If you're in New York today (Sunday) and looking for something to do in the afternoon, consider checking out Thurgood. It's a one-man show about the life of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), starring Laurence Fishburne (best known as Morpheus of The Matrix, but with a long list of other film and theater credits).

It's an entertaining and educational production, and Laurence Fishburne turns in a superb performance. As one friend of ours, an ex-theater major, put it, "Fishburne was able to make the audience forget that this is a one-man show."

As one might expect from a play based on the life of a heroic historical figure, Thurgood occasionally verges on the pedantic and preachy ("one person can make a difference"; "we know how far we've come -- but we also know how far we still have to go"). Law nerds might find feel patronized by the more expository parts of the play, like the mini-reviews of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. You can often sense the "message" button being pushed.

But hey, everyone needs a refresher course every now and then. And there are enough interesting bits of biographical trivia -- as well as ample entertainment, in the form of humorous anecdotes from Marshall's life, well-told by Fishburne -- to make you forgive the more didactic or heavy-handed elements.

If you'd like to see Thurgood, you need to act fast; it's closing today. The 3 p.m. matinee is the final performance. You can probably get discounted tickets at the TKTS booth (since Thurgood was there last week, and there were definitely a few empty seats at the performance we attended yesterday).

Additional thoughts -- if you're planning on seeing the play, save these for later, so you can form your own opinions free of taint -- after the jump.

We've all heard of the phrase DWB, or Driving While Black. How about PUPWB -- Picking Up Pizza While Black?

From an article by Leigh Jones in the National Law Journal (via Paul Caron):

An African-American tax attorney who was held at gunpoint and handcuffed by police officers after a Papa John's employee allegedly accused him of pulling a gun while buying a pizza has won an appeal in the Court of Appeals of Indiana.

Attorney Sanford Kelsey can move ahead to trial with his claims of false imprisonment, defamation, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress against the pizza chain.

Kelsey, who holds an LL.M. degree from Georgetown University Law Center, is a former attorney at Greenberg Taurig and at Indianapolis-based Ice Miller. He currently works as in-house counsel for a major packing and shipping corporation. The other plaintiff in the case is Thomas Williams, Kelsey's friend, who is also African-American and was with him at the restaurant when the incident occurred.

The allegations are quite disturbing:

The July 11 decision by a three-judge panel overturns a trial court decision that granted summary judgment to Papa John's and employee Kelly Tharp. ... The decision stems from a February 2005 incident, when Kelsey and Williams went to a Papa John's in Westfield, Indiana to pick up a pizza they had ordered. They paid for the pizza with a credit card. Kelsey, an attorney with the IRS at the time, was visiting Williams while in Indianapolis to interview for a job at a law firm there.

According to the plaintiffs' complaint, the employee, Tharp, falsely reported that the two men had brandished a gun and took money from the cash register. ... [A]n unmarked police car was waiting for the two men when they arrived at Williams's house after picking up their pizza. Several police cars arrived quickly upon their return and surrounded their car. The police ordered them out of their car at gunpoint, ordered them to their knees and handcuffed them. They were detained for about 90 minutes while their family and friends watched. No gun was found.

The Papa John's motto is "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza." Better employees, not so much:

Tharp had worked at two other Papa John's, where he was previously terminated for theft, rehired under a false name, and rehired again using his father's name, according to the decision.

We can't blame Tharp too much. If you were a guy named "Kelly," wouldn't you go by a false name too?

African-American attorney held at gunpoint will get his day in court [National Law Journal]
African-American Tax Lawyer & IRS Attorney Held at Gunpoint by Police After Buying Pizza Proceed With Lawsuit [TaxProf Blog]

May 2008 is almost over, and it's a month that Bingham McCutchen will probably be happy to put in the past. The month kicked off with Roofiegate. Then came this benchslap, reported by Legal Pad (in a post titled "Bingham Busted By Its Own Website"):

Almost every big law firm uses its website to tout its commitment to diversity and its global reach. For Bingham McCutchen, it may have cost the firm a bid for sanctions.

