As for doing what I like, I never do what I like! Ask my wife Joanna….
– Justice Stephen Breyer, rejecting the notion that unelected judges can do whatever they want, at an event at the New York Public Library to promote his new book, Making Democracy Work: A Judge’s View.
Justice Stephen Breyer
* An updated version of the Twinkie defense? A Kentucky man on trial for murdering his wife plans to blame it on the caffeine. “If this defense works, partners, lock your doors….” [BL1Y]
* Speaking of coffee — for just a dollar a day, less than the cost of your daily Starbucks fix, you can fulfill a poor Bolivian child’s dream of owing you money for the rest of his or her life. [Huffington Post]
* Suing for defamation: it’s just not worth it. Larry Joe Davis, the Florida attorney who sued lawyer-rating website Avvo, is dropping his libel claims. [Avvo Blog]
* If you’re planning to attend tonight’s event at the New York Public Library — featuring Justice Stephen Breyer, who has a new book out, and Jeffrey Rosen — look for me. If you can’t make it in person but are interested in the proceedings, you can watch them over the web. [FORA.tv]
* Blawg Review #282 — that’s a pretty number, isn’t it? — has a theme: Constitution Day. [Defending People via Blawg Review]
Here’s one talk that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t fall asleep during: her own, a conversation with Nina Totenberg at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday night.
We took note of the fact that RBG dozed off a bit during President Obama’s State of the Union address. As it turns out, Justice Ginsburg has an explanation.
Shortly before 5 p.m., the Supreme Court ruled against broadcast of the Proposition 8 trial, currently taking place in San Francisco. The Court split 5-4, with the majority setting forth its reasoning in a 17-page per curiam opinion. Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor.
You can read the per curiam opinion and Justice Breyer’s (excellent) dissent over here. Analysis and commentary, from Lyle Denniston and Chris Geidner, can be accessed at SCOTUSblog and Law Dork.
(We’ve already told you how we feel about this issue. In addition, about 80 percent of you support broadcast of the Prop 8 trial.)
Prop 8 Court TV blocked [SCOTUSblog]
SCOTUS Blocks Broadcast [Law Dork]
Earlier: Cameras in the Prop 8 Courtroom: Why Not?
Ed. note: ATL has teamed up with FantasySCOTUS, the premier Supreme Court fantasy league. (For more background, check out this WSJ Law Blog post.) On Fridays, the 10th Justice will analyze league voting to predict how the Supreme Court may decide upcoming cases.
Welcome to the third installment of Predictions of the 10th Justice, brought to you by FantasySCOTUS.net. The league has over 2,000 members, who have made predictions on all cases currently pending before the Supreme Court. Recently, Justice Stephen G. Breyer was asked in an interview about FantasySCOTUS.net. His response: “I don’t think I will bet on it.”
LEWW’s memory isn’t what it once was, but we can’t recall a stronger week in legal nuptials than this one. All six of our featured newlyweds are truly impressive, and a few are even interesting! And not to give anything away, but if you love SCOTUS clerks (and oh, we do!) prepare to curl your toes in ecstasy.
Here are our finalists:
1. Lee Bickley and Martin Carr
2. Betsy Anderson and David Gottlieb
3. Karen Dunn and Brian Netter
Join us in evaluating these couples, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 9.6: The Point Is Probably Moot”
* Left-brainers turn right-brainers in the recession, including a lawyer turned designer about whom we’ve previously written. [USA Today via ABA Journal]
* Bob Cohn of TheAtlantic.com sat down with Justice Stephen Breyer to talk about confirmation hearings, the future of SCOTUS and blogs, and why he might be glad his doppelganger Justice has stepped down. [Ideas/Atlantic]
* Legal experts and prosecutors are grappling with the Supreme Court’s decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. Getting lab analysts out of the lab and into court is a challenge, they say. [Washington Post]
* What’s the payoff for giving up custody rights of Michael Jackson’s children? [MTV]
* A cosmetic surgery company will pay $300,000 to the State of New York for instructing employees to give facelifts to online reviews. [New York Times]
* LA is the country’s meanest city. And Berkeley is the tenth meanest! [Los Angeles Times]
Our last round-up of Supreme Court clerk hiring was published back in August, before the start of October Term 2008. Now that the justices are back in the country and back on the bench, they’re back to interviewing clerkship applicants.
Over at the Clerkship Notification Blog, there was buzz about Justice Stephen Breyer interviewing and hiring clerks for October Term 2009. That intelligence was correct. Here are his hires:
1. Christopher Fonzone (Harvard 2007 / Wilkinson)
2. Jennifer Nou (Yale 2008 / Posner)
Fonzone appears to be the “2007 Harvard grad” referenced in the comments. With Chris Fonzone and Jen Nou on board, Justice Breyer is all done for OT 2009. (We also hear that he’s started to hire for October Term 2010, but we have no details.)
