As we mentioned in Morning Docket today, Gawker has a story about the Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, smoking crack.
It’s a delightful tale about how a conservative was apparently caught on a camera phone smoking crack, slurring his speech, and calling people fa**ots. The full video isn’t available, because of course the people who shot it want money. If you want to contribute to that cause, Gawker has set up a Kickstarter fund to buy the video.
That’s all well and good. Personally I would now like to see Anthony Weiner and Rob Ford face off to become the next mayor of Buffalo. But this afternoon I really want to focus on the lawyer Rob Ford apparently hired to try to kill the Gawker story. Because Saul Goodman, he is not…
* There’s been a changing of the guard at Sidley Austin. Carter Phillips, one of our nation’s preeminent appellate advocates, is now the sole chair of the firm’s executive committee after a one-year stint as co-chair. Congrats! [The Recorder]
* You should really try to make the most of your summers during law school, even after your first year. Because duh, in case you weren’t aware, it’ll probably help you to get a job later on. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News & World Report]
* It looks like the trolls attorneys behind Prenda Law got benchslapped in the worst of ways — complete with a multitude of Star Trek references. We’ll likely have more on this later today. [Ars Technica]
* The California Supreme Court just ruined everyone’s high, because it ruled that cities and counties can ban medical marijuana dispensaries. Smoke ‘em while you’ve got ‘em, stoners. [Associated Press]
* Justin Bieber is being sued for copyright infringement, along with his musical mentor, Usher. Tween girl mob: ASSEMBLE! Defend your pop idol’s honor; after all, he just needed somebody to love. [Reuters]
Ed. note: This is the second installment of Righteous Indignation, our new column for conservative-minded lawyers.
In Pennsylvania earlier this week, the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell drew to a close. Gosnell, a West Philadelphia abortion doctor, is accused of murdering four children who were allegedly born alive after Gosnell’s efforts to abort them. The jury now considers four counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of the children, along with one count of third-degree murder for the death of Karnamaya Mongar, a Bhutanese refugee to whom Gosnell allegedly gave a lethal overdose of Demerol. He also faces twenty-three counts of performing illegal late-term abortions. If convicted of first-degree murder, Gosnell faces the death penalty.
Trial witnesses, including clinic workers, offered gruesome testimony. Some of the allegations: the lethal drug Gosnell injected into the babies in utero failed to stop their hearts, and they emerged from their mothers’ birth canals breathing, wriggling, even crying; Gosnell then “snipped” the backs of the babies’ necks with scissors, severing their spinal cords; and Gosnell joked about the size of the “fetuses” whose spinal cords he cut, including a baby who he said was big enough “to walk me home.”
A mother of another of Gosnell’s alleged victims reportedly delivered her baby into a toilet while waiting for Dr. Gosnell. A clinic worker testified that the child made swimming motions in the toilet bowl before another employee snipped the child’s neck. Prosecutors dubbed Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic a “House of Horrors”….
Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a Wise Latina who seems to have a history with drugs. In her memoir, My Beloved World (affiliate link), she recounts the time her ex-husband tried to make her pop pills on their wedding night. She also tells the tale of unknowingly driving her cousin to a drug den (where he apparently did heroin) while she was working as a prosecutor. Later in her career, she asked about cocaine from the bench — specifically, if it could be made into a rock form without using a base.
From pills, to heroin, to crack cocaine, it seems like Sotomayor’s got all of her bases covered when it comes to drugs, but she claims not to have used any of them. Well, what about marijuana?
Come on, it’s just a little pot. Everyone smokes pot. Hell, 47 percent of our readers admitted to smoking it habitually. Some would wager that even Supreme Court justices smoke weed in the privacy of their own homes (they don’t sniff glue, though; ask AMK about that one). But no, not Sonia Sotomayor — that goody two-shoes doesn’t puff, puff, or pass, and she even quit her 3½-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
So then how does this woman know so freakin’ much about joints?