A Bingham employment law team including partner Wendy Lazerson and associates Jacqueline Bronson and Kristen Pezone was set to take a deposition in the wrongful termination case of Kim v. Poonsang Microtec Corp. on April 17. The day before the deposition, plaintiff's attorney Frank Mayo of Los Altos served additional discovery, including some documents that were in Korean.

Bingham's team insisted on postponing the deposition, saying they could not get the Korean documents translated in time. Mayo objected, saying his client had already flown up from Southern California. Things turned nasty and both sides moved for sanctions.

In a tentative order filed Thursday (see Page 31 of this pdf) , Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Socrates "Pete" Manoukian rejected both sides' request for sanctions.

"This court finds it difficult to believe that no one in the office of [Bingham] is able to speak Korean, given that the Bingham web[site] has many referrals to its commitment to diversity and its ability to service, among others, Korean clients," Manoukian wrote. [See, e.g., here (PDF).]

Ouch. As our tipster snarkily observed, "Live by the sword, die by the sword. For a firm that runs as much as this one does on pure PR, this is quite fitting."

Funny -- but fair? We contacted Bingham -- which we're not sure Legal Pad did, despite being an MSM blog -- and received this statement, from firm spokesperson Claire Papanastasiou:

To use this tentative ruling to question Bingham's commitment to diversity is misleading and false. Bingham has continuously been recognized as a leader in championing diversity in the workforce. More than 440 people at Bingham speak 51 foreign languages (including Korean), but this was not a simple matter of getting documents translated. This case involved the authentication of documents -- which would have required a court-certified translator -- and with a 16-hour time difference, the Bingham legal team wanted to confer with the client, who was in Korea, to determine the documents' authenticity and discuss next steps. Bingham informed opposing counsel of the decision not to go forward as a courtesy. And finally, Bingham offered to take the deposition in Orange County and ended up with an order that simply provides what our lawyers were already willing to do. Efforts to transform this relatively minor discovery dispute into something more profound simply are unjustified.

Interesting. As noted by a Legal Pad commenter, the ruling "[s]eems more like a political dig against diversity efforts by Judge Manoukian."

Speaking of diversity, Bingham has been honored as one of the best law firms for gays and lesbians, by Human Rights Campaign (Aaron Charney, holla); for Asian American lawyers, by Multicultural Law (Shinyung Oh, holla); and women, by Working Mother (pre-Roofiegate).

Alas, even if Korean Translation-gate was overblown, it wasn't the end of Bingham's unflattering media mentions in the month of May. Check out this National Law Journal article, which depicts Bingham as hemorrhaging talent and "troubled."

Was this piece evenhanded journalism? Bingham thinks not. They've issued a lengthy and detailed response, blasting reporter Sheri Qualters's article as "outrageous," "poorly reported," and "factually inaccurate by any objective measure."

It's kinda delicious. Read the whole thing, after the jump.

It's hard pleasing everyone at Kirkland & Ellis. Sure, K&E offers oodles of prestige, cutting-edge work, and above-market bonuses. When we asked our associate readers what firm other than their own they'd most want to work for, Kirkland took third place.

But people will always find something to be upset about -- and often there's a political component to the K&E complaints. For example, some people think Kirkland tilts too far to the right, thanks to its association with prominent conservatives like Ken Starr and John Bolton.

Others think the firm tilts too far to the left, bowing down before the forces of political correctness. These critics object to the firm's Diversity Networking Forums, its Big Gay Cocktail Parties.... and, most recently, its just-circulated "Diversity Census," asking lawyers for their demographic data.

From a tipster:

Many of us at K&E find this [Diversity Census] offensive. Clients who inquire about the race or sex of the attorneys working on their matters should be told it's none of their business and that the firm does not staff its matters in accordance with the racist or sexist quota requirements of its clients. If a client asked that no blacks work on its matters, presumably the firm would fire the client, but when the shoe is on the other foot, K&E partners are all too happy to oblige.

But is this really the purpose of the Diversity Census? No, according to the firm. We contacted Walt Lohmann, co-chair of the Firmwide Diversity Committee at K&E, who explained that "participation in the Kirkland Diversity Census is voluntary and anonymous (unless a respondent chooses to self-identify for purposes of receiving materials and event notifications)." Furthermore, "responses are not used in staffing decisions."

