* Utah college student can’t use “global warming” as a defense. Tim DeChristopher was indicted in April on felony charges for interfering with a government auction and making false representations when he bid $1.8 million for land near Utah’s national parks knowing he could not make good on the bids. [New York Times]

* ATL grammar police will hate this ruling. A misplaced modifier is not a $2.45-million mistake. “[W]hile misplaced modifiers are syntactical sins righteously condemned by English teachers everywhere, our job is not to critique the parties’ grammar, but only, if possible, to adduce and enforce their contract’s meaning,” wrote Judge Gorsuch of the 10th Circuit. [Courthouse News Service]

* Chevron sues lawyer who sued Chevron. [San Francisco Chronicle]

* LA city attorney wants $3 million reimbursement for Michael Jackson’s memorial service. [Associated Press]

* Cheering the Yarvard Crimdogs. [Yale Daily News]

* Ponzi scheme crackdown in California. [KCRA.com]

* FIU law student missing. [Associated Press]

* SCOTUS will decide whether juveniles can get life sentences for non-homicide crimes. [New York Times]

* Another law professor is heading to court. Columbia’s Philip Bobbitt sued the law firm formerly known as Milberg Weiss this week for allegedly messing up a class action suit. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Blind gamer sues Sony because its video games discriminate against the visually impaired. Perhaps just stick to Rock Band? [True/Slant]

* Ex-SEC lawyer pleads guilty to helping Marc Dreier scam hedge funds. [Bloomberg]

* Kamee B. Verdrager is taking her wrongful termination suit against Mintz Levin to Suffolk County Court. Verdrager alleges she was fired for becoming preggers. Longtime readers may remember this as the “I suppose we have your honeymoon to blame for this” case. [Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (subscription)]

* J-Lo would like to keep her sex tape on the downlow. [True/Slant]

* Scott Rothstein’s assets seized. If you know a lawyer who has eight houses worth $18 million, several luxury cars, a yacht, and two other boats, you might know a lawyer running a Ponzi scheme. [Associated Press]

As we’ve noted in Morning Docket for the past two days, lawyer Scott Rothstein is in all kinds of trouble in Florida. From what we understand, it’s Marc Dreier redux, the sunshine state version.

We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the story, but as the Bard would say, the sh** hath hitteth the fan this week.

The WSJ Law Blog is similarly perplexed by the scandal (See What’s Going on at Rothstein Rosenfeldt? Part I and Part II).

Scott Rothstein, a founding partner of Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, has been out of the country for the last few days, making this all even more confusing. He just flew back into Miami an hour ago and police have surrounded his firm. We give you context after the jump.

* Has Justice Sotomayor put Clarence Thomas over the edge? While speaking at the University of Alabama, Justice Thomas said he wishes that the other justices would STFU during oral arguments. He also complained that there are too many Ivy Leaguers on the SCOTUS bench. [Associated Press]

* One of the beneficiaries at the top of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was found on the bottom of a pool Sunday. [New York Times]

* Who has the rights to the treasures of the Titanic? [Associated Press]

* Proposition 8 proponents have to turn over their campaign strategy documents. [San Francisco Chronicle]

* An anarchist social worker believes his constitutional rights were violated during the G-20 meetings in Pittsburgh. Police raided his home for breaking an anti-riot law via Twitter. [Wired]

* Doo-doo diligence? Proskauer Rose and Holland & Knight have both been hit with legal malpractice suits. [Miami Herald via ABA Journal]

* Sometimes ignoring something does make it better. [Ars Technica]

* From the inane adventures in social networking file: Poll on whether Obama should be killed leads to Facebook suspension and Secret Service investigation. [CNN]

* No one wants to prosecute this torture porn case. [Politico]

* The SCOTUS justices will be gazing out toward the Mojave desert this week. [Washington Post]

* An argument for reading the comments section at Above The Law. Cox Smith attorneys are three times as fun as Ballard Spahr’s. [Above The Law comments]

* The laws for the holy day. [Houston Chronicle]

* “Like a lawyer, William Safire understood the voodoo involved in the use of language.” [Law and More]

* Has the law finally caught up with statutory rape convict and acclaimed film director Roman Polanski? [ABC News]

