To help me get in the holiday spirit, I’ve been catching up on my favorite movies. Some might prefer It’s A Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street, but I can’t get enough of It’s a Wonderful Lifetime and ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas. Give me a movie where a D-list celebrity overcomes the holiday blues to discover the meaning of Christmas, the joy of love, and the warmth of family, and I am a happy girl.
After 22 days of non-stop Christmas movie watching, I began to think that only in a movie staring Melissa Joan Hart would someone devote her professional career to tackling an issue she had to overcome. Not so.
Earlier this month, Casey Greenfield, known for her personal battle with child support issues, and Scott Labby, a fellow graduate of Yale Law School, formed the firm Greenfield Labby LLP. The firm’s mission is to serve individual clients “with a focus on family and matrimonial practice, strategic planning and crisis management”….
Continue reading “Size Matters: From Tragedy to Triumph Isn’t Just a Theme in Lifetime Movies (Just Ask Casey Greenfield)”
When asked about the decision in Bush v. Gore, Justice Antonin Scalia — one of the best legal minds in modern American history — tells questioners to “get over it.” That’s right, the Supreme Court decided the winner of a popular presidential election, and one of the architects of that decision wants people to not care about it anymore. Is he serious? I wish Scalia could just “get over” the fact that privacy is a right now, but nobody begrudges him the right to ask questions about it.
It’s the ten-year anniversary of the Bush v. Gore decision, and everybody is talking about it, in part because the Court does not talk about it. Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin tells us that in the decade since the five “conservative” justices stopped Florida’s recount, the Supreme Court has cited Bush v. Gore exactly zero times. Think about that: it’s been ten years since the Supreme Court picked the president, and the Court is kind of hoping everybody forgets about it. Bush v. Gore is like a stripper the Court killed in Vegas when it was there for a bachelor’s party. “She’s got no friends or family, strippers die all the time in Vegas, let’s get back to the hotel and NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN.”
But this isn’t some drunk broad you can drive into the Atlantic Ocean and hope everybody covers for you. This is a presidential election! And whether or not they talk about it, the effect of Bush v. Gore is very evident today — and not just because of the five SCOTUS votes that were more important than everybody else’s….
Continue reading “Ten Years After Bush v. Gore, the Stench Lingers”
Over on the website of the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has a nice post on how Elena Kagan deftly finessed the “gays in the military” / Solomon Amendment issue while serving as dean of Harvard Law School. It’s an interesting read; check it out here (via Dahlia Lithwick’s Twitter feed).
Alas, these days Toobin is apparently busy with pursuits other than journalism. Over the weekend, the New York Daily News provided a rather salacious update on his alleged affair and resulting love child with Casey Greenfield — the Gibson Dunn litigator, daughter of well-known political pundit Jeff Greenfield, and a media figure in her own right….
Continue reading “The Jeffrey Toobin / Casey Greenfield Drama Rolls On”
Over the weekend, Casey Greenfield — Yale Law School graduate, Gibson Dunn litigatrix, and daughter of political pundit Jeff Greenfield — made a foray into film criticism. Greenfield published a review of the new Jennifer Lopez movie, The Back-Up Plan, in the Daily Beast.
Adrian Chen of Gawker breaks it down:
The mother of CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s purported love child has written an essay about being a single mom….
It has long been thought that married Jeffrey Toobin—CNN analyst and New Yorker contributor—impregnated Casey Greenfield…. Neither Toobin nor Greenfield has ever confirmed this, which probably means it’s true. This weekend, The Daily Beast published an essay Greenfield about raising the-baby-which-probably-belongs-to-Jeffrey-Toobin. (His name is Rory.)
If litigating for Gibson Dunn (and against Jeffrey Toobin) doesn’t work out for Casey Greenfield, perhaps her “back-up plan” is a journalism career. As noted in her firm bio, “[p]rior to obtaining her law degree, Ms. Greenfield worked for magazines and newspapers in New York and Los Angeles.”
(Maybe she could even land a book deal for a memoir about her affair and subsequent experience as a single mom? That’s one book we’d definitely buy.)
So, what’s her Daily Beast essay like?