Fair enough. But what if they were -- would that be problematic? As reported last year by the American Lawyer:

Over the last few years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and others have raised the stakes for outside counsel, pressing firms to increase diversity in their ranks or risk losing clients. In one case... Wal-Mart dumped an outside firm that didn't adequately adhere to the company's diversity program.

Do efforts like Wal-Mart's merit commendation or condemnation? Feel free to opine in the comments.

More information about the K&E Diversity Census, plus a copy of the Census, below the fold.

Technically Larry Hutchins is -- or was -- a mere magistrate, as opposed to a full-blown judge. But we think his alleged conduct entitles him to Judge of the Day. From the Greenville News (via the ABA Journal):

The South Carolina Supreme Court today reprimanded a retired Spartanburg magistrate after finding that he used a racial slur to refer to people a clerk might be dating and allegedly asked another clerk if she would be willing to have sex with another magistrate and secretly videotape it for use against him.

The court agreed with the Commission on Judicial Conduct’s findings and issued a reprimand for former Magistrate Larry M. Hutchins, who retired in 2004. The justices said Hutchins has repeatedly asked that his suspension or retirement be lifted.

That's unlikely, in light of this:

According to the court, a former clerk of Hutchins testified that in May 2003 he asked her if it would be difficult to get a magistrate not identified in the ruling over to her apartment. "Respondent then asked her to ‘go all the way’ with the judge, to videotape it, and respondent mentioned the availability of small cameras," the court wrote.

Secret videotaping? Perhaps to be expected from a Dunkin' Donuts employee -- or, in this day and age, the federal government -- but not from a state-court judge.

The woman refused and reported the proposal to the chief magistrate, the court said.

Also, Hutchins allegedly called a clerk superviser [sic] and said that one of the clerks was dating black men, using a racial slur, according to the court.

He added, according to the court, that there was "no telling what we might catch using the same bathroom as her."

Huh? And why would a male judge be using the same bathroom as a female clerk?

Justices reprimand retired Spartanburg magistrate [Greenville News]
Magistrate Reprimanded for Using Racial Slur, Seeking to Record Sexual Encounter [ABA Journal]

Judging from tips we receive and comments we read when we post about affirmative action, it seems that a whole lot of white guys in Biglaw feel disenfranchised by all this "diversity" talk. They complain when law firms have special scholarships for minorities, "diversity networking forums" for various groups, and, worst of all, cocktail parties for the gays.

If you're an angry white male lawyer, and if you work in Chicago, you might want to attend this event:

White Men and Diversity: A Candid Dialogue

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
The Offices of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP
Chicago, Illinois

The Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity, in conjunction with the Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms, will host a panel discussion entitled, White Men and Diversity: A Candid Dialogue on Tuesday, May 20 from 12:00 - 1:30 p.m.

This interactive panel discussion featuring William Von Hoene, Jr. (Executive VP, General Counsel, Exelon Corporation), Robert Yates (Editor, Chicago Lawyer) and Lawrence Gray (Partner, Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell) and moderated by Dr. Arin N. Reeves will begin a candid dialogue on white men’s perspectives on diversity efforts, the ways in which they feel included in and excluded by diversity initiatives in the legal profession, and insights on ways in which white men can become and stay engaged in creating a more diverse legal profession.

The emphasis on "candid" dialogue is intriguing. Does Katten expect its white males to show up and spout politically incorrect statements? White Males of Katten: don't take the bait! They're waiting to escort you from the building the moment you question why women and minority lawyers always get staffed on matters for certain clients. (Answer: It's because the clients demand it, which explains pretty much everything in Biglaw.)

In all seriousness, White Males of Katten, we'd counsel against an excess of "candor" at said event. Complaining bitterly about how diversity initiatives are screwing you over won't put you on the fast track to partnership. Just work hard and keep your mouth shut. Or get a sex change AND claim lesbian status (which would double your diversity value, while still allowing you to get with women).

