In preparing for this august occasion, I asked one of my colleagues, a veteran of these events, ‘What is one supposed to say at the Midway Dinner?’ This colleague proposed three main themes: first, encourage the students to enjoy the rest of law school; second, encourage the students to take classes ‘across the midway,’ in other units of this great university; and third, encourage the students NOT to forward e-mails from the Law School to the ‘Above the Law’ blog.
– Professor Brian Leiter, delivering the Annual Midway Dinner Speech at the University of Chicago Law School last Friday evening.
If you don’t have a lawyer, it is hard to really put their feet to the fire and make sure the banks have every ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted… We are going to make sure funding for those legal services is restored.
– New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, discussing the implications of a $2.7 billion hard-cash settlement under a nationwide mortgage servicing agreement.
As part of the settlement, New York State will receive a guaranteed $136 million, and New Yorkers who suffered during the foreclosure crisis will be eligible for an estimated $648 million in additional payments. Schneiderman said the settlement will help restore legal service programs that were cut back in recent years.
William Brewer Jr.
Take it from those of us on the frontline of economic distress in America. This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.
– William E. Brewer Jr., president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, commenting on a new national survey of 860 bankruptcy lawyers. Surveyed lawyers expressed concern about the state of student debt in America, reporting that they are already seeing “what feels too much like what they saw before the foreclosure crisis crashed onto the national scene.”
[A]mong the world’s democracies … constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s. The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.
– Professors David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia, in a forthcoming article that will be published in the New York University Law Review. They conducted a study that was discussed in a very interesting article by Adam Liptak, ‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.
And perhaps with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Which constitutions does she prefer over our own founding document?
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Why Do You Hate America, Justice Ginsburg?”
There may be a case, which is for a court of law to decide, but that’s a made-up number.
– Kate O’Brien Ahlers, a spokesperson for the New York City Law Department, commenting on the $900 trillion lawsuit filed against the city by Fausat Ogunbayo, a mother whose children were placed in foster care in June 2008.
Antonin Scalia
Society cannot afford to have such a huge proportion of its best minds going into the law.
– Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, commenting on the state of the legal profession at the 2012 Midyear Meeting of the American Bar Association in New Orleans.
(Justice Scalia comments on Biglaw’s flawed compensation system, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quotes of the Day: Mo’ Superior Legal Minds, Mo’ Problems!”
[O]ne is a practicing polygamist, and he’s not even the Mormon.
– Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, commenting on the differences between leading Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich during a speech at the Alfalfa Club.
Or, maybe sometimes you should.
Due to the current weakness in the job market for environmental journalists, Columbia’s dual degree program in Earth & Environmental Science Journalism will not be accepting new students for the foreseeable future.
– A note posted on the official website for Columbia University’s Dual Masters program in Earth and Environmental Science Journalism.
(I feel like I’ve heard this before, in some sort of parallel universe. More on this, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Ground Control to ABA, Are You Listening?”
After staying away in 2010, firms have returned to the lateral market at boom-time levels. But this hiring binge is driven by desperation, not a thriving economy.
– A headline seen in today’s edition of the American Lawyer. The magazine confirms that in 2011, 2,454 partners left or joined Am Law 200 firms. Lateral hiring might be up, but at what cost?
Judge Andrew Peck
Keyword searching is absolutely terrible, in terms of statistical responsiveness.
– Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck (S.D.N.Y.), in a panel today at the LegalTech conference. He spoke alongside Wachtell Lipton counsel Maura Grossman and Jackson Lewis partner Ralph Losey, on a panel that aimed to demystify cutting-edge, computer-assisted e-discovery technology. Peck is a vocal proponent of computer-assisted discovery and predictive coding. He is not a fan of the slightly older keyword-searching technology.
(A few minutes later, Losey had another strong opinion to add. See what was said, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Keyword Searching? You’re Doing It Wrong”
A. Gail Prudenti
It’s the best chambers in the state. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen them all.
– Judge A. Gail Prudenti commenting to the New York Times about pleasing chambers afforded to the Brooklyn Presiding Judge. Prudenti was recently promoted to Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts of New York State, creating a vacancy for the position of Brooklyn’s Presiding Judge.
19 judges have applied for the position, apparently because the Brooklyn Presiding Judge doesn’t have to work in a spider hole like the rest of the borough.
Landing a Summer Public Interest Legal Job: hotsexyskippy@yahoo.com is not an appropriate email address to have on your résumé. LOL.
– PSLawNet, offering job search advice over Twitter.
[T]his might be a helpful alert to lawyers who are hiring someone to try to promote their sites: It’s possible that the promotion might consist of behavior that is par for the course for purported penis enlargement products, but not really in keeping with the sort of reputation that lawyers generally seek to cultivate.
– Professor Eugene Volokh, issuing a warning to lawyers that hire outside companies to promote their law firm websites using spam blog comments.
Death doesn’t change your status as a party.
– Max Kennerly, a Philadelphia trial lawyer, commenting on the effect (or lack thereof) that Joe Paterno‘s death would have on lawsuits stemming from the Penn State football sex scandal. Kennerly said prospective litigants could name Paterno’s estate.
Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people “dogs,” “rogues” and even “queens” (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled “poopes” (“dolts”).
– John McWhorter, the noted linguist, in his New York Times review this past weekend of Speaking American: A History of English in the United States.
(Additional fun facts about language and the law — specifically, facts about statutes criminalizing oral sex — after the jump.)
Continue reading “Fun Fact of the Day: Talk Dirty to Me”
Kim Kardashian
What reputation? She doesn’t have one.
– Legal analyst Joey Jackson, commenting on allegations made in Kim Kardashian’s lawsuit against The Gap. The reality television star claims that an Old Navy commercial featuring a look-alike actress damaged her reputation to the tune of $15-20 million.
(A clip of the commercial in question, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Please Stick to Sex Tapes”
Striking down the judicial precedent that established the legal supremacy of right over wrong more than two centuries ago, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned Right v. Wrong. The landmark reversal — a bitterly contested 5-4 decision that has been widely praised by murderers, rapists, bigots, usurers, and pro-wrong advocates nationwide — nullifies all previously lawful forms of right and makes it very difficult for Americans to make ethical decisions or be generally decent human beings without facing criminal charges.
– The Onion, Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’
Alexander Macgillivray
Bad day for the Internet…. Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.
– Alex Macgillivray, General Counsel at Twitter, commenting via Twitter about Google’s recent plan to alter search results based on users’ Google+ networks. Macgillivray used to be in-house counsel at Google. Corporate Counsel analyzed his comments yesterday.
Scrooge McDuck: he is the 1 percent (but not a lawyer).
Lawyers are the fourth most well-represented occupational group among the nation’s top 1 percent (which, for purposes of the study, consists of households with a pretax income of $380,000, excluding capital gains).
– a New York Times analysis of data collected by the University of Minnesota Population Center.
Additional interesting facts and links — including which occupations ranked ahead of lawyers, and what percentage of lawyers belong to the 1 percent — appear after the jump.
Continue reading “Fun Fact of the Day: Lawyers and the One Percent”
Thomas D. Morgan
The jolt to the legal profession is real, and the world is not going back to the way it was.
– Thomas D. Morgan, professor of law at George Washington University Law School, commenting on the state of legal education during a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Morgan, author of The Vanishing American Lawyer (affiliate link), noted that more must be done to make legal education relevant in a post-recession world.
