeley, in the hope that it’s still the Bezerkeley of the 1960s, only to find a bunch of JD and MBA students hurrying by, scowling at their unshowered ways.
On Tuesday morning, the flyer reappeared in the student center, attached to the King of Beers….
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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* No Boomer, no! Judge refuses to help a Pennsylvania man become a dog. [Post Gazette]
