Hopefully you paid attention during middle school sex-ed, because you’re unlikely to learn about the birds and bees at law school.
According a recently released survey by Law Students for Reproductive Justice, only 18 percent of U.S. law schools have offered reproductive rights law courses over the last seven years. More specifically: there have been 37 separate courses and instructor-led reading groups taught at least once, offered at 32 schools located in 17 different states.
Is that good? As future legislators, jurors, advocates or defenders of reproductive rights, do you think you need formal training in the subject? Or is study of the overarching foundations of our legal system sufficient to allow you to take the next Planned Parenthood case that comes into town — or at least talk intelligently about it at parties?
I’m surprised we’re not seeing more of this. As TSA continues to scan and/or feel-up everybody who gets on a plane, raising questions under the Fourth Amendment, an Oklahoman woman stripped down to her underwear to prove a point.
According to a report by News 9 – Oklahoma, Dr. Tammy Banovac, 52, arrived at the Oklahoma City airport wearing an overcoat and in a wheelchair. When she got to security, she removed the coat, revealing her curvaceous figure — clad in nothing but a black bra and panties. She refused to go through the metal detector, so she had to be subjected to a pat-down.
Is there video? Would I be posting this if there wasn’t?
Taking off your clothes and getting fondled is usually fun… except when it happens at the airport. Going through security before flights has gotten increasingly humiliating over the years. Watching people prepare themselves for inspection by stripping off their shoes, belts, jackets, and sweaters is like the least sexy and most frustrating strip tease ever.
The TSA’s new whole-body imaging machines make the stripping much more efficient. There are two types of scanners — using either millimeter wave or backscatter technology — which show a person without their clothes on, to reveal a glock, bomb-making materials, or smaller, less intimidating equipment. There are now over 300 of the machines in over 60 airports.
The scanners have been controversial for both privacy and health reasons. Some people aren’t comfortable with a random TSA worker seeing them sans clothing, despite promised privacy protections, such as faces being blurred and the TSA officer who views the image not seeing you in person. And some frequent flyers fear the radiation risks that come with being X-rayed on a regular basis.
A privacy civil rights group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is hoping to stay the scans with a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security…
West Wing fans will get a kick out of this. Liberals will get a huge kick out of this. Republican leaders who hope to take back the Senate will cry softly to themselves.
The Tea Party darling and Republican nominee for Senator from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has struck again.
Last week, we learned that Christine O’Donnell couldn’t name a recent Supreme Court decision she disagreed with. That was funny and embarrassing, but Lat did a good job defending O’Donnell and pointing out her recovery from the flub.
She’ll get no such quarter from me.
During a debate at Widener Law School, O’Donnell and Democratic Senatorial nominee Chris Coons mixed it up over teaching creationism in schools. Coons, on the defensive because Dems are too dumb to say “creationism is not science” and move on, said that a fundamental principle of this country is the separation of church and state. O’Donnell, after a pause, asked: “Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?” The crowd laughed, O’Donnell started grinning like an idiot, and, well — watch the clip for yourself, in which O’Donnell shares her thoughts on some other Constitutional amendments…
Tech-savvy people who love porn seem to know that one can avoid trouble by keeping the dirty stuff on an external hard drive (an effective tactic, except if you’re an SEC lawyer).
Non-tech-savvy people don’t think about this. And those same people are the types who take their laptops to the Geek Squad when they need computer help. Such a trip to Best Buy led to a 10-year prison sentence for Alabama resident Corey Beantee Melton.
In 2005, Melton sought the help of Best Buy’s Geek Squad because he was having trouble connecting to the Internet. Their initial assessment indicated the problem was originating from Melton’s DVD drive, so he left his laptop in their care and went on his merry way.
When the Geeks did their diagnostic scans of the computer, they found a pesky virus that appeared to be linked to specific files on Melton’s computer. Those particular files had names of a “very explicit nature,” says a judicial opinion in the case (hat tip: Eric Goldman for sending the opinion my way — see an old post of his for examples of filenames of an explicit nature).
The Geeks freaked — and called in the boys in blue, as they suspected they’d found child porn…
The drafters could have written the Constitution as a list of specific rules and said, “That’s all, folks!” Instead, they wrote a document full of broadly written guarantees….
(Please note that Quotes of the Day are selected for being interesting, thought-provoking, or funny — not because we necessarily agree with them. Personally I’m inclined to the view that originalism isn’t perfect but is probably better than any of the alternatives.)
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski gives a thumbs up to privacy for the poor
A user’s manual that’s 200+ years old can be difficult to apply to modern technologies. Thus, it’s been a challenge for judges interpreting the Fourth Amendment as it applies to police surveillance via GPS tracking devices on cars.
There has been a plethora of precedents set across the country as to whether slapping a GPS tracker on a car is considered a “search” and whether a warrant is needed. A Wisconsin state court decided last year that warrantless GPS surveillance is okay. Within a week of the Wisconsin decision, a New York state court disagreed. More recently, the D.C. Circuit ruled that GPS tracking is indeed a search, and introduced what the Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr called a “mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment,” i.e., that a series of discrete facts may be public, but their aggregation may violate privacy rights. Kerr dissed the D.C. Circuit’s mosaic ruling, but Cato’s Julian Sanchez was a fan.
The Ninth Circuit got in on the GPS-Fourth Amendment throwdown too. As noted by How Appealing, a Ninth Circuit panel — consisting of two of the court’s more conservative members, Diarmuid O’Scannlain and Randy Smith, and Judge Charles Wolle (S.D. Iowa), sitting my designation — ruled that police officers who placed a GPS device on the underbed of a suspected drug dealer’s car while it was parked outside of his house did not violate his constitutional rights.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski was not happy about their decision. He wrote an angry dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc, accusing the judges of “cultural elitism,” by granting privacy rights to the rich but not to the poor…
We touched upon this issue in Morning Docket, both today and yesterday: Is Steven Slater — the JetBlue flight attendant who reportedly unleashed a profanity-laced tirade over the airplane’s public-address system, before fleeing the plane via the emergency-evacuation chute, beer in hand — a criminal?
Slater was hit with felony charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment, on the reasoning that the deployed evacuation chute could have hit someone below. But his lawyer argues that there was no endangerment, since Slater — a flight attendant with about 20 years of experience, since he entered the business at age 19 — checked to make sure nobody was below before deploying the slide.
Let’s explore the legal issues a bit more — with the help of one of our favorite commentators, memoirist turned litigatrix Elizabeth Wurtzel….
The biggest legal news story of the past week — even bigger than the confirmation of Elena Kagan, which was widely expected — was the ruling of Chief Judge Vaughn Walker (N.D. Cal.) in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Judge Walker struck down California’s Proposition 8, a voter-passed ban on gay marriage, citing due process and equal protection grounds.
The decision was popular with Above the Law readers. In our poll, about 80 percent of you expressed support. But how many of you have actually read the entire 136-page ruling? If you’re looking for some fun this weekend, curl up with our special ATL edition of the opinion.
We’ve uploaded a version of the decision in fully hyperlinked form, i.e., with links to the authorities cited by Judge Walker. It’s available below….
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.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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Hopefully you paid attention during middle school sex-ed, because you’re unlikely to learn about the birds and bees at law school.