* The Kardashian-Odom marriage might be more of a symbolic union. [New York Post]

* A New York lawyer is accused of running an adoption Ponzi scheme. [Newsday]

* When it comes to pay, it’s better to be a state judge than a federal judge in California. [Los Angeles Times]

* K&L Gates chairman Peter Kalis advises would-be law school students to reconsider. [Wall Street Journal via ABA Journal]

* New role for the Justice Department: Keeper of secrets (or not). [Washington Post]

* California AG Jerry Brown is going after one of Madoff’s friends in the golden state. [Courthouse News Service and American Lawyer]

* Ben Roethlisberger’s lawyers want a Nevada court to sanction the attorney who brought rape charges against the Steelers quarterback. [The Huddle/USA Today]

* An E.U. court deals a blow to the environment. [New York Times]

* Google responds to the Justice Department’s concerns and will edit its Digital Books settlement. [The Recorder]

* The Patent Troll Tracker case finally settles. [IP Law & Business]

Frank DiPascali, the former CFO — chief fraudulent officer? — for Ponzi schemer extraordinaire Bernard Madoff, pleaded guilty today to a variety of charges, including securities fraud, falsifying records, and international money laundering.

Read more and comment over at Going Concern.

Guilty Madoff CFO Update [Going Concern]

* Just for Captain Canuck, we acknowledge that the differences between Canadian law and American law are about more than what you can legally do with a moose. [Legal Lad]

* The movement to ban anonymous commenters failed to gain another follower, but anonymous insults are still pretty wussy. [Simple Justice]

* The fair use doctrine is dissected in this podcast. [Intellectual Property Colloquium]

* Some dude hung out a shingle — on Craigslist — and now he’s making all the unemployed attorneys who are sitting around drinking until the economy turns around look bad. In middle school, this kid would have a hard time finding someone to sit with at lunchtime. [ABA Journal]

* Harry Markopolos — the Madoff Ponzi scheme investigator — fulfilled a mother’s worst nightmare about clean underwear. [Going Concern]

* A Blawg Review from a land down-under. You better run, you better take cover.
[Duncan Bucknell Company via Blawg Review]

A certain big-time lawyer turned big-time fraudster — Marc Dreier, aka “Mini-Madoff” — will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars. He must miss his days of house arrest, when he got to hole up in 34C — not just a great bra size, but also a great apartment — at One Beacon Court.

That apartment is no longer his. The New York Law Journal reports:

The luxury midtown Manhattan apartment of disgraced attorney Marc S. Dreier was sold at auction for $8.2 million, about $2 million less than the $10.43 million he paid in 2007.

The sale of the condominium at 151 E. 58th St. came just one week after Southern District Judge Jed S. Rakoff sentenced Mr. Dreier to 20 years in prison for orchestrating a multi-year Ponzi scheme that fleeced more than $400 million from clients of Dreier LLP and investors to whom he sold bogus promissory notes.

Forty-six bidders registered for the auction held at Southern District Bankruptcy Court. In just five minutes, the price of Mr. Dreier’s 3,000-square-foot apartment in the Bloomberg Building at One Beacon Court rocketed to $8.15 million from an initial bid of $3 million.

Eight million isn’t chump change. But look at everything the buyer is getting!

The long (inter)national Marc Dreier nightmare is almost at an end. He’s been sentenced to 20 years for defrauding his clients and investors. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports:

Prosecutors had asked for a 145-year sentence, which harked back to the 150-year sentence U.S. District Judge Denny Chin readily handed down to Bernie Madoff, whose massive Ponzi scheme drained the bank accounts of countless investors. In both cases defense attorneys sought a fraction of that. Dreier’s attorney sought no more than 12-and-a-half years.

But Dreier drew U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who has been highly critical of the length of sentences under the federal sentencing guidelines, particularly in white collar crime cases.

Bernie Madoff gets 150 years, but Dreier only gets 20? Justice may be blind, but she’s certainly not deaf.

Breaking: Marc Dreier Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison [WSJ Law Blog]

Earlier: Is Marc Dreier Almost As Bad as Bernie Madoff?

* Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is opening a new firm with four offices in Boston, St. Louis, Austin, and Dallas, each to be headed by Bush appointed federal prosecutors. [The Wall Street Journal]

* The Supreme Court had a an energetic discussion yesterday about the use of race in hiring and promotion when arguing about the New Haven firefighter’s case. [The New York Times]

* A judge ruled that Blockbuster will have to go to court after allegedly sharing customer’s video purchases with their Facebook friends as part of a targeted advertising campaign. [Geek.com]

* Former broker Kosta Kovachev pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring with Marc Drieir. [Reuters]

* The New York tax lawyer who killed his wife and two daughters before committing suicide may have run a $20 million ponzi scheme. [Bloomberg.com]

* Woody Allen wants $10 million from American Apparel for putting Woody-Allen look-a-likes on billboards without his permission. [The New York Post]

* The Supreme Court will decide if a federal law that prohibits selling videos depicting animal cruelty is a violation of free speech. [The Los Angeles Times]

* A Georgia Lawyer pleaded guilty to a $28 million ponzi scheme, which defrauded 125 people, including some senior citizens who gave their life savings. [The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

* Dole fruit has accused attorneys of recruiting people to give fake testimony that pesticides sterilized them when they worked on Nicaraguan banana farms. [The Los Angeles Times]

* Civil Libertarians are starting to question Obama, as he resembles Bush on issues related to terror detainees. [Time]

Ed. Note: Sorry for the delay. We’re having technical issues this morning. Please bear with us! (And, no, “technical” does not translate to “hungover.”)

* The Iranian court will consider the appeal of the Iranian-American journalist who was sentenced to eight years in prison for “spying on Iran for Washington.” [The New York Times]

* The Supreme Court will take up a case in Arizona “that could limit a federal court’s power to tell states to spend more money to educate students who aren’t proficient in English.” [The Associated Press]

* U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway from Missouri is leaving her job to start a law firm with former U.S. attorney general and Missouri governor John D. Ashcroft. Ashcroft’s apparent lack of ambition could pose a problem for the new firm. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

* Texas financier R. Allen Stanford, orchestrator of that other Ponzi scheme, has asked a judge to unlock $10 million in frozen assets so he can hire lawyers to save him from his inevitable demise. “It’s not fair,” said Houston criminal defense attorney Dick Deguerin, who is defending Stanford on the “hope” that he will have enough money to pay him. “We’re going to need lawyers all over the world.” Keep hoping, Deguerin—and dreaming of money. [Bloomberg]

* A South Korean blogger, Park Dae-sung, a.k.a. Minerva, a.k.a. “the prophet of doom,” who predicted sharp falls in the stock market and the collapse of Lehman brothers was acquitted Monday of spreading false information…because he was obviously right. [Reuters]

* The receiver appointed to locate Dreier’s assets recovered more than $100 million, including $39 million in art, a 121-foot yacht, three properties in the Hamptons, and a sand dollar. [Bloomberg.com]

* A month before he was accused of helping R. Allen Stanford run an $8 billion ponzi scheme, he sent him a text: “I am praying for you.” Now his fellow church members are praying for him. [Bloomberg.com]

* An Illinois attorney was charged with stealing more than $100,000 from his firm from a scheme that lasted from 2001-2006. Prosecutors say they should be able to pay back the firm with loose change found in between couch cushions in Dreiers yacht and three houses. [The Chicago Tribune]

* Three families have filed suit against the District Attorney after he threatened to charge them with child sex abuse for “sexting” (sending semi-nude photos to people on their cell phone). [The New York Times]

* Was it the recession that killed WolfBlock? This reporter says it was “a past they couldn’t escape.” Sounds sinister, but it was just bad management. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]

* Some small investors with bad luck repeatedly sue companies with allegedly poor management in an attempt to hold corporate officers accountable for their losses. Is that good or bad? [The Wall Street Journal]

* SCOTUS will look at the separation of church and state when they decide whether “a cross to honor fallen soldiers can stand in a national preserve in California.” [The Los Angeles Times]

* Lawyers say Madoff must have had help with his Ponzi scheme. [Bloomberg]

* Attorney General Eric Holder visited Guantanamo yesterday to see what is needed to close the prison. [The Associated Press]