* The Dukes of Hazzard and Braveheart cited in the Eleventh Circuit. Other circuits, the gauntlet has been thrown down. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Dave’s not here, man. Probably not the smartest stoner on the planet. [Lowering the Bar]
* Former Skadden attorney loses her appeal claiming that insomnia constituted a disability. It’s a setback for her, but nothing worth losing sleep over. [National Law Journal]
* The Second Circuit agreed with every other court that heard the motion and denied the effort to recuse Magistrate Judge Peck from the Da Silva Moore predictive coding case. [IT-Lex]
* Maybe it’s time for law professors to get off their duffs and try helping out their unemployed students directly. [Concurring Opinions]
* Chief Judge Easterbrook allows a $25K student-loan discharge for a “destitute” paralegal. The educational-industrial complex is not going to sit still for this. [ABA Journal]
* Saira Rao, of Chambermaid (affiliate link) fame, has a new publishing venture — check it out. [Kickstarter]
* Thieves made off with 5.5 tons of Nutella. Damn you Danny Ocean! [CBS News]
* Don’t try to play Baseketball in Canton, Ohio. [Legal Juice]
* The SEC finally allows companies to distribute disclosures via social media. Welcome to the 21st Century, SEC. [IT-Lex]
* Speaking of the SEC, Mary Jo White was confirmed by the Senate. [Fox Business]
* Chief Judge Alex Kozinski: “Can I get an oy vey up in here?” [COLLive]
* Kentucky is just all kinds of screwy. Lawyer jailed for not turning over documents/running drug ring. [AP]
* Energy law was number two in law firm activity this quarter. For the billionth quarter in a row, Third Amendment law failed to crack the top 10. [AOL Energy]
* Ha! “Thus, it seems that (as has so often occurred in IP law) the focus on the problems of copyright and patent has allowed trademark law to engage, unsupervised, in a great deal of mischief.” [Law of Fashion]
* Just a reminder: Legalizing gay marriage does not end discrimination. [National Law Journal]
You were going to read this post, until you got high.
Yo, you smoke? I mean, you like to get high? I like to smoke pot on occasion. I don’t remember if the character and fitness application for bar admittance asked about drug use, but I think it probably did. It doesn’t matter, of course. Just another brick in the wall of hypocrisy that our nation’s drug laws and attitudes have become. Or have always been. I don’t really know. But seriously, you smoke?
I’ve never been terribly enthusiastic about smoking weed. To be honest, I’m too lazy to develop a serious pot habit. To me, it’s no different than collecting stamps or reading literature. It takes effort. And that’s just something that I don’t have much of in large amounts. This is all to say that if I were a harder worker or had more motivation to do something/anything, I’d probably be a pothead. I mean, I like smoking pot well enough.
This weekend, the New York Times blew up your bubby’s spot. And Rand Paul went on national television and said a whole lot of sensible things that no one in their right minds could disagree with. And, well, it got me thinking.
I have to give Paul Bergrin some credit. This former federal prosecutor, accused of drug dealing, pimping, and murder, has been remarkably successful at eluding conviction for his crimes.
Bergrin was first arrested back in 2009. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey, where Bergrin once worked before becoming a defense lawyer, brought him to trial. That trial, which took place in 2011, ended with a hung jury. Some time was taken up with appellate machinations (in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office prevailed).
A new trial, before a different district judge, got underway this January. And today justice finally caught up with the man that New York magazine famously dubbed “the baddest lawyer in the history of Jersey”….
* Carla Spivack of Oklahoma City University’s law school suggests rethinking the logic of statutes that prevent a killer from inheriting from their victims. Spivak argues that most of such killings involve escaping abusive situations and not a “child who kills a grandparent to hasten an inheritance.” Um, Spivak hasn’t watched enough Murder, She Wrote. [The Faculty Lounge]
* “Would It Be Okay To Perform Surgery On Crack?” I’m not sure, but I’m a sporting fellow! Fetch me a scalpel and your finest rock! [Legal Juice]
* Dunkin’ Donut’s employee used hot coffee to spoil a robbery while yelling “go run on Dunkin.’” Moral of the story: Next time rob Winchell’s. [NBC New York]
* Bear Lawyer grapples with sequestration. I’m fairly certain the chalkboard behind him is a direct reproduction of a notepad Paul Ryan used. [Bear Lawyer, LLC]
* Subway founder says regulations would prevent him from building his business today. “I had an easy time of it in the ’60s when I started.” Yes, it’s harder to cut costs with horse meat today, but you can still dare to dream. [Overlawyered]
* Mila Kunis is the greatest interview ever, turning the whole thing around on a nervous interviewer. There are a couple important lessons here for litigators: (1) don’t get too stuck to your script; and, (2) if you’re going to let the witness take over the examination, just hope they’re trying to help you. Video after the jump. [YouTube via BBC Radio 1]
But you need to stay on her good side; if you tick her off, woe unto you. Let’s check out the Beloved World (affiliate link) — of pain — that Her Honor just inflicted on a federal prosecutor down in Texas….
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;
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• 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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As we mentioned in Morning Docket today, Gawker has a story about the Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, smoking crack. 
