We’re posting this on Friday the 13th — hardly anyone’s lucky day. But last Saturday was 7-7-07, and couples all over the world rushed to the altar (and the gambling tables) to take advantage of the auspicious date.
And sevens weren’t the only thing we saw multiples of in the NYT weddings section. We’ve got four grooms this week, and all four are named John!
If that gives you chills, just wait till you check out their credentials.
Here are this week’s finalists:
LEWW is delighted to bring you the first all-Jewish edition of Legal Eagle Wedding Watch! The MOT really represented this week. Mazel Tov to all the happy couples and their proud parents!
Here are the finalists:
Once again, the wedding pages were chock-full of lawyers last weekend. Without further ado (because LEWW has other things to post today), here are your candidates for Couple of the Week:
Our condolences to Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan. Dean Kagan, who was under consideration for the president of Harvard University, was passed over for the job in favor of historian Drew Gilpin Faust (aka “Dr. Faust”).
But maybe it’s for the best. As Harvard president, it can be tough not to make enemies. See, e.g., Larry Summers.
(Unless you want to be kinda boring and ineffectual. See, e.g., Neil Rudenstine.)
And enemies are not what a possible Supreme Court nominee wants. Especially a nominee who, like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, generally plays well with others — even those who hold divergent ideological views.
From a Princeton tipster:
The most recent edition of the Princeton Alumni Weekly has an interesting tidbit about Anne-Marie Slaughter and Elena Kagan (who have creepily similar resumes):
“‘Elena has an extraordinary talent for not making enemies,’ says Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, who became friendly with Kagan when both were Sachs Scholars at Oxford (Kagan coxed the boat in which Slaughter rowed), and later taught with her at Chicago and Harvard law schools.”
How hot is that??? Perhaps you could create a “fantasy legal academic crew team,” with, e.g., Charles Fried as stroke (naturally — he’s quite the gym bunny) and Bruce A. in bow. Think of the Photoshop head-pasting potential!
We are well aware of Dean Kagan’s hotness (since she was nominated in our law school deans hotties contest). But we had no idea she was also an athlete.
How neat! Dean Kagan, you can yell “Stroke!” at us anytime. A ‘Rebellious Daughter’ to Lead Harvard [New York Times]
Lots of interesting moves, both actual and rumored, to report upon today. Possible promotion:
* Elena Kagan, the popular (and hot) dean of Harvard Law School, is being considered for the presidency of Harvard University. In government:
* New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is on a hiring spree (just like his successor as AG, Andrew Cuomo). Lloyd Constantine, who currently heads a 40-lawyer firm, will serve as a senior advisor to Spitzer. Debra Bachrach, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, will direct the state’s Medicaid program. Joseph Baker, bureau chief for health care under AG Spitzer, will take over as deputy secretary for health and human services. “You’re Fired”:
* Former Apple in-house lawyer Wendy Howell was discreetly discharged, late last year, for her role in the options backdating fiasco. Reunited and it feels so good:
* Structured finance lawyers William Cullen, Janet Barbiere and Bola Oloko, to Thacher Proffitt & Wood, from Sidley & Austin. The trio left Thacher Proffitt together in 1997 (back when Barbiere and Oloko were still associates; they were recently promoted to partnership at Sidley). Other lateral moves:
* Bankruptcy lawyer Steven Wilamowsky, to Bingham McCutchen, from Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Headhunters at Harvard May Pick a Woman [New York Times] NY Bankruptcy Partner Switches Firms [NYLawyer.com] NY Trio Returns to Firm They Left in the ’90s [NYLawyer.com] Spitzer Taps Three NY Lawyers to Fill Key Positions [NYLawyer.com] Apple Quietly Canned Lawyer Who Backdated [The Recorder via Law.com]
[T]he Supreme Court’s two newest justices have decided, at least temporarily, to stick with the Court’s clerk-pooling arrangement…. [B]oth Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said they will stay in the “cert pool,” as it is called, for the current term.
Roberts said he will participate on a “year-to-year basis,” and Alito said the same….
The use of the certiorari pool does, by the way, increase the power of law clerks at the Court:
In a 1997 speech when he was in private practice, Roberts said he found the pool “disquieting” in that it made clerks “a bit too significant” in determining the Court’s docket. During his confirmation hearings in January, Alito said he was “aware of the issue” surrounding the pool. He added: “We cannot delegate our judicial responsibility. But . . . we need to find ways, and we do find ways, of obtaining assistance from clerks and staff, employees, so that we can deal with the large caseload that we have.”
One could quibble with Justice Alito’s description of the SCOTUS caseload as “large.” The Court hears fewer than 100 cases each Term, and the number has been decreasing over the years. And the cert pool may actually be contributing to that decline, as Lyle Denniston suggests.
But we heart Justice Alito, so we won’t quibble.
Another consequence of the pool:
In their new book on the Court’s clerks, Sorcerers’ Apprentices, authors Artemus Ward and David Weiden chart the history and impact of the pool. At the same time the pool has increased the power of clerks in the gatekeeping function, they say, it has made clerks less candid and more timid in their recommendations. “The pool writers are going to be less candid than they would be with their own justice,” says Ward in an interview. “It has a chilling effect.”
It would be interesting if another justice were to join Justice Stevens in declining to participate in the cert pool. But would that make a clerkship with that justice less desirable? Clerks to that justice would have to spend more of their time doing mind-numbing cert review work, getting down into the factual weeds of lower-court records — instead of working on the sexy, pure legal issues presented by merits cases.
Maybe there’s a collective action problem here. Who would be willing to go first? Cf.Harvard ending early admissions.
Interesting — but not our problem. Shrug. Courtside by Tony Mauro: Pool Party [Legal Times]
Commentary: The Court’s caseload [SCOTUSblog] Cert Pool [Wikipedia]
* Justice Department lawyers have lost their Federal Circuit appeal in their long-running class action suit for overtime pay. Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be DOJ attorneys. [Washington Post]
* The Ninth Circuit has ruled against a freelance journalist and blogger who refused to testify to a grand jury or turn over video footage he took of a violent protest at last summer’s G8 summit. The journalist, Josh Wolf, will seek an en banc rehearing. [New York Times]
* The latest news in Spitzer v. Grasso: Dick Grasso’s looking for a new judge, baby, a new judge. Eliot Spitzer is looking for a way to make his eyes look less beady. [Wall Street Journal via WSJ Law Blog]
* The fellow we mentioned yesterday, who had sex with his 14-year-old sister, has lost his suit to keep his identity off Virginia’s online sex offender registry. [Washington Post via How Appealing]
* Not directly related to the law, but interesting: Harvard University is ending its early admissions program next year. (And it has an indirect connection to the law, insofar as it might affect the educational paths of future lawyers.) [Wall Street Journal]
David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law. He also founded Underneath Their Robes, a blog about federal judges, and served as editor of the politics blog Wonkette. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Observer, Washingtonian magazine, and New York magazine, among other publications. David has received several awards for his work on Above the Law, including recognition as an ABA Journal Legal Rebel, a group of innovators within the legal profession, and inclusion as a member of the Fastcase 50, “the fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology.”
David graduated from Regis High School, Harvard College, and Yale Law School, where he served as book reviews editor of the Yale Law Journal. You can find David on Facebook and on Twitter, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.
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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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.
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