* Banned children’s book about Cuba, “Vamos a Cuba,” now in court. [Miami Herald]
* “Hit Movie ‘Knocked Up’ With a Lawsuit.” [WSJ Law Blog]
* Should Libby be pardoned? [LA Times via BLT]
* More pardoning analysis from NYT. [New York ]
Books
- ACLU, Books, Copyright, Free Speech, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Intellectual Property, Morning Docket, Movies, Politics
Morning Docket: 06.07.07
By B Clerker* These ads are as unfunny as the Jon Stewart skit, and both are a waste of Jack Chin’s legal credentials. [Arizona Daily Star]
* I doubt books are in any danger. Remember the Rocket? [Out of the Jungle]
* You are probably safe calling her hot and/or making phallic jokes, but please don’t make any tenuous analogies between a sex crime victim accused of “asking for it” and a beautiful and athletic object of lust. I kind of think we should be more worried about other over-exposed (but less blessed) girls like Tara Reid. [Sports Law Blog]
* This is how I want to bill my hours; I’d feel like a veritable Miss America…on To Catch a Predator. [Madisonian]
* Here’s another survival guide for summer campers associates. (Other examples were previously linked to here.) [Daily Business Review]
We reiterate last year’s request for funny or interesting stories about summer associates. We’ll use them for our new feature, Summer Associate of the Day. Like ATL’s Lawyer of the Day and Judge of the Day columns — which may be somewhat misnamed, since they don’t appear daily, but whatever — we’re most interested in people making damn fools of themselves.
For today’s Summer Associate of the Day, though, we’re going for “notable” rather than “embarrassing.” From a source:
Judging from your recent post on Shane Chase, it appears you may have a soft spot for interesting or controversial summer hires.
How’s this? The New York office of WilmerHale has hired Elizabeth Wurtzel as a summer associate. You may remember her as the controversial author of Prozac Nation and Bitch, as well as a former music critic/wild card for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. She’s also a looker — see here. She’s at Yale, almost 40 now, and still looks as good.
Who knows, maybe she’ll use Wilmer for fodder for another article/book!
Indeed. Prozac Law Firm, anyone? It seems that commenter WilmerNY could use some antidepressants.
Or maybe Wurtzel could pen a sequel to her 1998 book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women? The world of Biglaw should provide ample fodder.
Elizabeth Wurtzel [Wikipedia]
Earlier: Low-Hanging Fruit: Summer Associate Stories, Please
Hey, guess what, ATL readers? Here’s your chance to win free stuff!
Happy news: Anonymous Lawyer — Jeremy Blachman’s very funny novel about law firm life, based on his wildly popular blog — is now out in paperback. Hooray!
To learn more about the book, check out the hilarious website for Anonymous Law Firm LLP. Or read our review, from the New York Observer.
To celebrate this occasion, guess what? Thanks to the generosity of the publisher, Picador, we are giving away five copies of the paperback Anonymous Lawyer to lucky ATL readers. Exciting!
Here’s how to participate. Send a blank email to anonymouslawyergiveaway AT gmail DOT com (or just click here). We will pick five winners, at random, and notify them by email.
Good luck!
Anonymous Law Firm LLP [official website]
Anonymous Lawyer [Amazon.com]
Way Better Than Briefs: Legal Minds Turn To Blogs [New York Observer]
We realize this news broke last week. But we were on vacation — and it’s just too good to omit from these pages. From Metro.co.uk:
A father in Arkansas is looking for $20,000 in compensation for his teenage sons, after they found a book in a public library called The Whole Lesbian Sex Book.
According to Earl Adams, his sons – aged 14 and 16 – were ‘greatly disturbed’ by Felice Newman’s classic lesbian sex manual, described by its publishers as ‘the most comprehensive sex guide available for lesbians.’
And now he is demanding $10,000 from the city of Bentonville for each boy. The volume has already been withdrawn from the library shelves, and the director of the library has resigned – although she is adamant she left for personal reasons, not in response to the complaints.
So what’s the basis for the $20,000 damages claim? Per Overlawyered:
[This incident] happened, Adams said, while [his sons] were browsing for material on military academies (titter ye not!). The shock to their sensibilities from exposure to the “immoral” volume resulted in the boys being “greatly disturbed” and undergoing “many sleepless nights in our house.”
Simply ridiculous. Ask these boys in five years whether they still find lesbians “greatly disturb[ing].”
Also, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book has been critically acclaimed. Check out this review:
Cure for cancer? End to world hunger? What’s left to do after the publication of Felice Newman’s definitive guide to lesbian sex? Drawing on a wide range of published sources as well as her own notoriously graphic questionnaire circulated by e-mail… Newman has compiled an exhaustively thorough how-to guide for practices as exotic as play piercings and as pedestrian as oral sex.