As for the panel's exploration of "ways in which white men can help create a more diverse legal profession," here's one answer: THEY CAN LEAVE.

P.S. We expected this event to be open to the public, since it is up on the web, co-sponsored by the Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms, and featuring non-Katten panelists. But we contacted Katten and learned that, sadly, it's not. If you work at another firm, dialogue candidly on your own time.

UPDATE / CORRECTION: As it turns out, this event IS free and open to the public. We received this correction, from a Katten representative:

The White Men & Diversity event about which you inquired is a Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms event that is being hosted by Katten. The event is open to the public, and there is no charge for the event. Please let me know if you have further questions about this event. Thank you.

White Men and Diversity: A Candid Dialogue [Katten -- Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity]

Indiana lawyer Tony Zirkle is making a run for the Republican nomination for a congressional seat. There is a general rule for political candidates that involves not being photographed in front of Hitler's portrait.

Apparently, Zirkle missed that one:

A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Zirkle compares talking to a white supremacist group to talking to African-Americans. Nice. We wonder if he discussed his segregation plans during the radio appearance.

Zirkle has the following "defense" up on his campaign website:

I've been getting a flood of e-mails and phone calls, some of which include death threats, about my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews.... Let's save our Jewish brothers and sisters from this tyrant king porn dragon before we get to another world-wide pogrom after a war with Iran or some other conflict and after the Jews get blamed again.

Cuckoo. The tyrant king porn dragon sounds like something out of a dirty version of The Lord of the Rings.

Candidate speaks at Hitler birthday party [The Times via Respectful Insolence]
Tony Zirkle's Segregation Plan: Crazy Enough To Work? [Wonkette]

Richard Peltz teaches torts and con law at the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Within Arkansas, he is a well-known expert on freedom of speech, cited by the Arkansas Supreme Court. In 2005, he exercised his freedom of speech while talking about affirmative action during a con law lecture. From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

In that class, Peltz displayed a satirical article about the death of Rosa Parks and made comments about friends who weren’t admitted to law school because of affirmative action, according to a letter students wrote about a year and a half later to law school Dean Chuck Goldner. The students also said Peltz promised to give black students who scored as high as white students an extra point on the final exam.

Apparently, the satirical article was Now We Can Finally Put Civil Rights Behind Us, from the Onion.

Though the issue was resolved in 2005, the allegations of racism reemerged in 2007, during a controversy over there being no black students on the Law Review. (The admissions website says the school has 440 students, and that 30% of the 2007 entering class was "of color.")

From this description, it sounds like there's a race war brewing at the UALR's Law School. And Professor Peltz just put himself in the middle of it, suing his black students and Arkansas's black law association for defamation:

In a nine-page lawsuit filed last week, he complains that the defendants, students Valerie D. Nation of Little Rock and Chrishuana L. Clark of Pine Bluff, who are officers or former officers with the university’s Black Law Student Association, and attorney Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society, have been making false accusations against him around the law school and statewide legal community since the fall of 2005. In the lawsuit, he asks for unspecified punitive and compensatory damages.

Ironically, if Peltz's suit is successful, it may limit speech on campus, says Jonathan Knight, director of programs on academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors in Washington, in the Gazette.

Getting sued by your law professor? Worst. Homework. Ever.

Read about another professor-versus-student lawsuit, after the jump.

Sorry we're late to the party on this HuffPo post, bearing the provocative title "Law Firm Segregation Reminiscent of Jim Crow." It's by Yolanda Young, a former staff attorney at Covington & Burling. Her claim, in a nutshell, is that Covington fills the ranks of its "staff attorney ghetto" with African-Americans, while the ranks of its partnership and partnership-track associate pool are overwhelmingly white.

Young's post has already been discussed at Legal Blog Watch and the WSJ Law Blog. But considering how we love to fan flames of racial tension follow the issue of diversity in the legal profession so closely here at ATL, of course we're going to cover it.

Here's an excerpt (emphases added):

Blacks at Covington comprise less than 5% of the Washington office's partners and associates, but make up 30% of its staff attorneys. A peek at the firm's website doesn't reveal this since, unlike all other lawyers there, staff attorneys aren't pictured. Were they, a peculiar pattern would emerge.....

