Auckland Law School

* Intellectual property lawyer chastised for plagiarism. Repeatedly. As they say, it’s like O. Henry and Alanis Morissette had a baby and named it this exact scenario. [Retraction Watch] * Legislator blocks an award to a wrongfully convicted man who served 11 years in prison because he thinks the guy should just feel lucky that he got released. His reasoning will surprise you… mostly because he doesn’t really offer any. [The Arkansas Project] * Mike Spivey of Spivey Consulting is racing a 5K on Vail Mountain (at an elevation of 10,000 feet) as a fundraiser for Law School Transparency. Give your donations here. [Fundrazr] * The family of the woman who posed for the iconic advertising character Aunt Jemima have sued alleging that the pancake peddlers screwed the model out of her duly earned money. [TMZ] * A mystery woman has been sitting in an Ohio jail cell for weeks after trying to use false documents to get a driver’s license. Now it turns out that she’s a disgraced lawyer that we’ve heard of before…. [WINK News] * The seeds of Halbig were sown a really long time ago. It’s a wonderful window into how a cynical gang of people make their plans. [Constitutional Accountability Center] * Our friends from Aukland Law School that have given us parody videos of Royals and Blurred Lines have tackled House of Cards and adapted it to making your way into Biglaw. If you were wondering what a New Zealand accent impersonating Kevin Spacey impersonating a Southern accent would sound like, the video is after the jump…. [YouTube]

* The NSA protests that its spying on foreign leaders was entirely legal. In defense of the NSA, this latest uproar seems misplaced. Warrantless spying on Americans is illegal, but spying on foreign governments is kind of the whole point of the NSA. [Associated Press] * Judge James Bredar has laid out his thoughts on how sentencing judges should deal with the changing legal landscape surrounding marijuana. This is important because those dumb Guidelines still recommend an enhancement for taking One Toke Over the Line. [Sentencing Law & Policy] * Should a plagiarizing journalist be allowed to join the ranks of licensed attorneys? Con: his crime suggests low moral character. Pro: He’s going to be a master of boilerplate. [Juice, Justice & Corgis] * Jones Day is representing pro bono a number of Catholic institutions ticked off that they might have to buy insurance that their workers might, at some point, maybe use to buy birth control pills. It’s a tremendous intrusion upon religious liberty that Catholic institutions routinely did before they decided to make a political spectacle out of it. [The National Law Journal] * A speech to Harvard Law alums about the slow death of free speech at Harvard. By “slow death of free speech” he details how a private, non-governmental institution decided not to tolerate jackassery, but whatever. [Minding the Campus via The Volokh Conspiracy] * It’s still several months until the ATL Law Revue competition. So to keep you entertained until then, check out this parody of Lorde’s Royals performed by some law students. It looks like the same geniuses from Auckland Law School behind the Blurred Lines parody. Do the Kiwis have time to do actual law school stuff? Video embedded after the jump… [Legal Cheek]