Update (3:40 PM): We now know one of SGB’s hires for OT 2010:
Erika Myers (Stanford 2008 / Kozinski)
Interesting — although Chief Judge Kozinski is a big-time feeder, he tends to feed more to the right side of the Court. So he may be expanding his range as a feeder judge.
The updated list of Supreme Court clerks, with Fonzone and Nou and Myers added, appears after the jump.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: New Term, New Hires”
In October 2006, when LEWW reviewed her wedding, we wrote of Aileen McGrath (at right, with handsome hubby Jason Gillenwater):
Aileen is the President of the Harvard Law Review. HELLO!!! And this isn’t mentioned in the announcement, but we’ve learned that she’ll be clerking next year for Chief Judge Michael Boudin, of the First Circuit — feeder judge extraordinaire.
So, Aileen, have you picked which Supreme Court justice you’d like to clerk for?
She has. We’ve learned that Aileen McGrath (Harvard 2007 / Boudin) has accepted an offer to clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer in October Term 2008. One source tells us: “[S]he’s universally recognized as brilliant. She was president of the law review and a Sears Prize winner.”
We also hear that the fourth clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas for OT 2008 is a D.C. Circuit clerk (believed to be clerking for Judge David Sentelle). Will someone please give up the name?
Update: Her name is Claire Evans. She’s a 2002 graduate of Rutgers School of Law – Camden, and she’s the first alum of the school to score a SCOTUS clerkship. She clerked for Judge Jerome Simandle (D.N.J.) in 2003, and then for Michael Chertoff, back when he was still on the Third Circuit. Reports our source:
“Chertoff liked Claire so much that he took her to the Department of Homeland Security when he left the bench for Washington. Apparently, Claire continues to amaze and has now secured the most coveted of credentials — a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship.”
“[S]he holds the highest cumulative grade point average in the history of Rutgers School of Law – Camden. And, because of a grading change implemented the year after Claire graduated, it is now mathematically impossible for Claire’s epic GPA to ever be topped.”
Finally, expect more SCOTUS clerk hires in the near future. From an in-the-know tipster:
There’s movement among the justices now. At least Alito, Roberts, Kennedy & Breyer have scheduled interviews in the last few days. Kennedy has scheduled pre-screen interviews, at least some of which are with Judge Kozinski.
The current tally of OT 2008 Supreme Court clerks, with Aileen McGrath and Claire Evans added, appears after the jump.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: OT 2008 (Update #7)”
Welcome. If you’re at home, tune in to C-SPAN, which is rebroadcasting the recent book party for Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas’s eagerly anticipated memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, is now in bookstores — and topping the bestseller charts (to the relief of his publisher, HarperCollins, which reportedly paid him a $1.5 million advance).
7:05: The party is being held at the elegant, red-brick Capitol Hill home of radio host and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams. Expected to attend: 250 guests, including six Supreme Court justices, Vice President Dick Cheney, and several U.S. senators.
Armstrong Williams is interviewed. He explains that the party has been in the works since June. An overwhelming turnout is expected; more people were turned away than allowed to attend.
7:08: Justice Thomas climbs the stairs. When he enters the kitchen — which is right at the top of the stairs, and thus (oddly) where everyone enters and exits — he’s greeted by hearty applause.
Various guests hug him. One guest gushes over his 60 Minutes appearance. CT explains that CBS News made no promises about the nature of its coverage. Interesting. Considering how flattering that segment was, and how uncritical Steve Kroft was in his questioning of Justice Thomas, one might have suspected that Brangelina-type stipulations were in place.
More after the jump.
Continue reading “Liveblogging the Clarence Thomas Book Party”
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 »
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 »
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
The proper hair styling product might just be the only thing standing between you and your dream job. And the best way to find what works for you is to try the best stuff on the market. Join Birchbox Man for $20 a month and you’ll get customized shipments of the best grooming and lifestyle gear on the market every month—everything from haircare and shaving supplies to style accessories and tech gadgets.
As the leading discovery commerce platform, Birchbox is redefining the retail process by offering consumers a unique and personalized way to discover, learn about, and shop the best grooming and lifestyle products out there. It’s a full 360-degree process: try, learn, buy. Once you sign up and fill out your profile, head over to Birchbox Man’s online magazine to find article and video tutorials on how to get the most out your monthly box products. Pick up full-size versions of anything you like in the Birchbox Shop and earn points for every purchase.
Gift with Purchase: Use code TRYFECTA1 at checkout when you spend $40+ in the Birchbox Man Shop. Includes a stylish Areaware bottle opener, a sample of TOWELDRY’s Paste Styler, and a sample vial of Atelier Mistral Patchouli cologne.
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