Covington's black staff attorneys (like its black partners and associates) hail from top law schools like Harvard, Duke and Georgetown while several white associates and partners attended schools like Catholic, Kentucky and Villanova (all ranked well below 50). Taken as a whole, the black staff attorneys' average law school rank is higher than that of white staff attorneys at the firm.

Blacks bought into the notion, stressed by legal literature, ranking systems and law firm recruiting departments, that investing in a top legal education is paramount for those wishing to work at top law firms. It's disheartening to then discover that the black student who borrows $120,000 to attend Georgetown will only earn half that of the white associate who's paid $60,000 to attend the University of Maryland.

Covington began stockpiling its staff attorney ghetto with blacks and other minorities in 2005, shortly after the General Council [sic] of some of the country's largest companies joined Roderick A. Palmore, Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary of Sara Lee in taking a tougher stance on law firm diversity. Signed by hundreds of General Counsel, this new "Call to Action" states they will retain firms that demonstrate a level of diversity reflective of their employees and customers and end their relationship with firms "whose performance consistently evidences a lack of meaningful interest in being diverse."

Covington has certainly diversified its firm; however, its attorneys are far from equals. The vast majority of Covington's black attorneys do no substantive work, have no control over their case assignments and no opportunity for advancement. This seems to be just the sort of structure the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warned against in its 2003 "Diversity In Law Firms" report which stated, "In large, national law firms, the most pressing issues have probably shifted from hiring and initial access to problems concerning the terms and conditions of employment, especially promotion to partnership."

You can read the rest of the post -- it's quite lengthy -- over here.

What explains our delay? We were doing the MSM thing of waiting to hear back from Covington before posting (instead of just going ahead and writing about it, which would have been the more bloggy thing to do). They just got back to us, a few minutes ago; here is the first part of their statement:

We have long been committed to equal opportunity at all levels of hiring. Our ongoing efforts show positive results. In the case of our staff attorneys, we've been very successful in recruiting African-American lawyers. We attribute our success to a number of factors. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, which we will likely further enhance in the near future. This includes the innovative benefit of pay for pro bono work, and our staff attorneys average about 70 hours of pro bono work a year. Our staff attorneys are a stable, productive and respected part of our workforce. Part of this stability can be attributed to our recruitment process, which has benefited from the great number of referrals from our current staff attorneys.

The rest of the Covington statement appears after the jump.

In addition to reading Young's post and the coverage of it, check out the material on the rest of her blog for background. Props to her for coming up with such headline gems as "Think of my mouth as your next sexual partner."

P.S. Disclaimer: Please note that Kashmir Hill, former Covington & Burling paralegal, had no role in the writing of this post.

Law Firm Segregation Reminiscent of Jim Crow [Huffington Post]
Georgetown Law Grad Says Big Law Segregation Reminiscent of Jim Crow [Legal Blog Watch]
Ex-Staff Attorney Takes Aim at BigLaw Minority Hiring [WSJ Law Blog]
Spade Project [video blog of Yolanda Young]

We bring you two interesting updates on our friends at Kirkland & Ellis -- one important, and one silly.

Let's start with the trivial, and work our way up. First, from a tipster:

The balkanization of Kirkland & Ellis continues. Why should an "informal, visible network for attorneys to exchange ideas, provide support, and develop relationships" be based on race and/or sexual orientation? What's next, separate cafeterias and drinking fountains?

A recent email from The Kirkland & Ellis LLP Diversity Committee reads:

Kirkland & Ellis Diversity Networking Forums (Chicago Office)

On behalf of the Diversity Committee, I am proud to announce a new addition to our diversity programming, Diversity Networking Forums. The main purpose of the Diversity Networking Forums is to provide an informal, visible network for attorneys to exchange ideas, provide support, and develop relationships. There will be four Diversity Networking Forums:

Asian Diversity Networking Forum
Black Diversity Networking Forum
Hispanic/Latino Diversity Networking Forum
GLBT Diversity Networking Forum

The Diversity Networking Forums are open to all Chicago Kirkland attorneys. If you are interested in becoming a part of any of these forums, please email Attorney Training and Development at [xxxx] by February 8 and indicate which forums you would like to join.

