The weather is finally heating up here in New York City, so this seems like a good time to remind everybody of their rights to unburden themselves of oppressive upper body clothing.
It’s cool, it’s for charity.
It’s legal, and if the cops hassle you about it, you might be able to really cash in…
* New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg commissioned a report on SDNY Judge Shira Scheindlin in advance of her ruling on the NYPD’s controversial “hey, you’re black, come get a pat down” “stop-and-frisk” policy. According to the report, Judge Scheindlin is biased because she ruled against the NYPD in search and seizure cases 60% of the time. An alternative read is that the NYPD is really bad at following the Constitution. Occam’s Razor strikes again. [New York Daily News]
* STRIKE!: Legal Services NYC walked off the job this morning after rejecting new contract offers. [New York Law Journal]
* Pentagon Papers lawyer James C. Goodale thinks President Obama, whose administration seized phone records of journos, is worse than President Nixon, who tried to charge the New York Times for conspiracy to commit espionage. Because hyperbole is the awesomest thing in the world! [New York Observer]
* A surplus of lawyers over law jobs exists in every state, and for most states the surplus has grown. I’m sure third-party litigation financing will solve all of this though. [Am Law Daily]
* Tennessee law grad and judicial affairs director fired amid allegations she hooked up with Tennessee basketball player Trae Golden. [MStars News]
* After revelations earlier that Arkansas wasn’t “buying American” and instead getting its death penalty drugs from the UK, the pharmaceutical company announced it would cut off the supply, joining a number of drug companies that are practically slowing executions around the country by limiting supply. [YubaNet]
* After the post, check out the Biglaw firm using 4square way too much…
The “Angry Police Captain” is one of the premiere cultural archetypes of late 20th Century America. The gruff, by-the-book peace officer asking his roguish subordinate if he realized how many regulations he’d broken or if he understood how many times the mayor had called that day to complain about all the damage from the car chase. At some point in the film, the captain will ask our anti-hero to turn in his badge and gun. Later on, the captain will begrudgingly return them while delivering some version of this speech: “I may not like your methods, but you get results.”
One judge has the first part of this archetype down, labeling a cop “dangerous” and questioning if he, “should not be carrying a gun.” I doubt the judge will have occasion to change his mind about a cop who pulled a gun on his neighbor, and then asked for a restraining order…
Continue reading “Judge Lays the Benchslap on ‘Dangerous’ Cop”
* Professor Alfred Brophy wonders if The Great Gatsby (affiliate link) provides an early preview of product placement. In any event, I’m willing to bet the new movie will provide a stellar latter day view of product placement. [The Faculty Lounge]
* Brooklyn Law School will begin offering a two-year JD program. This makes too much sense. [Brooklyn Law School]
* Former Dora the Explorer star rebuffed in effort to unwind settlement, in part over claims that she overpaid for her lawyer. He charged $755/hour plus a 37.5% “success fee.” [UPDATE: According to her former lawyer, the hourly rate was replaced by the contingency fee arrangement.] This is the sort of thing that happens if a monkey is your most trusted confidant. [Hollywood Reporter]
* Oreck files for bankruptcy. Not Orrick, Oreck. They make vacuum cleaners that suck. Figuratively. [USA Today]
* Urinating on police stations? Detroit sounds like such a charming place. [Legal Juice]
* If you don’t mind spoilers, here are the answers to all your Iron Man 3 legal queries. Not answered: why was the post-credits scene so lame? [Law and the Multiverse]
* While created for short-sighted criminal defendants, this applies equally to the hubris of civil defendants who are just SURE they’re going to win. [What the Public Defender?]