* Meanwhile, a Pentagon official who inspected Guantanamo at Obama’s request is under fire from human rights activists for filing a report (which declares Gitmo humane) that is little more than good public relations for the administration. [The New York Times]

* What do you do when your boss gets indicted for securities fraud? You get another job. A team of seven bankruptcy lawyers left Dreier LLP for Epstein Becker Green. [EBG]

* A federal judge encouraged the Obama administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a case against 11 Vietnam War Veterans accused of trying to overthrow Laos’s communist government. [The Associated Press]

* Judge says: UBS must respond to the U.S. lawsuit seeking disclosure of 52,000 names of people who allegedly used Swiss accounts for tax evasion. [Bloomberg]

Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: time to announce Above the Law’s top two stories for 2008, on the gossip front. We’ve also been recapping the top stories on the business side of the fence, but stories about the business of law are available from many other outlets. Juicy law firm gossip is harder to come by.

Our two leading gossip stories were broken here at ATL. They were subsequently picked up by mainstream media outlets, but we covered them first.

Read about the two stories, after the jump.

* SCOTUS may hear the case of a Texas woman who claims that an extreme religious group forced her to “exorcise her demons”, disturbing her so much that she later attempted suicide. [The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

* On Wednesday, the federal court in Manhattan will start considering information that will infect the investor’s in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Furthermore, Judge Louis L. Stanton of the U.S. District Court will consider whether people who invested in “feeder funds” with other Wall Streeters who invested in Madoff’s fund will be covered under the Securities Investor Protection Corporation—a federal fund that protects investors in cases like these. [The New York Times]

* The federal government announced a settlement over a developers who build projects on wetlands in Michigan’s Midland and Bay counties—a case that has gone on for decades. [The Chicago Tribune]

*Former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerick pleaded not guilty in a federal court to charges of tax evasion and corruption. [CNN.com]

* Store vendors angered by department store’s mark-downs may make the stores cover more of the losses. If they succeed, they could get back $ 1.2 billion from Macy’s, Saks Inc., Dillard’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s and JC Penney. [Bloomberg.com]

* “The 6th Circuit struck down a vehicle safety law in Michigan that banned drivers from hanging any view-obstructing baubles from their rearview mirrors. [Courthouse News Service]

* A couple is suing United Airlines for “overserving” the husband by serving him red wine every 20 minutes on the flight. They say this is what caused him to beat his wife on the way to customs. [Chicago Tribune]

* “Federal judges in some parts of the United States are delaying the swearing-in of new citizens, apparently so that courts can keep millions of dollars in naturalization fees paid by immigrants, according to a new government report.” [The Washington Post]

* A Rhode Island family sued their cable provider for hooking up the Playboy channel, which plays hardcore porn. [Courthouse News Service]

* Investors in Madoff’s ponzi scheme might be able to get back some of their money by filing for a U.S. tax refund. As if the U.S. government isn’t paying out enough money these days…[Bloomberg.com]

* The high court in Europe says a UK couple should be bound by the ruling of judge in southern Cyprus that they demolish their vacation home. The house is built on land that belongs to a Greek Cypriot who claims it was taken from him during the Turkish invasion in 1974. [BBC News]

* Poker chip thief sniped!!! (thank goodness) [Norwich Bulletin]

* Budweiser (Bud) beer cannot corner the market on it’s name anymore. The EU high court took away Anheuser-Busch’s famous trademark—a big win for Czech beer company “Budvar”. [Associated Press]

* The Supreme Court breathed life in to the lawsuit of former Gitmo detainees, British Muslims who want top officials (including Donald Rumsfeld) held responsible for their torture at the prison. [The Los Angeles Times]

* Bankruptcy filings are up 30% this year, and New York filings are happening at a faster rate than the rest of the Nation. Maybe this time Wall Street is suffering more than mainstreet? (doubtful). [The New York Times]

* Madoff’s lawyer John R. Wing, known as “Rusty” says Madoff’s family had nothing to do with the ponzi scheme (am I the only one who thinks of the Fonz every time I hear ponzi scheme). [The New York Times]

* A Senator says the U.S. Treasury may adopt a plan that would force automakers into bankruptcy if they can’t make it without the government’s help. [Bloomberg]