Note that the forums are "open to all." We wonder if that language was added to avoid a psuedo-controversy like the one over K&E's big gay party. We also wonder why you'd join one of these networking forums if you weren't a member of the group in question. But see "fag hags" signing up for the LGBT group.

Okay, on to the second update. Perhaps in an effort to avoid an Aaron Charney debacle -- or, on a smaller scale, a Schoenfeld v. Allen & Overy or a Morisseau v. DLA Piper -- K&E has enacted a mandatory employment arbitration policy, applicable to all associates. From a tipster:

Kirkland just sent a memo to all of its associates, which they had to sign, reminding them that they were at will employees, and telling them they had to agree to arbitrate any employment dispute. Apparently a response to Charney-gate.

If you're interested -- perhaps you're a labor and employment lawyer, or a Biglaw partner looking to foist such a policy on the associates at your own firm -- check out the memo, after the jump.

In our column for this week's New York Observer, we help you plan an imaginary dinner party. A dinner party, of course, is only as good as the guest list. So we review which colorful characters of the legal world, who made headlines in 2007, should be invited to your festivities.

Think of it as a "year in review" piece, aimed primarily at people who don't read ATL (since most of the names mentioned in the article will be familiar to regular visitors to this site). The potential guests under consideration: Charlene Morisseau, the sassy ex-associate who sued DLA Piper; Aaron Charney, who made S&C "bend over"; and internet celebrity Loyola 2L.

ATL bonus content: Due to space considerations, our write-up of Elana Glatt (née Elana Elbogen) wound up on the cutting room floor. But if you'd like to read it, we've reprinted it after the jump.

Culture of Complaint Spreads Through Law Firms [New York Observer]

We love tales of misbehaving DAs. And this one is a doozy. From the Houston Chronicle:

New e-mails released Tuesday show District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal sent and received racist jokes and strategized with political consultants and colleagues about his re-election campaign on his county e-mail account.

Also within the correspondence obtained Tuesday by the Houston Chronicle were numerous sexually explicit images. It was unclear, however, if Rosenthal ever forwarded those files.

Those were just for his personal wank collection.

Among e-mails that concerned Woodfill were video clips of nudity and sex acts and a racist joke forwarded by Rosenthal that compares former President Bill Clinton to a black man. The e-mail says Clinton played the saxophone, smoked marijuana and gets a check from the government each month.

Pot always struck us as more of a white person's drug, but whatever.

Also included within the e-mails is heavy traffic between Rosenthal and Sam Siegler, Rosenthal's physician and the husband of Kelly Siegler, who is running for district attorney. In one e-mail from Sam Siegler to Rosenthal, an attached video shows women having their breasts exposed after men forcibly pulled down their blouses in public. The video called the act "sharking."

Kelly Siegler dismissed her husband's e-mails. "He cusses like a sailor and his sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly," she said. "It's his computer and what he does at work is his business. He's the boss."

Stand by your man, Kelly. As long as there's no kiddie porn in those emails, it's all good.

Oh, and Rosenthal also sent "intimate e-mails to his executive secretary." More details, after the jump.

Former DLA Piper associate Charlene Morisseau isn't just our Lawyer of the Day. This high-powered litigatrix -- a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review -- should be hailed as a heroine by Biglaw associates everywhere.

From a most engaging article by Anthony Lin, in the New York Law Journal:

A Manhattan federal judge has thrown out a race discrimination suit brought against DLA Piper by a former associate who claimed the firm's New York office was a hostile work environment.

Charlene Morisseau, a 2001 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was a law review editor, joined DLA Piper as a litigation associate in April 2003 but was asked to leave less than a year later. In a lawsuit filed last year, Ms. Morisseau, who is black, claimed her firing was retaliation for complaints she had made about discriminatory treatment.

She requested almost $250 million in damages from the firm and the 11 partners she individually named in the suit.

