Good. Now bring that hand down in a hard, smacking manner upside your own head.
Traffic cops are the worst cops of all cops and meter maids are the worst of all the traffic cops. Think about it, the entire job of a meter maid involves punishing people for parking their cars — usually in a time and place where the very city they represent has not provided enough parking. What kind of job is that? I feel like everybody should have the right to go Lock Stock on traffic wardens.
Well, maybe that’s going a little far. But you should at least be able to scream at them. That’s a position that the state of Michigan fully supports me on…
* Only 44% of Americans approve of how the Supreme Court is doing its job, but that’s probably because the other 56% wouldn’t know what the Supreme Court was unless the justices were contestants on a reality show. [New York Times]
* Having nothing to do with the outcome of this Tenth Circuit appeal, apparently a juror in the underlying case had no idea when the First Amendment was adopted. As Bush II would say, is our children learning? [U.S. Tenth Circuit / FindLaw]
* Who’s going to win the “Super Bowl” of Android patent trials? Nobody. Judge Richard Posner has issued a “tentative” order which noted that both sides of the Apple/Google case ought to be dismissed. [Reuters]
* You should’ve “known better”: in case we didn’t make it abundantly clear when we spoke about NALP’s data for the class of 2011, the job market for new law grads is being classified as “brutal.” [National Law Journal]
* U. Chicago Law revolutionized the field of law and economics, but much to the school’s chagrin, everyone copied them. Now they’re thinking up new ways to do the same things. Gunners gotta gun. [Businessweek]
* Say hello to Mary Lu Bilek, the woman who’s been appointed as the new dean of UMass Law. Hopefully she’s not keen on using school credit cards for personal spending like the last dean. [Wall Street Journal]
* Occupy Wall Street protesters can’t sue NYC, its mayor, or its police commissioner, but they can sue the police. And with that news, “F**k tha Police” was sung in drum circles across the tri-state area. [Bloomberg]
Luckily for all the non-Mormons in Idaho, the state doesn't find references to grand tetons offensive to anybody.
It’d be one thing if the state of Idaho banned all alcohol because the state sports a large Mormon population and Mormons don’t drink. That might raise a Con Law question or two, but before we could even litigate it out, the state’s many non-Mormons would rebel against the religious theocracy preventing them from drinking. (They wouldn’t call it a “theocracy” because some Grover Norquist-type would convince them that “redistributive taxes” had empowered a “Communist regime,” and the good people of Idaho would blame the black guy, but I digress.)
Banning all alcohol would be too obvious of an imposition of religious dogma upon a secular concern.
Instead, Idaho is trying to get away with a smaller encroachment of religion upon the public sphere. The state of Idaho has effectively banned the sale of one particular kind of vodka because the state believes the company’s marketing campaign is offensive to Mormons.
And no, the marketing campaign is not “drink some of this vodka and then go make fun of Mormons,” or anything the state could reasonably fear might affect the public safety of the citizens of Idaho….
We’ve got two unrelated First Amendment issues floating around today that I’m mashing into one post, because it is my right to do so.
We all know that money is speech. How we got to the point where money is worth just as much speech as talking is a manner of some contention (see Jeff Toobin’s New Yorker piece and Tom Goldstein’s response), but the question is what other things that don’t involve people saying anything can also be construed as “speech.”
Now Mitt Romney will tell you that money is speech and “corporations are people, my friend.” Fair enough. But I’m not sure he’d defend the free speech rights of people who don’t have any money so they’re asking for it on the streets of Chicago.
And I have no idea how he’d respond if you asked him if cars are people that can flash each other under the protection of the First Amendment….
A large portion of the strenuous life of bloggers consists of cruising various news sites, looking for some tidbit ridiculous interesting enough to merit a couple hundred words. You do this long enough, and you wind up getting picky pretty quickly. So, last night, when I clicked over to Wired, it was surprising in and of itself that when I saw the following story I literally stared at the screen, slack jawed, for close to a minute.
That’s how ridiculous this proposed legislation coming out of New York is. The only thing I can say is that if this bill somehow managed to become law, the Above the Law commentariat would not be happy at all…
I really, really hate being the one to defend stupid teenagers who get expelled from school. The ones who are kicked out for cursing online or for other forms of bullying.
