* Extra slanty. [The Onion]
* Have you seen this lake? [CNN]
* Crazy murder trial in Nevada. [Reno Gazette-Journal]
* Shuttle landing postponed; will be made up as part of doubleheader later in the year. [New York Times]
Latest Stories
Perkins Coie is raising to market in California, with a catch. To get the raise, associates must 1) be “on pace” of 1900 hours; and 2) have “no outstanding timesheet penalties.”
The memo’s after the jump.
Continue reading “National Pay Raise Watch: Perkins Coie to $160k in California”
In his dissent today from a order denying rehearing en banc in the case of United States v. Ziegler, Kozinski basically calls the rest of the panel morons, or at least hack magicians. The best part is this paragraph:
By plucking consent out of its judicial top hat, when neither
party has argued it and the district court made no findings to
support it, the panel gives the unfortunate impression that it
is seeking to vindicate a result it has reached on other (nowrepudiated) grounds.
It is not our business to reach particular
results, nor may we jiggle the rules of procedure to achieve
an outcome we prefer. Our responsibility is to apply the law
in an objective and impartial manner, and let the chips fall
where they may. Here, the government lost the one issue on
which it chose to make its stand—Ziegler’s expectation of
privacy in his own office. At that point it was our responsibility
to reverse the district court and vacate the defendant’s sentence.
Appellate review is not a magic wand and we
undermine public confidence in the judicial process when we
make it look like it is.
But he basically rips the panel a new one throughout the dissent.
Access the entire opinion here.
This one’s a vicarious “Eyes of the Law” through a source in New York. According to the source:
“Since we’re getting close to the end of the Supreme Court’s Term, people might be wondering: Are we going to see any retirements this year? Will Justice John Paul Stevens finally pack it in? Or what about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was described as looking somewhat frail earlier this year?”
“Well, I wouldn’t count on RBG stepping down anytime soon. At the Second Circuit conference a few weeks ago, I saw Justice Ginsburg dancing a jig — with Judge Pierre Leval of the Second Circuit, another prominent judicial liberal.”
“I tried to take some video with my camera phone, but it came out unusual. That may be for the best.”
We wonder if it was “for the best” because of the dancing being anything like this:
At any rate, it sounds like Ginsburg is definitely still kicking.
Dean Barkley, fomer U.S. Senator from Minnesota (Nov. 2002-Jan. 2003) as a member of the then Minnesota Reform Party (he was appointed by Gov. Jesse Ventura after the death of Paul Wellstone in a plane crash), is apparently looking for love online. Here is his profile from Match.com.
Girls, don’t worry about getting hurt, because as Barkley puts it:
I am honest and do not play games.
He’s kinda in between jobs, but he plans to rev up his law practice again soon:
I just returned from Texas where I ran the Governor’s race for Kinky Friedman. He did not win so I have to re-invent myself once again. I am going to start my old law practice up because driving a metro mobility bus is not my dream job.
I’m not sure he really understood the question here, but is ethnicity important anyway?
my ethnicity:
My 23 year marriage ended about a year ago. I did not want the divorce but have finally gotten over it and I am ready to rejoin the human race. I would like to meet someone that is smart, funny, likes to be spontaneous and passionate.
And don’t think he’s an asshole just because he’s a lawyer. In fact, he hates lawyers and the law:
I have a law degree but dislike most lawyers myself. I have spent most of my life trying to find a way not to practice law. I have run a car wash, drove a school bus, started a political party and recruited Jesse to run for Governor to escape law.
He’s just doing what he’s gotta do. Give ‘em a shot, ladies.
We missed this separate benchscuffle from the Tellabs opinion in our haste to look at all three earlier, but Scalia and Stevens, the lone dissenter, went at it as well. Stevens told Scalia that he was “clearly wrong”, and Scalia responded with “it’s you who is ‘mistaken’”. Steven then said “nun uh”, and Scalia said, “unhuh”.
Read the relevant excerpts and commentary at the WSJ Law Blog.