Now, we're all in favor of giving associates more money. But $250 million may be a bit much, even for a Harvard Law grad. It's about 90 percent of DLA Piper's total firm profits for 2006 ($280 million).

But it looks like Morisseau won't be seeing a dime:

Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan granted summary judgment to the firm Monday, finding that DLA Piper had put forth a "legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for plaintiff's termination."

"Here, the uncontradicted evidence demonstrates that plaintiff did not perform in a manner satisfactory to Piper notwithstanding her academic credentials," the judge wrote. "She was a confrontational, stubborn, and insubordinate employee in an environment in which professional personal relations, flexibility and a willingness to accept supervision were essential."

Now we've reached the good part. Here's why Charlene Morisseau should be every associate's idol:

[I]n court filings, DLA Piper denied treating Ms. Morisseau differently and said the firm had taken action because the ex-associate had exhibited a pattern of unacceptable behavior, including yelling at partners and throwing one out of her office.

The firm said Ms. Morisseau ordered former partner Marilla Ochis to "back up" out of her office after Ms. Ochis had come to discuss an e-mail exchange Ms. Morisseau had apparently taken offense to.

Have you ever fantasized about telling off your partner oppressors? Well, Charlene Morisseau has lived your dream -- and then some.

Read the rest, after the jump.

As Justice Holmes famously wrote in his Lochner dissent, "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." But does it enact, say, Mr. Alan Flusser's Dressing the Man?

This doesn't affect us, since we usually don't put on pants before 5 p.m. But for those of you who do get dressed and leave home in the morning, check out this story:

Pine Lawn, a mostly black municipality outside St. Louis, is among a growing number of U.S. cities enacting laws that ban low-slung pants.

Critics say the bans amount to government attacks on youthful fashion that some find offensive. And constitutional scholars say they may not be lawful.

"People have a right to express their identity through speech and action," said Neil Richards, a First Amendment expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "On the other hand, municipalities have a vague power to control the health, safety and welfare of citizens.

Discussion continues, after the jump.

This actually happened quite some time ago -- last month, to be exact. But we're happy to write about it because (1) it hasn't been blogged about elsewhere, as far as we know, and (2) with the passage of time, tempers have cooled. So maybe now people can look back on it with amusement rather than anger.

A summary, from one of the several tipsters who drew our attention to this:

A friend of mine at Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, sent me this. Apparently some girl sent out a mass email about President Bush's veto of some health care legislation. This set off a whole clusterf**k of responding emails, with the debate devolving into one over race and class. From reading through the several threads, it's almost frightening that some of these people are actually going to become lawyers.

[One of the more] recent post[s] is especially enlightening.... [T]he author states that "The powers that be count on sellouts to climb the ladder of success and refuse to help those underneath them. That way they can use you sellouts as tokens...."

However, the most hilarious part of this whole thing is where one of the black (1L) students responds to an Asian student by saying, "To the Asian.....u aint black." Further idiocy follows.

The aforementioned "idiocy," after the jump.

She probably wouldn't be very happy with her law firm. From the Minority Law Journal:

[N]owadays most associates don't plan on spending their entire legal career at one law firm. But some associates are more likely to head for the exits than others. Nearly half of all white male midlevel associates say that they expect to be working at their current firm in five years, according to our Minority Experience Study. Just over 40 percent of minority male midlevels said the same. Of the minority female midlevels, though, fewer than a third planned to stay put.

Minority women seem to have more reason to want to leave big firms, according to our findings. [The study] showed women of color experiencing less satisfaction and more obstacles at large firms than their peers, including men of color.

You can read the full article -- replete with numerous quotes from "diversity advisers, "diversity consultants" and "diversity officers" -- over here.

P.S. Yes, the Wanda Sykes reference is pretty random. We just think that she is hilarious, and we try to mention her at every opportunity. We also think she bears an uncanny resemblance to one of our favorite jurists, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Cir.; see photo at right).

P.P.S. And have you seen -- or rather, heard -- Wanda Sykes in the new Applebee's ads? The restaurant chain has hired her to serve as the voice for their new "spokesapple." Genius.

Why Are Minority Female Associates Leaving Law Firms? [Minority Law Journal]

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