Because I was a teenager once — not even that long ago — and I still clearly remember what it feels like to be on the receiving end of horrid teenage evilness. But somehow, I can’t help myself.
So here you go. Keep reading to see why the ACLU is doing the right thing by defending three eighth-grade girls who were expelled for talking about killing people on Facebook…
* Since you’re so funny, crack some jokes about this one, Obama. Senate Republicans will be filing an amicus brief in support of a challenge to the constitutionality of the President’s recess appointments. [New York Times]
* Thanks to this Third Circuit ruling, you can rest easy knowing that you can rely on the First Amendment to protect your homemade sex tapes from all of those strict porn record-keeping and labeling requirements… for now. [Reuters]
* Due to Kelley Drye’s EEOC settlement, the New York State Bar Association is asking firms to end mandatory retirement policies. Because old folks need to make bank till they croak. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* The ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20 has decided to ditch its proposal to allow limited nonlawyer ownership of law firms. Cue tears and temper tantrums from the likes of Jacoby & Meyers. [Am Law Daily]
* “If I believe that Chris Armstrong is a radical homosexual activist, I have a constitutional right to express that opinion.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell that to the judge who dismissed your suit, Shirvell. [Detroit Free Press]
* Presenting “her royal hotness”: apparently Pippa Middleton has been seen cavorting around France with gun-toting lawyer Romain Rabillard, of Shearman & Sterling. [Daily Mail]
Half of it’s nonsense, and the other half is more nonsense.
– Tony Abbatangelo, referring to blog comments in the course of responding to a defamation suit filed against his client, an anonymous internet commenter known only as “Lawyer.”
(What are the salacious comments that “Lawyer” is being sued over? Find out, after the jump.)
* I know you don’t want to be evil, but I don’t think “privacy” means what you think it means. Google users have filed a class action suit against the company in New York over its new complete and utter lack of privacy policy. [Bloomberg]
* So you made some anti-war comments, touched Dick Cheney, got arrested, claimed your First Amendment rights were violated, and your case made it all the way to SCOTUS. Greatest accomplishment? Not getting shot by Cheney. [Huffington Post]
* Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean to tell me that Wachtell’s name partner, Martin Lipton, the man who created the “poison pill,” supports staggered boards? Consider my mind blown. [DealBook / New York Times]
* M&A maven Dennis Block and real estate rock star Jeffrey Feil each donated $1M to their alma mater, Brooklyn Law School. See, you don’t need to go to a T14 school to make bank. [National Law Journal]
* Protip: not even Dov Charney’s world-renowned creepiness can save you from an arbitration agreement. A former employee’s $260M sex slave suit has been tossed out of court. [New York Daily News]
And so last week I wrote about mentors, questioning whether today’s young lawyers considered them crucial to professional and personal development. I questioned whether the high calling of being a lawyer has today been reduced solely to a desire for cash, and as such, nothing more than the hope to be “first” on Google and have a “game changing” web presence.
Which brings me to what you can call “Part II” of last week’s mentoring post, and an example of a lawyer to emulate.
There are certain lawyers that bring to mind a one- or two-word description. David Boies — Bush / Gore, Morris Dees — Civil Rights, Clarence Darrow — Criminal Defense, and when I hear “First Amendment,” I think Marc Randazza.
When I hear “first page of Google,” I can’t name one lawyer, and if I can, it’s not a lawyer that matters, except maybe to a bunch of lawyers looking to be the next internet sensation. Being an internet sensation as a lawyer is no different than having been a yellow pages sensation in the previous generation. Ever seen an obituary of a lawyer that said: “She was respected for her two-page, multicolored ads that were placed ahead of all other lawyers in the yellow pages”?
Marc Randazza isn’t an internet sensation. He’s only got about 275 followers on Twitter (and is therefore clearly on his way out of the profession if you ask any social media expert), but Marc Randazza matters.
Would you like to matter in this profession? Will you ever do anything important — anything that causes others to think of you as “that” lawyer for “that” type of case or issue? Or are you just hoping to win that stupid lawsuit against your law school for forcing you to go there because they promised you a job? Or maybe you’ve just bought in to the lie that to survive as a lawyer, you must vomit all over the internet with whatever your marketer tells you is the latest trick to game Google?
And before the commentariat’s collective head explodes, yes, Marc Randazza is my lawyer. I’m in the group currently being sued by Joseph Rakofsky….
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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:
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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