* Caroline Kennedy just paid up her lapsed bar admission. Just in time for a Senate confirmation hearing… you know if she were to get nominated for something. [WiseLawNY]
* Eugene Volokh analyzes the free-speech issues raised by the prosecution of Anya Bargh, the UConn law student accused of sending anti-Semitic and racist emails. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Lawyerist thinks you suck, not the gunners. Discuss. [Lawyerist]
* Law and the Multiverse now has CLE courses about comic books. Maintaining this license just got that much easier. [Law and the Multiverse]
* Some new developments in the Ed O’Bannon case against the NCAA. Basically, discovery has not been kind to the NCAA. [Bloomberg]
* All the editors-in-chief at Michigan Law are women. Now, if another 90 or so journals follow suit, Staci’s article will seem outdated. [Michigan Law]
* Ruh-roh. Did David Boies blow the lid off campaign spending limits last cycle? [Huffington Post]
* No, Mike Bloomberg was not denied a slice of pizza yesterday. [Gawker]
* WARNING: If you understand math, the latest from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly will annoy the hell out of you. [PrawfsBlawg]
* Man injured in a drunken fight sues the bar that he says should have cut him off. [Overlawyered]
* Gun nuts want to prevent THE PENTAGON from buying too many bullets. [Talking Points Memo]
* Subway employees can be held liable for not helping police officers. I’m a legal genius. [New York Law Journal]
* Employment lawyers get catty on their way out of the door. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Do top firms even have compliance departments? [Corporate Counsel]
* Colleges are cracking down on Adderall abuse. So… it only took administrators about a decade to figure out that was going on. [New York Times]
* Okay, now Obama is going to close Guantanamo. And by “close,” I think he means “finds other excuses to leave it open.” [SCOTUSblog]
Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
If you’ve ever wondered why public agencies have such ridiculously stringent social media policies (for instance, DHS employees can’t even view the agency’s Facebook page while at work), it’s likely because of unfortunate instances like the following.
A Texas state trooper charged with sexually assaulting two women during a traffic stop was providing them with “customer service,” says Dale Roberts, the executive director of the Columbia Police Officers Association (CPOA) and a professor at the University of Missouri. (The CPOA is a part of the Fraternal Order of Police, one of the country’s largest police unions.)
“It’s called Customer Service!” Roberts wrote in a March 27 Facebook post about the indictment of Texas State Trooper Kelly Helleson, who was charged with two counts of sexual assault after conducting an illegal roadside strip search of two women. “We just did it so they wouldn’t have to make the trip all the way down to the station,” he added.
Beautiful…
How does someone find themselves on trial for armed robbery with almost no attention paid to due process? If you answered, by playing football for Auburn, it looks like you’re right.
There are two things I know about Auburn football. First, the school boasts some really great fans. I met a number of them when I went to the BCS National Championship game three years ago to watch Auburn eke by Oregon on a last second field goal. Most everyone was reasonably nice, which made them very different than, say, Ohio State fans.
Second, Auburn cheats like it’s its goddamned job. Historically, it’s not even very savvy about it. In 2006, the school got busted handing out ‘A’s to players for classes that didn’t exist, a scandal that came to light when the school overdid it and NCAA reports revealed Auburn had better students than any program but Stanford, Navy, and Boston College. Oops.
Then there was the whole Cam Newton thing.
But I can say without hyperbole that these new allegations are a million times worse…
Continue reading “Whoa Eagle: Auburn Football May Need a Serious Timeout”
‘Don’t Tase me, bro.’
Animals are cool. People are a-holes. Any bill that prevents people from senselessly harming animals is a good thing.
The natural enemy of the family dog is the local cop. Some of the stories we hear about cops shooting dogs, man, it’s like they don’t even try to deal with the animal reasonably. They shoot first and put the leash on later. I get that some people are just irrationally afraid of dogs, but cops are armed and in stressful situations. And since “dog murder” isn’t really a thing, there’s no incentive for cops to hold their fire.
We’ve reported in the past about how jury awards are going up when cops are found to recklessly kill family pets. But money cannot replace the companionship of a best friend.
Now, one state is trying to take more decisive action by requiring cops to learn how to deal with “short, hairy children”….
Debra Milke
We will be appealing this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the Court takes the appeal, I will argue it personally as I have done in two previous cases over the past five months. In my last case, the Supreme Court accepted my argument and overruled the Ninth Circuit’s decision unanimously.
– Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, commenting on the Ninth Circuit’s grant of federal habeas relief to Debra Milke, who has been on Arizona’s death row for 22 years.
(Why is Milke sometimes called the “Arizona sister” of Casey Anthony? Keep reading….)
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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