Continue reading “Alleged Jeffrey Toobin Baby Mama Has a ‘Back-Up Plan’”
We recently wondered: Is Jeffrey Toobin the Tiger Woods of legal journalism? Like Tiger, he’s phenomenally talented and successful, the biggest name in the game. And, if news reports are correct, Toobin — a legal writer for the New Yorker, a political analyst for CNN, and the author of several bestselling books — may share Tiger’s weakness for women and wandering eye.
The big Jeff Toobin story is his alleged affair with Casey Greenfield, the daughter of political pundit Jeff Greenfield and an associate at Gibson Dunn. This romance resulted in a child that Toobin is allegedly refusing to support, according to Casey Greenfield — who just took Toobin to court over it.
Last weekend, the New York Daily News wrote about Toobin’s purported advances towards “a well-known media figure.” According to Rush and Molloy, Toobin made a proposition to this woman that was so crude as to be unprintable, even by the Daily News — and that’s saying something. (The folks at Gawker were less inhibited.)
So, who was the mystery media figure Toobin found so alluring?
Continue reading “So Who Was the Mystery Woman Hit Upon by Jeffrey Toobin?”
Leading legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin — this year’s commencement speaker at Penn Law and Golden Gate Law, by the way — has been making headlines rather than writing them as of late. Last week we covered his family court showdown with Casey Greenfield, an associate at Gibson Dunn and the daughter of television pundit Jeff Greenfield (Toobin’s former CNN colleague).
Over the weekend, the New York Daily News alleged that Toobin — who has been married to fellow journalist and Harvard alum Amy McIntosh, for almost 25 years — has long had a wandering eye. According to Rush & Molloy:
[Toobin] is said to have made a play for a well-known media figure. The woman, who met Toobin about 15 years ago, contends he hit on her repeatedly, using some shockingly sexual come-on lines.
“I was at a party in Washington,” the woman tells us. “He came up behind me and whispered in my ear …”
This being a family newspaper, we can’t repeat what Toobin allegedly told the woman he’d like to do to her. But the woman recalls, “I didn’t even know who he was. I couldn’t believe my ears. It was so disgusting. At the time, I never even knew people did that.”
So what did Toobin want to do to this “well-known media figure”?
Continue reading “Is Jeffrey Toobin the Tiger Woods of Legal Journalism?”
One blogger teed up a story about celebrated legal and political journalist Jeffrey Toobin being sued for paternity with this quip: “This Might be Scandalous If Anyone Watched CNN.”
But people also read the New Yorker, where Toobin is a longtime legal correspondent, as well as Toobin’s bestselling books — including, most recently, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
So let’s get inside the not-so-secret world of Jeff Toobin and Casey Greenfield — daughter of television personality Jeff Greenfield and an associate at Gibson Dunn (so there’s a Biglaw connection here too). From the New York Daily News:
One of the media elite’s most whispered-about scandals went public Wednesday when married CNN correspondent Jeffrey Toobin squared off with a woman who says he’s the father of her baby.
Yale-educated lawyer Casey Greenfield — the daughter of eminent CBS News analyst Jeff Greenfield — had a chilly faceoff with Toobin in Manhattan Family Court.
Watch out, Jeff: Casey practices in litigation at Gibson Dunn, recently named by the American Lawyer as Litigation Department of the Year. And if this litigatrix loses, she might take it to a higher court — perhaps aided by GDC’s stellar appellate practice. (Thanks to Ted Olson’s involvement in the Proposition 8 case, Gibson lawyers are acquiring expertise in family and matrimonial law.)
More discussion — plus a better photo of Casey Greenfield, who’s quite attractive — after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagles Mate: But Who Will Take Care of the Eaglet?
Jeffrey Toobin Taken to Family Court by Gibson Dunn Associate.“
The current New Yorker has an interesting piece by Jeffrey Toobin on President Obama’s judicial picks. Toobin took part in a live chat about the piece at NewYorker.com right now earlier today if you’re interested. (Try not to crash their website.).
UPDATE: The chat’s quite interesting. Toobin reveals why he likes Justice Souter best and answers this young wannabe judge’s question:
11:31 Guest: I’m a 25 year old law student, I want to be a judge, and my roommate smokes pot. How worried should I be? Do you think people will still care when I’m older?
