President Obama seems to have made up his mind about the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed circus trial that will be coming to a New York courthouse near you. The Associate Press reports (gavel bang: ABA Journal):

Obama, in a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, said those offended by the legal rights accorded Mohammed by virtue of his facing a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won’t find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”

I’ve argued that Obama isn’t as cool as everybody makes him out to be, but that was certainly some cold-ass rhetoric. “[W]hen the death penalty is applied to him”? Damn brother, you sending in the Wolf too?

Of course, after the jump, the lawyer part of Obama’s brain kicks in and he backpedals like a professional cornerback.

Over the weekend, we had the pleasure of attending the Federalist Society’s 2009 National Lawyers Convention, down in Washington, D.C. As in past years, conservative and libertarian legal luminaries were plentiful, and the panel discussions and other events were excellent.

Some folks — e.g., Josh Blackman — were liveblogging the proceedings. We’re only writing up the conference now, so you can call this “lateblogging” (both because we’re late in blogging about the conference, and blogging late at night; hey, better late than never).

This year, sadly, we missed most of the Thursday events (because of a speaking engagement at the ABA’s Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference). The first Fed Soc panel we caught was on Friday afternoon:

Free Speech: The Fairness Doctrine

The rumors circulated back in August, but now it looks like it’s finally happening. From Marc Ambinder, shortly before 11 on Thursday night:

Sources in government say that White House Counsel Gregory Craig has decided to resign, and that the president’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer, will take his place. A formal announcement is slated next week, though word might drop tomorrow.

Looks like that announcement is getting sped up. More after the jump.

UPDATE: Greg Craig’s resignation letter, also after the jump.

It’s the day after Election Day! Granted, this year’s election cycle wasn’t nearly as exciting as last year — when Obama ended racism in America.

Still, there are many winners to congratulate. Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are new governors. People can now point to the North Country on a map of New York State. Michael Bloomberg secured a third term as New York City Mayor. And the New York Post (predictably) managed to ignore it all and plastered of picture of Pedro Martinez in a diaper on its front page.

But for our purposes, the biggest winners were the voters of Maine. They successfully defeated the efforts of gays and lesbians to be treated fairly, thus making sure that all of those rugged and earthy Mainers will not be tempted to have the gay sex they secretly desire.

Obviously the tactics of BC Law professor Scott Fitzgibbon — and other defenders of traditional marriages between drunken woodsmen and the girls they knock up — won the day. Do gay marriage advocates have any more tricks stashed in their closets?

Kash says yes, after the jump.

Meet Stewart Rhodes. He graduated in 2004 from Yale Law School, where his paper, “Solving the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status,” won a prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. Before entering the law, he served as a U.S. Army paratrooper.

What’s Rhodes up to now? Many military men turned lawyers troop off to large law firms, where the discipline and diligence cultivated in the armed forces help them succeed. Others join the JAG Corps or work for defense contractors.

But Rhodes, who was a non-traditional student at YLS, has taken a non-traditional career path since graduating.

Last week we wrote about the move of prominent D.C. lawyers Lanny Davis and Eileen O’Connor from Orrick to McDermott Will & Emery. Am Law Daily described the jump as follows: “Lanny Davis, a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush, is taking his unique practice from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to McDermott, Will & Emery.”

It’s not the case, however, that the entire practice moved. As noted by one commenter, the rest of the legal strategic and crisis management practice remained with Orrick. Consistent with this, an Orrick spokesperson issued the following statement to ATL:

We wish Lanny and Eileen well, but Orrick’s law, policy, media, and crisis management practice remains vibrant and strong with continuing plans for expansion and will keep delivering its unique blend of legal, public relations and government affairs counsel to our clients around the world.

Remaining at Orrick are partners Adam Goldberg, who was co-chair of the practice with Davis, and Joshua Galper. Goldberg and Galper will head the practice going forward. In addition, the associates who work in and with the law, policy and media group are staying at Orrick.

As for clients, it’s not yet clear which ones will stay with Orrick and which will move to McDermott. “Thankfully, this is a practice where we’ve always had plenty of work, so that’s not an issue,” Galper said. (We’d guess, however, that certain clients closely tied to Davis — like CEAL, the Honduras business group supporting the coup in that country — will travel with him.)

Get to know Messrs. Galper and Goldberg, and read more about Orrick’s very interesting and unusual practice area, after the jump.