At issue in the SCOTUS’s decision today in Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd.[SCOTUSblogvia How Appealing] was the definition of the term “strong inference”, and therefore what the standard is for determining whether a plaintiff has met the pleading requirements as to scienter in a securities fraud case. Some mildly saucy benchslaps insued.
Justice Scalia expressed his disdain for the majority’s resolution to this issue (authored by Justice Ginsburg) this way in his concurring opinion:
If a jade falcon were stolen from a room to which only A and B had access, could it possibly be said there was a “strong inference” that B was the thief? I think not, and I therefore think that the Court’s test must fail. In my view, the test should be whether the inference of scienter (if any) is more plausible than the inference of innocence.
Well, I don’t know. If a Supreme Court justice uses a really bad analogy from an old movie, could it possibly be said that he had made a “strong argument?”
But Ginsburg wasn’t taking this lying down. Her benchslap back from n.5 of the majority opinion is after the jump.
Also, the SCOTUS issued two other opinions today:
Rita v. United States [SCOTUSblog via How Appealing]
Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Assn. v. Brentwood Academy [SCOTUSblog via How Appealing]
Continue reading “Scalia Gets Snarky Over Scienter Standard”
From Vegas we take a short drive through the desert into the beautiful state of California.
Since Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley are regularly covered on ATL, this open thread will be for the rest of California: San Diego, Sacramento, or any other not-regularly-covered market in the Golden State that you care to discuss. Feel free to discuss associate salaries in these markets or any other issues of interest in the comments.
We have a ruling in the HappyMealGate case (prior coverage here, here, and here of Wiliam P. Smith, the McDermott Will & Emery partner who told Judge Laurel Myerson Isicoff that she was “a few French Fries short of a Happy Meal”). And it’s surprisingly lenient.
Judge Isicoff basically gave Smith a stern talking to:
“There is no jurisdiction in the U.S. — including the district where Mr. Smith regularly practices — where the expression and tone Mr. Smith used on May 7 would fall in the bounds of acceptable behavior,” a solemn Isicoff said from the bench in front of a packed courtroom.
and ordered him to take an online professionalism course administered by the Florida Bar.
Smith brought McDermott chairman Harvey Freishtat with him to beg and plead for mercy from Isicoff. Apparently it worked.
Isicoff said she accepted the apologies of both Smith and McDermott Will & Emery chairman Harvey Freishtat, the head of the Chicago-based, 1,000-lawyer firm, who also appeared in front of her to beg her pardon.
Looks like the fry guy got off relatively easy, and we’ve all learned something: don’t stoop to middle-school insults while arguing in front of a federal judge, especially if you’re appearing pro hac vice.
* NOLA nurses get immunity in post-Katrina deaths case. [CNN]
* Paris Hilton’s prosecutor scrutinized. [CNN]
* Yeah, because that’s why Motley Crue fizzled…bad management. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Justice Scalia on Jack Bauer. We can only hope that this discussion was filmed in real time from dramatic camera angles and they spoke with urgently raspy voices. [More Law Blog]
* Where do gay men look first? [Huffington Post]
* Vigilante justice is alive and well in Texas, but this innocent passenger is not. [BBC]
* Walter Reed rent-a-cops get all belligerent with each other. [CNN]
* Hawaii’s gonna blow. [AP via Yahoo!]
* File another one in the “ridiculous reasons for Muslims to be upset” department. [BBC]
Ok, that’s not exactly right. Technically, he’s not ok with torture, he just defines torture in a manner that allows him to be ok with stuff that most of us would call torture. Would you expect anything less of a CIA lawyer?
John Rizzo, acting GC for the CIA and Bush’s nominee for the permanent job, is facing opposition in the Senate because of his
decision to sign off on the controversial 2002 “Bybee Memo” in which the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) defined torture as physical pain equivalent in “in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.”
[Jurist, citations omitted]
Related: Bybee Memo [FindLaw via BBC (PDF)
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