11:32 Jeffrey Toobin: Don’t inhale! I’m kidding. I don’t think it will make a bit of difference. Our president has more or less admitted he was a pretty big pothead in his day, and it’s been a non-issue. Certainly the fact that your roommate smokes — not you — is irrelevant.
Toobin’s piece is available online to non-subscribers here. If you don’t feel like clicking through seven pages, here’s the ATL reader’s digest version:
Aging liberal judges hung on through the Bush era, but once a Dem took over, they were ready to hang up their robes. Additionally, since 2006, Senator Patrick Leahy has prevented Bush’s nominees from getting through the Judiciary Committee. Now vacancies abound in the federal judiciary.
Bush kicked ass in choosing judges; Obama is taking his sweet time. In the first eight months of their respective terms, Bush nominated 52 judges while Obama has chosen 17.
Obama says he’s looking for “experiential diversity” in his judicial nominations: “not just judges and prosecutors but public defenders and lawyers in private practice.” But his first batch of nominees are mainly former judges, like SCOTUS justice Sonia Sotomayor and Indianapolis federal district judge David Hamilton, nominated by Obama to the Seventh Circuit.
More bullets, after the jump.
Continue reading “Peering Into The Crystal Ball for Obama’s Judicial Picks
(Plus a live chat with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin)”
Everyone’s a-twitter about Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Chief Justice John Roberts in this week’s New Yorker. And with good reason. We’re not sure whether the title of the profile, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” is meant to describe Roberts or Toobin.
We’re sure you’re familiar with Toobin, the ubiquitous legal analyst whose resume includes gigs with CNN and ABC, as well a Harvard Law School degree, a stint as an assistant U.S. attorney, time on the Oliver North trial, a Second Circuit clerkship, and many books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. And he’s not yet 50 years old (though he’ll be 49 on Thursday, according to Wikipedia).
But back to Roberts. He gets a fairly harsh appraisal in the profile, coming across as a political stooge:
After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
Toobin does not appear to be a fan of the Roberts Court. More on the elephant in the courtroom, after the jump.
Continue reading “Chief Justice John Roberts: The Elephant in the SCOTUS Courtroom?”
If you’re a judiciary junkie who used to read Underneath Their Robes, the judicial news and gossip site that was our first foray into blogging, you may be mildly amused by this strange piece of spam.
Jeffrey Toobin — legal affairs writer for the New Yorker and author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, one of our favorite books in 2007 — forwarded the rather bizarre email to us yesterday. Check it out, after the jump.
Continue reading “Spam Email of the Day”
Guess we picked our Lawyer of the Day too soon.
Update (2:30 PM): Press conference scheduled for 2:15 p.m., but Governor Spitzer is running 15 minutes late. “I don’t blame him,” said Ben Smith of the Politico, interviewed just now on CNN.
Update (2:35 PM): Jeffrey Toobin, who was an HLS classmate of Eliot Spitzer, described the news as “a total shock.” He said Spitzer has been “nothing but a straight arrow” for many years.
Update (2:50 PM): Still no press conference. Brooke Masters, author of Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer, was just interviewed on CNN. She noted that this scandal comes at a bad time for Spitzer politically, in the wake of last year’s scandal involving his misuse of the State Police for political purposes.
Update (3 PM): We’re stepping away for a bit, to give a talk at Stanford Law School. We’ll be back online as soon as we can. Some content will be posted while we’re gone (material prepared ahead of time, not Spitzer updates).
Developing… Check back for updates.
Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring [New York TImes]
This has been all over the news. We like the ABA Journal’s version, ’cause it’s the crispest:
The Atlanta judge overseeing the prosecution of alleged courthouse shooter Brian Nichols has stepped aside from the case after he was quoted [in a New Yorker article] as saying, “Everyone in the world knows he did it.”
The New Yorker piece was by one of our idols, prosecutor-turned-writer Jeffrey Toobin (who launched our blogging career, with this Talk of the Town piece). Judge Fuller and Jeff Toobin were interviewed by the Fulton County Daily Report about the controversy:
“I had a specific agreement with Toobin,” said Fuller on Tuesday, before announcing his recusal. “Our conversation was to be on background only, and there would be no direct quotations or attributions, unless they were floated by me first.”
