American Bar Association / ABA

  • Morning Docket: 10.24.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.24.16

    * “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign.” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump plans to sue all of the “liars” who have accused him of sexual assault within the last two weeks when the election is over. As an attorney representing one of Trump’s accusers noted, a lawsuit would provide a “field day” to depose him under oath. [CNN]

    * The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved a tougher bar-passage rate standard that would require 75 percent of of a law school’s graduates who sit for the bar exam to pass it within two years. It’s up to the ABA House of Delegates to decide if the stricter standard will ever be implemented. We’ll have more on this later today. [ABA Journal]

    * “I don’t know why he would wait around for 200 days and then pull out at the very moment that it seemed likely that he was going to get confirmed.” Will Judge Merrick Garland be confirmed to SCOTUS? With senators calling for lame-duck hearings if Hillary Clinton is elected and a bare-bones oral arguments calendar scheduled, it seems like even the justices are holding out hope for a full house in 2017. [Washington Post]

    * In a deal likely to invoke government scrutiny, AT&T has agreed to purchase Time Warner for $84.5 billion. Teams from Sullivan & Cromwell (transaction work) and Arnold & Porter (regulatory work) will be representing AT&T, while Cravath will be representing Time Warner. Faiza Saeed, Cravath’s deputy presiding partner, will lead the team working on the deal from her firm. [DealBook / New York Times; Am Law Daily]

    * According to testimony from Bridget Kelly, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, Christie allegedly knew about the Bridgegate lane closures a month before they occurred, not afterwards, as he’s repeatedly claimed. Kelly, who says she thought the lane closures were for a traffic study, not a politically motivated scheme, is currently being tried in federal court over her role in the 2013 scandal. [Reuters]

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  • Morning Docket: 09.26.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 09.26.16

    * As you may have already seen, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump released another list of his potential Supreme Court nominees ahead of tonight’s debate. The list includes a Republican senator who has refused to endorse Trump (and has already turned down Trump’s proposal), three non-white judges, and one female judge. [WSJ Washington Wire]

    * Speaking of the Supreme Court, the justices may be shorthanded and trying to avoid 4-4 deadlocks on controversial cases, but they’ll soon decide whether they’ll liven up this term’s docket by agreeing to hear a major transgender rights case involving public school bathrooms. It could be one of the biggest case of the high court’s 2016-17 term. [Reuters]

    * “[Twelve] students is not any kind of representation of our program.” Indiana Tech Law’s dean says the fact that only one of the school’s graduates passed the bar isn’t a realistic assessment of the quality of their education, and was unwilling to confirm the school’s low pass rate since five graduates were appealing their results. [Indiana Lawyer]

    * The Department of Education will not suspend the American Bar Association from accrediting new law schools, despite a recommendation to do so from the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. We’d like to think that the ABA has learned its lesson, but perhaps that’s a bit naive of us. [ABA Journal]

    * In anticipation of further fallout from its fake accounts scandal, Wells Fargo has hired Shearman & Sterling to advise the bank’s board as to the legal ramifications of a possible clawback of pay from Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf, Chief Operating Officer Tim Sloan, and Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of community banking. [Bloomberg]

  • Non-Sequiturs: 09.09.16
    Non-Sequiturs

    Non-Sequiturs: 09.09.16

    * The ABA is finally cracking down on law school accreditation… and ham-fistedly came down on the wrong school. [Big Law Business]

    * The EU Playboy verdict could undermine the online press. [Engadget]

    * Today, on the anniversary of the Attica uprising, prisoners across several states planned a mass work stoppage to protest systemic injustices. How does something like this come together? [Wired]

    * Meanwhile, across the pond, the Supreme Court is selling off art made by prisoners for £30-£500 a pop. [Legal Cheek]

    * We need more judges like this. [Katz Justice]

    * A chat with activist Amanda Nguyen on the occasion of President Obama’s expected signing of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. [NPR]

    * The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline is generating as much buzz as anything can over the cacophony of the election and football, but is there a legal case to be made for putting a stop to the project? [The Atlantic]

    * Forget about the Prime Directive, why doesn’t Star Fleet have a duty to warn about some of the crazy stuff they run across? [The Legal Geeks]

    * Speaking of Star Trek, the National Marine Fisheries Service just delisted nine humpback whale populations from the endangered species list. Thanks, Admiral Kirk! [Courthouse News Service]

  • Morning Docket: 08.31.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 08.31.16

    * The clerk who allegedly took a turn at judging has been fired. [Chicago Tribune]

    * DLA Piper partner Joseph Finnerty was fined and resigned from a public position after fundraising fiasco. [Law360]

    * The ABA Journal’s 2016 Legal Rebels revealed! This is like the Vogue September issue, except for nerdy lawyers. [ABA Journal]

    * The ABA is taking a tough line with a couple of law schools, but is this show of force still too late to save its accreditation status? [Inside Higher Ed]