* At the Supreme Court, much ado about a cross. [Washington Post (Robert Barnes); Washington Post (Dana Milbank)]

* Former Heller Ehrman partners deny that the firm was insolvent in 2007. [Am Law Daily]

* The new Honduran government, which came to power through a coup, has hired lawyers and law firms — including Lanny Davis, who recently moved from Orrick to McDermott — to defend its legitimacy. [New York Times]

* And there may be more work for antitrust lawyers, thanks to a new Justice Department invesitgation of IBM. [Reuters]

* Key Democratic lawyers agree to allow Guantanamo detainees to be transferred to the U.S. for trial. [Washington Post]

* Prosecutors drop one victim from the case, but Judge Herman “Who Needs A Spanking?” Thomas still faces charges dozens of counts related to 14 other victims. [CNN]

* No, it’s not your imagination: Gov. Jon Corzine’s campaign commercials are making fun of former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie (pictured) for being fat. (Disclosure: We worked as an AUSA under Christie from 2003 until 2006.) [New York Times]

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not really retired yet. “I am more busy in retirement than before,” she told Above the Law in a recent interview. One of her myriad projects is Our Courts, a non-profit organization that develops Web-based games to teach seventh- and eighth-graders about government. We spoke with Justice O’Connor recently for our piece for the Washington Post reviewing the games.

We had hoped to actually play the games with her, but it turns out she’s not much of a gamer. Not being the computer type, she hasn’t actually played the Web-based games herself. “I watched young people play it. They have a lot of fun. They’re actively engaged. I think it’s very exciting,” she told us.

Justice O’Connor has been touring the country to promote the games. She even stopped in to chat with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. We got to catch up with her via conference call last month. We rung her up at One First Street — like some retired Biglaw partners, retired SCOTUS justices get to keep an office. After her secretary connected us, Justice O’Connor answered the phone: “Sandra Day O’Connor.”

We discovered that O’Connor is adamant about bringing an end to the election of judges in America. Read more from our interview, after the jump.

The University of Virginia Law School, and legal academia more generally, have been rocked recently by a controversy involving a leading law professor and claims of anti-gay animus.

William N. Eskridge Jr. — currently the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School, where we had great good fortune of having him as a professor — testified last month before Congress in support of the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2009 (ENDA). ENDA would prohibit sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace. In explaining the need for ENDA, Professor Eskridge made reference to his own career, testifying that “I was denied tenure at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1985 based in part on my sexual orientation.” You can, and should, read his complete testimony here (opens as a Word document).

The controversy has, of course, reverberated throughout the blogosphere. See, e.g., the UVA Law Blog (including 40+ comments, many of them quite insightful); Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports (here and here); and The Faculty Lounge. The UVA Law Blog also reprints a Virginia Law Weekly article from January 1986 about the Eskridge tenure denial (which was strongly opposed by students; if you’ve been lucky enough to have Bill Eskridge as a teacher, this should not be a surprise).

We reached out to both Professor Eskridge and UVA Law School. We received written statements from Professor Eskridge and from Dean Paul G. Mahoney.

Their statements, plus a comprehensive collection of links, appear below.

Over the years, numerous proposals have been made to split the Ninth Circuit, the nation’s largest federal appeals court. There are certainly reasonable arguments to be made in favor of a split.

But regardless of the merits of a split, the careers of politicians who have backed these proposals seem to meet unfortunate ends. We’ve dubbed this effect the Ninth Circuit Curse. Check out this list of victims.

Last Wednesday, Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a bill to split the Ninth Circuit. The very next day, he wound up on the front page of the New York Times — for possible ethics violations. Coincidence?

Politicians, consider yourselves warned: mess with the Ninth Circuit at your peril.

Senator’s Aid After Affair Raises Flags Over Ethics [New York Times]
Senate Ethics Committee investigating Ensign [Political Ticker / CNN]

Earlier: The Ninth Circuit Curse
The Ninth Circuit Curse Strikes Again

Ed. note: Above the Law has teamed up with Law Shucks. Law Shucks has done excellent work translating all of the layoff news into user-friendly charts and graphs: the Layoff Tracker.

For a while there it would look like the first consecutive weeks without layoffs since this time last year (by our reckoning, you have to go back to the weeks ending October 9 and October 2, 2008). Alas, one firm did come through with staff layoffs, about which more after the jump.

As usual, we begin with the US macroeconomic picture, and as usual, it ain’t pretty. For the week, the S&P 500 was down about 2%. That was the second straight week of losses, and the DJIA had its biggest weekly decline in three months. 263,000 net jobs were lost in September and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, despite perhaps the technical end of the recession. As with the stock market, bad results are one thing, but results worse than expectations are another, and that was the case here. Consensus estimates were net losses of 175,000, so the actual results were way short. August’s revised numbers were slightly better than original reports, though.

