Everyone smile and say “certiorari”!
One of our favorite legal blogs is Noncuratlex.com, authored by Professor Kyle Graham of Santa Clara Law. The site is extremely funny and insightful, especially if you’re a legal nerd (we plead guilty), and we link to it regularly.
Professor Graham shares a number of our interests, such as legally themed vanity license plates. And, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Which SCOTUS justice would you be? Find out by taking the Noncuratlex.com personality quiz….
This morning, the New York Times published an op-ed by actress Angelina Jolie discussing her decision to get a preventative double mastectomy.
Jolie is being hailed as an inspiration for coming forward with this story, which marks an amazing turn-around for a woman who used to make out with her brother and carry vials of her then-husband’s blood around her neck.
The actress decided to take the preventative measure after genetic testing determined that she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.
Now, Jolie is a movie star married to another movie star, so the decision to undergo an expensive procedure did not deter her like it will many women in the United States.
Not the mastectomy. Insurance usually covers that if the patient presents such risks. No, the expensive procedure is the initial genetic testing. And the Supreme Court might be able to do something about that in the next couple of months…
Continue reading “Yes, It Is Worth Making A Federal Case Over Angelina Jolie’s Boobs”
More trustworthy than any SCOTUS justice.
I suppose that’s a rhetorical question. When you live in a nation that’s been reduced to an army of mindless reality-TV-watching drones, it’s not exactly surprising that the average citizen is more inclined to trust a television judge than a jurist who’s been appointed to the highest court in the land.
We care more about the matching camouflage wedding couture Honey Boo Boo’s parents, Mama June and Sugar Bear, wore when they tied the knot this past weekend than the next round of controversial decisions that will be soon be handed down by the Supreme Court. We care more about the Kimye baby bump than the very existence of the Supreme Court, much less the names of the justices sitting on its esteemed bench.
No one who’s been paying any attention is taken aback by the fact that Americans care more about the people they see on television on a daily basis than names they once read in a textbook. That’s why the results of the latest Reader’s Digest Trust Poll as to this country’s judges are expected, and sad, and not at all surprising….
The scene outside One First Street after the argument.
Dearly beloved, we were gathered together at SCOTUS today to argue about these fourteen words: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
But we talked a lot about standing. And we did a lot of standing.
What time did I get to the Court?
Continue reading “The Proposition 8 Supreme Court Arguments: Standing and Standing”
How many push-ups can RBG do? Probably more than you can.
How do federal judges maintain taut abs and tight buns underneath their robes? They all have their own special methods.
For some, it’s about diet. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, for example, has a four-word diet: “Few carbs, less sugar.”
Other judges believe in aerobic exercise. The ranks of runners include retired Justice David H. Souter, whose exercise regimen turned him into a judicial hottie (“Certiorari is GRANTED to that hot, lean body!”); Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson (4th Cir.), whose failure to cross train got critcized by President Bush during a Supreme Court interview; Judge Denny Chin (2d Cir.), a veteran marathoner; and Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain (9th Cir.), my former boss.
But maybe running is for wimps? For the women of One First Street, weight training is the order of the day. Let’s meet the personal trainer helping two of the justices get HUGE….
Continue reading “Meet the Personal Trainer to Two Supreme Court Justices”
Now there’s a cover boy for the conservative Tiger Beat.
Paul Clement must still be stinging from that Obamacare loss. The celebrated conservative lawyer and former Solicitor General seemed unbeatable after he managed to secure constitutional approval for the government to hold prisoners indefinitely while blasting Barry Manilow if the Vice President’s office says so. People actually described him as the Michael Jordan of the law.
And then the Court upheld Obamacare. Even Jordan needed Pippen.
To reestablish his conservative street cred, Clement filed a petition with Justice Ginsburg to jump the line and put his case complaining about NLRB recess appointments, currently residing in a Connecticut district court, in front of the Supreme Court ahead of the high profile Noel Canning v. NLRB decision from the D.C. Circuit (discussed by Elie here).
Justice Ginsburg told Clement to pound sand.
There is a 64 percent probability that at least one Supreme Court justice will die in the next four years….
– The ABA Journal, offering a rather grim assessment of the health and wellness of the justices of the nation’s highest court, based on Slate’s Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator. (You may want to start taking bets.)
[UPDATE: Hm...well it looks like everyone in D.C. (including Feinstein herself yesterday) was wrong. So she's sticking with her Intelligence chair. This assignment now becomes something of a "what might have been" exercise) Query: what changed? Why would Leahy not take Appropriations? Was he worried about turning Judiciary over to the more conservative Feinstein?]
Daniel Inouye, the second longest serving Senator in history, died on Monday. Inouye had represented the state of Hawaii in Congress as either a Representative or Senator since… well, forever. Inouye took office the day Hawaii became a state and never stopped. He was also an undisputed badass who wasted a German machine gun nest by prying a grenade from his own partially severed arm and throwing it at a guy trying to kill him! This was a more impressive response to having your arm severed that I would have.
But with the loss of Inouye, the Senate has to find a new chair for the powerful Appropriations Committee. Since the Democrats run on strict seniority, noted Batman enthusiast Patrick Leahy of Vermont jumped at that plum assignment.
And here’s where this all comes back to the law. By taking the Appropriations gig, Leahy had to forfeit his role as chair of the Judiciary Committee. Enter Dianne Feinstein, who will take over as the shepherd of the country’s legal policy making for the next Congress.
So what will a Feinstein-led committee look like?
Justice Samuel Alito
Where did we go wrong?
– Justice Samuel A. Alito, imagining the reaction of Yale Law School professors to the fact that he and Justice Clarence Thomas were, for a time, the two YLS graduates on the Supreme Court. Justice Alito delivered the keynote address last night at the annual dinner of the Federalist Society.
(Additional highlights from Justice Alito’s speech, after the jump.)
Continue reading “Quote of the Day: Justice Alito on Yale Law School”
I’m always amazed by the ability of the American public to contradict themselves. People hate Congress, but consistently reelect their Congressmen. People want more government services, but don’t support tax increases. The say they hate negative ads, but allow them to be incredibly effective.
Today is Constitution Day, and the Associated Press has a new poll that’s giving Americans a chance to express their contradictory views about our beloved organizing document.
One “headline” from the poll: nearly 70% of Americans believe the Constitution is an “enduring” document that doesn’t need to be “modernized.” Although that number is going down.
So it’s perfect the way it is, except for the parts that people don’t like….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
Keep reading »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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