Not so, said Toobin, reached in New York. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I mean, it was clearly for attribution; we even had a New Yorker fact-checker call and confirm it. … I have great respect for Judge Fuller, but that was not at all my understanding.”
We’re with the meticulous Toobin on this one. In fact, we share the suspicion of one of the correspondents who wrote us about this story: Was Judge Fuller’s indiscretion intentional? Was it his way of getting out from under a long and complex nightmare of a case?
Judge Recuses From Courthouse Shooting Case Due to New Yorker Quotes [ABA Journal]
Judge Fuller recuses from Nichols case [Fulton County Daily Report]
Judge in Courthouse Shooting Case Steps Down [New York Times]
Death in Georgia [The New Yorker]
New Yorker Quote Leads to Atlanta Judge Recusal [WSJ Law Blog]
* Check it out: the Los Angeles Daily Journal has a brand new blog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Hurley! [Washington Briefs]
* Don’t you wish you had attended a non-top-tier non-T14 law school? At U. Conn. Law, Professor Robert Birmingham (at right) screens prostitution training films in class. [TaxProf Blog]
* ESPN’s Stephen Smith lawyers up, retaining Willie Gary — a/k/a the “$22,000 an Hour Man.” [FishBowl NY]
* Fake Lawyer of the Day. [AP]
* Dubious Lawsuit of the Day. [Orlando Sentinel]
* Another interesting interview with Jeffrey Toobin, author of the bestselling Supreme Court book, The Nine. [On the Media / NPR]
More good press for Jeffrey Toobin’s new book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. It scored a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, which is the Holy Grail of the publishing industry.
But we’re partial to this great Slate piece, by Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick (two of our favorite Supreme Court correspondents). Bazelon and Lithwick conduct a meta-review of critical reactions to Jeff Toobin’s book, which they use as a jumping off point for broader reflections on media coverage of the Court. They include a generous shout-out to ATL:
One of the oddest byproducts of the Internet has been the growth industry that is the Supreme Court gossip blog. These folks are less interested in the court as the place where Law Is Born, or where Politics Really Come From, and more fascinated by which clerks are sleeping with whom, and how much they earn while doing it.
No blog has a better bead on those items than David Lat’s Above the Law. Sure, ATL invariably tends to reduce the entire sweep of modern constitutional history to a form of girl-on-girl Jell-O-wrestling. But then at bottom, what else is there?
As one reader jokingly suggested, “Looks like your Facebook group membership finally paid off!”
Nine Ways To Read The Nine [Slate]
Meet the Supremes [New York Times Book Review]
Last night’s Colbert Report was a bonanza for law nerds. The featured guest was Jeffrey Toobin, who spoke about his new book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Toobin and Colbert had a relaxed and easy rapport, and their conversation was highly entertaining — perhaps the best CR appearance since Neal Katyal. You can check out Stephen Colbert’s interview of Jeff Toobin by clicking here.
Before turning to the SCOTUS, they discussed the most recent legal troubles of O.J. Simpson. As you may recall, Toobin was one of the lead correspondents on the original O.J. trial, as well as the author of a bestselling book about it, The Run of His Life. Toobin summarized the defense strategy in the armed robbery case against Simpson as follows: “If it’s his s***, you must acquit.”
But that’s not all! There was a special shout-out to Bingham McCutchen, during the ThreatDown.
More details, plus a video clip, after the jump.
Continue reading “A Colbert Report for Legal Geeks”
New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin’s exciting new book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, is being released tomorrow. But it’s already provoking some interesting discussion in the blogosphere. See, e.g., this post by Professor Rick Garnett (esp. the comments).
And it’s garnering some favorable reviews. The dean of the Supreme Court press corps, Nina Totenberg of NPR, has given The Nine her blessing.
How does The Nine compare to other recent books about the Supreme Court? Here is Totes’s take:
Jeffrey Rosen’s book about famous court personalities and rivalries is an interesting history packed into a professorial thesis. [A] biography of Justice Clarence Thomas by the Washington Post’s Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher is a credible, but limited, look at the justice. In addition, Thomas himself was paid a reported $1 million to write a book that is slated to come out this fall.
If you’re interested in the Supreme Court as an institution and as a collection of personalities, though, Toobin’s is the book to read.