The poor results are creating pessimism around when things will start to turn around:

[T]he report also buttressed fears that economic expansion would be weak and hesitant, with scarce paychecks and economic anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.

“This is a weak report,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The rate of job loss has tapered off, but we still haven’t reached the point where businesses are willing to hire.”

Could this create political difficulties for the president?

Last week we participated in a panel discussion at Georgetown Law that was skillfully moderated by Eileen O’Connor, the Emmy-nominated journalist turned high-powered lawyer. After the talk, we tried to play the “name game” with O’Connor regarding colleagues of hers over at Orrick. But O’Connor seemed strangely uneasy about Orrick, and she quickly changed the subject.

Could this have been why? From Am Law Daily:

Lanny Davis, a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush, is taking his unique practice from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to McDermott, Will & Emery.

Davis, who previously moved to Orrick in 2003 from Patton Boggs, will bring counsel Eileen O’Connor, a former ABC News and CNN reporter, with him.

Beltway dwellers know that Lanny Davis is a big deal. He served as White House Special Counsel during the Clinton Administration, but he has friends on both sides of the aisle. As Bobby Burchfield, cohead of McDermott’s Washington office, told Zach Lowe of Am Law Daily, “Lanny is the only person I know who considers both Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush good friends.”

In addition to practicing law, Davis writes for the Washington Times and for The Hill. In one recent column, he scolded bloggers for inadequate fact-checking. If anything in this post is inaccurate, Mr. Davis, please email us and we’ll fix it ASAP.

Press release after the jump. Good luck to Davis and O’Connor in their new professional home.

Last month, DLA Piper lost a prominent former lawmaker from its ranks when Dick Armey had to step down due to controversy over his remarks about healthcare reform. This week, DLA has a new Republican to tout: former U.S. Senator Mel Martinez.

Martinez, who hails from the Sunshine State, announced last month that he was ending his senatorial term early. From the BLT:

A Florida Republican and the first Cuban-American elected to the Senate, Martinez announced in August that he would resign with more than a year remaining on his first term, saying that “it’s time I return to Florida and my family.”

The BLT says Martinez will be a partner in DLA’s offices in both Washington and Tampa, though in DLA’s press release Martinez emphasizes the time he’ll be spending in Florida: “Working in DLA Piper’s offices in Florida, I look forward to helping the firm grow its practice in Latin America and collaborating with a team of distinguished lawyers and professionals with the highest level of legislative knowledge and diplomatic skill.”

Specifically, Martinez might want to help DLA Piper grow its practice in Cuba. When Martinez resigned from Congress, he told the Washington Post:

“Even though I will no longer hold public office, my passion to work to see the day when people in Cuba will live in freedom will continue,” he said.

Over at Politico, Kenneth Vogel discusses the quick jump from the Hill to the Piper.

But for the state of Illinois, New York State would be receiving more national recognition for its state political situation. Even the President is embarrassed by the performance of New York Governor David Paterson.

Perhaps Paterson’s chances of beating Andrew Cuomo, or Rudolph Giuliani, or the Naked Cowboy are depressed because of stories like these. From the New York Post:

Gov. Paterson’s former economic-development czar, Avi Schick, stepped down from his post at the helm of the Empire State Development Corp. in January — but, astonishingly, continued to quietly draw his $213,000 annual salary for eight more months, The Post has learned.

Schick, who has close ties to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, managed to hang on to his full salary — more than what the governor earns — in return for advising Paterson on lower Manhattan issues, said ESDC spokesman Warner Johnston.

In case you’re wondering, Sheldon Silver is essentially the most powerful state official left in New York State, owing to his ability to perform his duties at a basically competent level. That is a rarity in Albany.

But how did Avi Schick’s state salary become exposed? Details after the jump.

Last Thursday, we posted a photo of VP Joe Biden enjoying some good ol’ blueberry pie at his alma mater, Syracuse University College of Law. It was up to you to come up with a caption for the picture, and now it’s time to choose the best one. Here’s the photo once again:

After the jump, check out the finalists.

Time for an Eyes of the Law celebrity sighting. On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden visited Syracuse University. From the Syracuse Post-Standard:

Vice President Joe Biden talked with Syracuse students, teachers and parents Wednesday about his mission to strengthen the middle class.