Umm, who describes oral sex as “pedestrian”? Sounds like mistakes are being made in this reviewer’s household.
(Also, why are we not surprised that The Whole Lesbian Sex Book has been effusively praised on, of all websites, Amazon?)
Saw sex book by mistake; $10K apiece demanded [Overlawyered]
Man seeks compensation for lesbian trauma [Metro.co.uk]
The Whole Lesbian Sex Book [Amazon.com]
No, we’re not talking about the penis fish in Assistant Director Skinner‘s member on “Grey’s Anatomy” last night. (Although that was seriously cool.)
Via the Legal Times, we see that Judith Warner has weighed in on the “mommy wars” in her NYT blog, commenting on the genre of anti-stay-at-home-motherhood writing, of which Leslie Bennetts’ “The Feminine Mistake” and Linda Hirshman’s “Get To Work” are the prime examples.
Warner reports that Bennets, who calls non-working wives “parasites,” is the target of an online boycott spearheaded by outraged mommy-bloggers. Warner sides more with the moms than with Bennets:
[T]here is more than one way to provide for one’s family. Sometimes, for a host of reasons, ranging from a spouse’s excessive or erratic work schedule to a child’s special needs, the best way to provide for one’s family is by upping one’s own presence at home. Sometimes it just works out that one parent needs to be at home in order to keep the machinery of life from spinning apart.
Good point. There are no children in the LEWW household, and even so, our machinery of life sometimes teeters perilously close to shutdown. Unfortunately, lawyers know all about “excessive or erratic work schedules.”
A boycott of Bennets’ book may not be necessary, though; the NYT reported Wednesday that despite all the heat generated by the topic, the mommy-wars books generally have dismal sales.
* Texas legislature blocks mandatory HPV vaccine that fights cervical cancer. [MSNBC]
* Indian court issues warrant for Richard Gere due to public kiss. [CNN]
* Secretary Rice may assert executive privilege to avoid House subpoena. [MSNBC]
* Review of new Justice Thomas biography. [Newsweek]
* ALJ seeking $65 million in damages from his dry cleaners. [WSJ Law Blog]
* The headline screams “Britney!” But, in fact, this plaintiff was not wearing too-long jeans and fleeing the press — he was tasered. [Houston Chronicle]
* In my college days, this kind of activity was confined to private study booths known as “weenie bins.” We respected the books. [AP via Yahoo! News]
* Are royalties drying up, or is this (PDF) a legit lawsuit? [Los Angeles Times]
* Is teamwork encouraged in law school? Well, there is no “I” in team, but there sure is one in “Order of the Coif.” [Law School Innovation]
We recently blogged about Kiwi Camara — the young, brilliant, controversial legal scholar — and his mysteriously disappeared job offer from George Mason University School of Law. Camara is a legal Doogie Howser who was 16 when he entered Harvard Law School. At HLS, he caused an uproar after dropping the N-bomb in a group outline. He has apologized repeatedly and profusely for that mistake; but it continues to dog him, years later.
The Washington Post originally broke the story about Camara’s GMU appointment falling through. But their story may have been erroneous, at least in one respect. The Post reported:
At George Mason’s law school, the faculty had authorized [Dean Daniel] Polsby to hire Camara as an assistant professor, but the dean wanted to first see what students, alumni and others thought. He scheduled a town hall meeting for last night, but the meeting was nixed after Camara’s application was withdrawn.
We contacted Camara for comment. He explained:
I was never instructed to withdraw my application, and I never did so. My candidacy was ended by George Mason…
Also, there was a week’s lapse between my job talk and when the faculty voted me an offer (to be precise, voted to authorize the dean to extend an offer). Surely they would have investigated before, rather than after, voting me an offer — and especially before going public and thereby triggering the recent media coverage.
Indeed. This is all very strange.
More discussion, including an interesting mini-scoop from Camara, after the jump.
It seems that LLM students are an endless source of stories — and not just those continually squabbling Harvard LLMs. In advance of our upcoming visit to Columbia Law School, here’s an amusing little anecdote about LLMs at CLS:
I practically fell to the floor laughing. I know Coffee is a Corporate God, but come on. Do you really get your Con Law book signed by Larry Tribe or your Admin book signed by Tom Merrill? Besides, how could you worship someone that turned to teaching only after he failed in becoming a partner at Cravath?
[Ed. note: That last sentence is merely the speculative opinion of our tipster. Another CLS source tells us, "There are some who claim that, but I don't believe there is any real basis for it."]
Coffee is an extremely colorful professor. You really should do a small piece on him and you’ll get some interesting stories.
If you have anything funny or interesting to share about Professor Coffee, please feel free to email us (subject line: “John Coffee”). Thanks.
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