Bar Exams

  • Morning Docket: 10.12.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.12.16

    * From a SCOTUS mention to what seems like a final exam hypo: Kim Kardashian filed a defamation suit against celeb gossip site Media Takeout for reporting she’d faked her robbery and filed a fraudulent insurance claim. In her complaint, she alleges that the site victimized her again by “referring to her as a liar and thief.” [Reuters]

    * A legal recruiter claims that she received a series of death threats after she made political donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Because she “fear[ed] for her life and safety,” the disturbing calls were reported to the police, and the matter is still under investigation. We may have more on this later. [Big Law Business]

    * “It seems to me that the design is applied to the exterior case of the phone. [T]here shouldn’t be profits awarded based on the entire price of the phone.” Thanks to SCOTUS, will Samsung get another bite at the apple when it comes to not giving up all of its profits as damages in its design patent dispute with Apple? [DealBook / New York Times]

    * The results of the July 2016 administration of the bar exam are out, and with a 91.96 percent pass rate for first-time takers, Duquesne Law boasted the second-best passage rate for first-timers out of all 10 Pennsylvania-area law schools, with only Penn Law coming out ahead. But which school did the worst? [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]

    * “Katie is the woman in the middle doing everything. It’s all because of Katie, man.” Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is alleged to have facilitated the successful murder-for-hire plot against Florida State law professor Dan Markel, has been denied bond. She will remain in prison behind bars until her trial. [Tallahassee Democrat]

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  • Morning Docket: 10.03.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.03.16

    * The New York Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995, revealing a nearly $916 million loss that would have enabled him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. Marc Kasowitz, name partner of Kasowitz Benson, represents Trump, and has threatened the paper with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” for its publication of his client’s tax records. [New York Times]

    * George Mason University will host a grand opening ceremony this week for the twice renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law Antonin Scalia Law School — a ceremony that five SCOTUS justices will reportedly attend — and some students and faculty are planning to protest the Koch brothers’ funding of scholarships by wearing red tape over their mouths to symbolize their voices being taken from them. [Big Law Business]

    * Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is suspected of connecting Florida State University law professor Dan Markel’s alleged killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, with the family of Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, has been arrested on murder charges. According to police, she has “received numerous benefits from the Adelsons since Markel’s murder.” We’ll have more on this later today. [Tallahassee Democrat]

    * According to Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, Orlando-based firm Butler & Hosch violated the WARN Act when it closed suddenly in May 2015 and conducted mass layoffs of more than 700 employees without giving them 60 days of advance notice. The firm, which is bankruptcy, could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. We may have more on this later today. [Orlando Sentinel]

    * Following the embarrassment that was former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s light sentence in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman at his school, California Gov. Jerry Brown has broadened the state’s legal definition of rape to include penetration with a foreign object, mandate prison time if the victim was unconscious at the time of the assault, and forbid judges from granting probation or parole in such cases. [Reuters]

    * “Frankly, USD has been a bit behind in that, in part, up until 2014, we had no problem with the bar exam. When you’re hitting in the high 80s or 90s, you don’t worry about much.” Unofficial results from the South Dakota bar exam are out, and after years of declines in passage rates for graduates of South Dakota Law, administrators are ready to take action now that only about 50 percent of graduates passed the test. [Argus Leader]

    * “I was empty and then this woman walked into my life. I didn’t think it would happen again and it did. She is it.” LGBT rights pioneer Edie Windsor, the plaintiff whose Supreme Court case rendered DOMA unconstitutional in 2013 and laid the groundwork for the high court to declare that marriage equality was a fundamental right just two years later, remarried in New York last week. Our very best wishes! [New York Times]

  • Morning Docket: 09.29.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 09.29.16

    * “The ballot-selfie prohibition is like ‘burn[ing down] the house to roast the pig.'” Just in time for Election 2016, the First Circuit has struck down New Hampshire’s ballot selfie ban as unconstitutional, citing the fact that it curtailed voters’ free speech, and on top of that, the state was unable to identify any complaints of vote buying or intimidation. [POLITICO]

    * Suspended Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who instructed probate judges to adhere to the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, even after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling, says the ethics charges he faces are “ridiculous” since he never “encourage[d] anyone to defy a federal court or state court order.” [WSJ Law Blog]

    * Wiley Rein lost two practice group leaders to DLA Piper this week. The firm, known for its media, telecom, government contracts, and IP practices, no longer has partners in charge of its telecom group or its wireless group, but it claims these departures were anticipated, and the practice groups were merged ahead of time. [Big Law Business]

    * Cha-ching! The Caesars bankruptcy is ending, which means the “fee frenzy” for lawyers who were working on the case is about to dry up as well. Nine law firms have been involved in the case since the company first filed for bankruptcy in January 2015, and hundreds of millions of dollars of legal fees have already been assessed. [Am Law Daily]

    * Many jurisdictions adopted the Uniform Bar Exam for the July 2016 administration of the bar exam, and it seems like it may have had the opposite effect on test-takers than what was intended. Graduates of this law school saw their bar exam passage rate drop by 13 percent since last year. We’ll have more on this later today. [Albequerque Journal]

  • 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]

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