Hey Nina, what about the book by that rather attractive lady reporter?
Supreme Conflict, by ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg, contains a fair amount of good conservative gossip about the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, but it lacks the balance, substance, and context of Toobin’s book.
Ouch. Jan, remember all those nice things you had to say about Nina? Care to take any of them back?
Toobin’s ‘The Nine’ Reveals Politics of High Court [NPR]
“The Nine” [PrawfsBlawg]
Earlier: In Defense of Nina: Jan Crawford Greenburg
* More lawyers — no, not Nixon Peabody — have a bone to pick with YouTube. [Michael Geist]
* UK study: “Workers who spend time on sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day.” [BBC via Dealbreaker]
* Speaking of Facebook, here’s some advice that’s so obvious, yet so frequently ignored: “[I]f you don’t want a hiring partner to see it, it probably shouldn’t be up on the web.” [PrawfsBlawg]
Update: As noted by a commenter, the first comment to the PrawfsBlawg post is pretty great.
* New Yorkers, take note: Could Wall Street Woes Sink NYC Real Estate? [DealBreaker]
* Blawg Review #125 is up. [Real Lawyers Have Blogs via Blawg Review]
* Have a question you’re dying to ask Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court? Here’s your chance. [SCOTUSblog]
We’ve been writing a fair amount about Jeffrey Toobin’s exciting new book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Its scheduled publication date is September 18, but we’ve gotten our grubby paws on a copy. We’ll have more to say after we’ve read it.
In the meantime, check out this great report from ABC News, which highlights some of the book’s juiciest parts. It mentions the business about a crying Justice Souter, which is already old news, but it also has these tidbits:
* The decision to rush the swearing-in of Justice Clarence Thomas spared the controversial nominee the publication of more embarrassing personal revelations than Anita Hill’s notorious testimony. That same day, three Washington Post reporters were set to write a story about Thomas’ extensive taste for pornography, including accounts from eyewitnesses such as the manager of his local video store. “But since Thomas had been sworn in, the Post decided not to pursue the issue and dropped the story.”
* Former Chief Justice Warren Burger, an Anglophile who collected antiques and fine wines, was so vain that “he placed a large cushion on his center seat on the bench, so he would appear taller than his colleagues.”
* Rehnquist was not impressed with Bill Clinton and his wife. When told that the newly elected president was thinking of nominating Hillary as attorney general, the chief justice quipped, “They say Caligula appointed his horse counsel [consul?] of Rome.”
Plus there’s a great story about the justices trying to get to the Court during a snowstorm — lawlessness and hilarity ensue — and some gossip about Justice Souter’s love life. Read the full article here.
Meanwhile, in other Jeffrey Toobin news, he’s conducting an awesome event later this month at the New Yorker Festival. It’s a conversation about the future of the Supreme Court, featuring two of our favorite members of the Elect: Rachel Brand (OT 2002 / Kennedy) from the right, and Neal Katyal (OT 1996 / Breyer) from the left.
We wouldn’t miss it for the world. If you’d like to attend, ticket information is available here. Tickets to Festival events go on sale at 12 noon E.T. on September 15th, at ticketmaster.com — and they tend to go fast. So mark your calendars!
Under the Robes: Secrets of the Supreme Court [ABC News]
Rachel Brand, Neal Katyal, and Jeffrey Toobin: The Future of the Supreme Court [New Yorker Festival]
Another day, another controversy involving New Yorker scribe Jeffrey Toobin and his eagerly anticipated book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (to be published on September 18).
Yesterday we wrote about Toobin weighing in on who deserved the blame for Harriet Miers. Today we bring you a new drama (first noted earlier this week by Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, over at Yeas & Nays).
We begin with a juicy excerpt from Toobin’s book, concerning Justice Souter’s reaction to Bush v. Gore:
David Souter alone was shattered. He was, fundamentally, a very different person from his colleagues. It wasn’t just that they had immediate families; their lives off the bench were entirely unlike his. They went to parties and conferences; they gave speeches; they mingled in Washington, where cynicism about everything, including the work of the Supreme Court, was universal.
More discussion, including JT’s juicy revelation about Justice Souter, after the jump.
Continue reading “Bush v. Gore: Enough to Make a Grown Justice Cry?”