Then, he rode in a limousine to a ballroom where people had paid $250 to have lunch and $1,000 to pose for a picture with him. After that, he rode the limousine a few more blocks to mingle with more people who had paid thousands of dollars to spend private time with him.

But staff members at Syracuse Law, the VP’s alma mater, got to meet with him for free. All it took was some homemade blueberry pie.

A picture of Vice President Biden getting his pie on, plus a caption contest, after the jump.

A few months ago, we reported on the saga of Mark Hardman. He was an attorney for the commonwealth in Portsmouth, VA. But he was fired after only five months on the job. He claims that his termination stemmed from his decision to run for public office, against his boss. Back in March, we noted:

[Hardman was fired] most likely because Hardman decided that he should be the boss, after only five months on the job:

“A 27-year-old prosecutor in Portsmouth said he was fired because he plans to challenge incumbent Harvey Bryant for Virginia Beach commonwealth’s attorney.”

Incumbent Harvey Bryant denies the charges.

Hardman’s campaign continues, but it seems that he continues his fight at great personal cost. The Virginian-Pilot reports some difficult circumstances for Mr. Hardman:

The challenger in the race for commonwealth’s attorney hasn’t had a fixed address in the city since June 1 and last month filed for unemployment benefits in Newport News….

“I wasn’t prepared, financially, to lose my job at that point in the election cycle,” he said. “It had an impact on my living situation, and I continued to… take all steps that were necessary to maintain my residency in Virginia Beach.”

Without a job, Hardman said he was unable to sign a new lease in June, and he couldn’t afford the summer rent for his home on 75th Street. That address was the only one on file for Hardman’s residence as of Wednesday at the Beach general registrar’s office.

Hardman said filing for unemployment benefits in Newport News shouldn’t have any effect on his residency. He said he has used his mother’s house as a billing address for about 10 years.

That is the kind of situation that makes standing on the breadline so terrifying.

After the jump, Mark Hardman responds to these reports.

Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) passed away shortly before midnight on Tuesday, while at home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He was 77. From CNN:

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” a family statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice.”

Kennedy, nicknamed “Ted,” was the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy and New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was gunned down while seeking the White House in 1968. However, his own presidential aspirations were hobbled by the controversy around a 1969 auto accident that left a young woman dead, and a 1980 primary challenge to then-President Jimmy Carter that ended in defeat.

Senator Kennedy was a lawyer. He graduated in 1959 from the University of Virginia School of Law (where he won a moot court competition), became a member of the Massachusetts bar, and served as an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County from 1961 to 1962. But he was more known for his long and distinguished political career than for his legal one.

Update: Over at True/Slant, Elie asks: “Could a 30 year old Edward Kennedy get elected to the Senate today? Would he have survived the scandals of his youth to become entrenched in the U.S. Senate?”

Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy dead [CNN]
Ted Kennedy Dies of Brain Cancer at Age 77 [ABC News]
Senator Edward Kennedy, 77, dies [Reuters via Drudge]

Friday was the last day for companies on the government dole to submit their pay plans to Kenneth Feinberg, our nation’s new Pay Czar. The new compensation commissar is as powerful as a mid-winter blizzard on the Eurasian Steppe. According to Law.com:

The Obama administration’s “pay czar” is embarking on a review of proposed compensation packages for the top employees at seven companies that are on government life support, marking the first time a federal official will have veto power over how much private-sector executives are compensated.

Kenneth Feinberg, who ran the government’s fund for families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has 60 days to approve or reject the compensation plans submitted this week from bailout recipients. They include American International Group Inc. and General Motors.

Can’t you just see a detail of Feinberg’s men assigned to follow Fritz Henderson (the new CEO of GM) during his training routine? One day maybe Fritz will outrun Feinberg’s men and climb to the top of a high peak and scream “Fein-BERG,” as he prepares for an epic final battle with Feinberg himself?

In the meantime, here are more reasons why being a lawyer right now is better than being a banker.

A Friday afternoon in August — the perfect time for a resignation. As first reported by Politico:

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) is resigning from DLA Piper law firm amid a wave of negative attention his grassroots organization, Freedom Works, has drawn for helping to organize protesters at health care town hall meetings with members of Congress.

In an interview with POLITCO Armey said that he was concerned about the media scrutiny the health care protests were drawing to the firm he has been associated with since retiring from Congress.

“The firm is busy with its business, and shouldn’t be asked to take time out from their work, to defend themselves of spurious allegations,” Armey said. “No client of this firm is going to be free to mind its own business without harassment as long as I’m associated with it.”

This is the culmination of a controversy that was brewing over the past week.