    * Oh look, Chris Brown’s in the news again! [ABC News]

    * Paul, Weiss is investigating the alleged culture of sexual harassment at Fox News and they’re facing a lot of skepticism. [Law.com]

    * One client is drawing a firm line with law firms: alternative fee arrangements or else. [Corporate Counsel]

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  • Morning Docket: 08.22.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 08.22.16

    * “You’re going to make a federal case out of this – a dispute between two sorority sisters?” A fight between two sorority sisters recently landed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, but it turns out the suit was dropped quicker than a misbehaving pledge. We’ll have more on this later today. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

    * “Generally, it is God who decides whether presidents get Supreme Court appointments.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be the oldest member of SCOTUS, but that doesn’t mean she’s preparing to step down, even if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. She’s already hired clerks for the October 2017 term. [Washington Post]

    * The Eastern District of Michigan has ruled that in cases of employment discrimination, religious rights trump transgender rights. The ACLU says this case has set a “dangerous precedent,” in that it has “exempted [a business that was “not a particularly religious operation”] from civil rights law with regard to transgender people.” [WSJ Law Blog]

    * The ABA has closed a probe regarding allegations of religious discrimination (i.e., expulsion of students who left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and bans of sexual activity between students of the same sex) that were said to have occurred at BYU Law School. The school is said to have changed its honor code. [ABA Journal]

    * Infamous Kentucky clerk Kim Davis has lucked out thanks to some actions taken by the Sixth Circuit. A new state law removed the names of clerks from marriage licenses, thus enabling the appeals court to refuse her claims, allowing a judge to toss a suit she was facing over her unwillingness to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. [WSAZ]

  • Morning Docket: 08.19.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 08.19.16

    * “Donald Ducks,” the DNC’s mascot that’s being used to taunt Donald Trump for his undisclosed tax returns, bears a striking resemblance to Disney’s Donald Duck, and people are starting to wonder: “Is Donald Ducks waddling over Disney’s intellectual property rights?” [WSJ Law Blog]

    * The Third Circuit declined to re-seal excerpts of depositions in the Bill Cosby case where he admitted to giving women Quaaludes, but included in its opinion an interesting footnote calling out the district court judge’s decision to unseal the records in the first place, saying its “public moralist rational” had “no basis in our jurisprudence,” and that the term itself was “vague and undefined.” [THR, Esq. / Hollywood Reporter]

    * This fall, Indiana Tech Law will welcome its largest class ever, with 55 students set to begin their legal studies next week. With only 15 students in its inaugural class, this huge jump in enrollment could possibly be due to the fact that the ABA gave the school a provisional rubber stamp (as it’s wont to do) back in March. [Indiana Lawyer]

    * “There is a disconnect between what banks are doing and what consumers want,” and what they want is the ability to sue. More and more big banks — 72 percent of them, in fact — are using mandatory binding arbitration clauses in their contracts to prevent customers from filing suit. Read the find print, people. [DealBook / New York Times]

    * “What if somebody gets injured on somebody else’s property? Trip on a rock or get bitten by the neighbor’s dog? There would be a whole host of responsible parties.” A New York firm already filed a class-action suit against the company behind Pokemon Go, but this lawyer thinks there’s a minefield of tort actions available to sue over. [Mlive.com]

  • Morning Docket: 08.18.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 08.18.16

    * A Brazilian judge ordered that Olympic swimmers Ryan Lochte and Jimmy Feigen surrender their passports and remain in Rio until investigators can determine whether they filed a false police report of being robbed at gunpoint. There’s one problem: Lochte is back in America. Jeah! [USA Today]

    * As we mentioned yesterday, according to NALP, law school graduates in the class of 2015 landed fewer jobs in private practice than any other class in the past 20 years. There is a bright side, though: Biglaw firms are hiring in droves and the median starting salary for new lawyers has risen to $100,000, which is 5 percent higher than it was for the class of 2014. [DealBook / New York Times]

    * Graduates who sued Widener Law in 2012 over the school’s allegedly deceptive employment statistics lost a federal appeal to overturn a denial of class certification. A three-judge panel of the Third Circuit — one which included Donald Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — rejected a class-wide theory of damages. [Law.com]

    * Legal ethics professor Ronald Rotunda of Chapman Law wrote an op-ed striking out against the ABA’s adoption of a new professional misconduct rule which seeks to combat discrimination and bias in the law. He refers to the new rule as a misguided “foray into political correctness,” and thinks the ABA overstepped its bounds. [WSJ Law Blog]

    * “At best he was doing something profundity stupid with the hopes of meeting someone he will never get to meet in his lifetime.” A lawyer for Stephen Rogata, the teen who scaled Trump Tower, says her client should receive psychiatric treatment instead of jail time. He’s being held on $10,000 bail bond or $5,000 cash. [New York Daily News]