Basketball

* “We’re in uncharted waters.” Following a split vote down party lines, the House of Representatives authorized Speaker Boehner to move ahead with his lawsuit against President Obama. [WSJ Law Blog]

* “Vultures! Don’t take our pound of flesh.” Despite last-minute settlement talks, it seems Argentina has defaulted on its debt for the second time in 13 years. Oopsie! [DealBook / New York Times]

* The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has added 19 additional schools to its law school clinic certification pilot program. IP is hot right now, so congrats if your school made the cut. [USPTO.gov]

* What are some of the pros of working before going to law school? Well, if you can’t get a job after you graduate, you can go back to your old field, so that’s a plus. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]

* California probate attorneys’ hearts were all aflutter following Shelly Sterling’s win against her husband, specifically because of the new precedents the Clippers case left in its wake. [National Law Journal]

* The NRA’s general counsel was once convicted of murder. What’s the phrase? If you outlaw guns, only general counsel will have guns… [Mother Jones] * Seattle is looking for people donating skulls to Goodwill. Wow, if Jeffrey Dahmer had only known there was a charitable tax write-off available. [Lowering the Bar] * “A domestic helper has appeared in court accused of trying to injure her employer by mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking.” Eww. [Legal Juice] * Can Congress sue the president? Here are multiple takes. [The Volokh Conspiracy / Washington Post] * As the confirmation of Pamela Harris to the Fourth Circuit reminds us, “that whole nuclear option has really worked out.” So far. [Huffington Post] * Money magazine is looking to create a ranking of undergraduate schools heavy on outcome-based factors. If you need any hints on how to do it, let us know. [The Chronicle of Higher Education] * Donald Sterling has lost, which is something he knows a lot about from his years of owning the Clippers. Here’s Mitchell Epner’s review of the ruling and its appealability. [CNBC]

What does the new executive director of the NBA players' union, who's leaving a Biglaw partnership to take the role, have to say for herself?

* The Second Circuit ruled that the World Trade Center Cross may remain on display in the September 11 Memorial and Museum. Apologies, atheists, but it’s a “genuine historical artifact.” [New York Daily News]

* Howrey going to get money back when judges keep tossing unfinished business claims like they’re yesterday’s trash? We’ll see if such claims will be laid to rest after a hearing later today. [Am Law Daily]

* Paul Weiss had a good get this week, with Citigroup’s deputy general counsel leaving the bank to join the firm — which coincidentally has served as the bank’s outside counsel for two decades. [WSJ Law Blog]

* North Carolina, a state that adopted a ban on same-sex marriage in 2012, said it will no longer defend its law in the wake of the Fourth Circuit’s ruling as to a similar ban in Virginia. Hooray! [Los Angeles Times]

* If you missed it, a judge issued a preliminary ruling against Donald Sterling, meaning that the sale of the L.A. Clippers may proceed. Don’t worry, his attorney says this is just “one stage of a long war.” [CNN]

* It seems that “weed-infused weddings” are a hot commodity in states where the drug has been legalized. Sorry, it may be better than an open bar, but it doesn’t seem like a very classy thing to do. [Boston.com]

* Cheryl Hanna, Vermont Law School professor and praised legal analyst, RIP. [Burlington Free Press]

* The day after the Supreme Court lifted a stay on Joseph Wood’s execution, it took nearly two hours for Arizona authorities to kill him using the very drug cocktail he contested on appeal. [New York Times] * So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu: Spencer Barasch, the lawyer at the center of some blowback due to his dealings with Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford, is now leaving Andrews Kurth. [Am Law Daily] * A dead body was found inside of this West Texas law firm, and the man who was pegged as a suspect claimed he lived at the firm, along with his recently deceased friend. This seems sketchy. [KCBD 11] * Suffolk Law is hosting a contest where students, coders, and entrepreneurs will try to figure out a way to hack the justice gap. Start by creating an app to help new lawyers earn a living wage. [BostInno] * Donald Sterling isn’t going to let the fact that he’s already involved in one contentious lawsuit about the L.A. Clippers stop him from filing another contentious lawsuit about the L.A. Clippers. [Bloomberg] * Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild infamy is in some trouble with the law. He just got hit with a $5,000 per day fine until he returns two luxury cars to the pornography company’s bankruptcy estate. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Dewey think Joel Sanders and Steve DiCarmine, former head honchos of the failed firm D&L, have a friend in the District Attorney’s office? Even their opponents in their criminal case want their civil case stayed. [WSJ Law Blog]

* “They’re literally dancing in the streets in Cleveland.” Frederick Nance, Cleveland-based regional managing partner of Squire Patton Boggs and lawyer to King LeBron, couldn’t be more thrilled that his client is returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Hooray for hometown billables. [Am Law Daily]

* Tracy Morgan filed a lawsuit against Walmart over the fatal car wreck that killed his friend and left him with numerous broken bones. We suppose his injuries will prevent him from getting girls pregnant. [CNN]

* The NYLS grad who founded an imperiled cupcakery dropped enough Crumbs to lead investors to her rescue. Now the bakeshop has enough cash to make it through bankruptcy. [DealBook / New York Times]

* Fabulicious? Teresa Giudice, the Real Housewife of New Jersey who pleaded guilty to fraud charges last year, is awaiting sentencing of up to 27 months, but isn’t sure she regrets what she did. [New York Post]

* For all you surprised by LeBron James, let me remind you: Cleveland is all about two non-consecutive stints. [Wikipedia] * Speaking of basketball, Mitchell Epner takes his talents to CNBC to breakdown the 5 things he learned during the first week of the Donald Sterling trial. [CNBC] * Who is the Litigator of the Week, per Litigation Daily? It’s Daniel Gitner of Lankler Siffert & Wohl because he became the first lawyer to beat the S.D.N.Y. U.S.A.O. in an insider trading case. Also because he’s awesome. Pardon me while I put on my LSW shirt. [The Litigation Daily (sub. req.)] * Hey! Take a second to take our latest law firm survey. We really want your feedback on your perception. [Above the Law] * “5 Reasons the Sleeping Yankees Fan’s Lawyer Should Be Disbarred.” Fair enough. [Internet on Trial] * Will the EPA’s latest carbon rule survive judicial challenge? I would have said “no” but after Homer City… [Breaking Energy] * Do blondes make more money? I guess that’s the trade-off with being the focus of revenge porn. [The Careerist / American Lawyer] * Aereo is back. Sort of. [Comm Law Blog] * A former Patton partner lost his new job at Pillsbury over the Chevron case. Could anybody have suffered more over this case? Oh, right, all the Ecuadorians. [Legal Times] * While you weren’t looking, even fewer people took the LSAT. Obviously. [LSAC]

* According to his former lawyer, The Situation’s tan is as fake as his checks. [Defamer /Gawker] * The folks at New Republic explain the Notorious R.B.G. phenomenon in such excruciating detail as to make it really kind of awkward. [New Republic] * Lawyer who asked trainee 78 times to have sex with him and then secretly filmed her around the office gets an eight-month suspension and a fine. Seems like it should be more than that… [The Age] * Dealing with outfit “compliments” and maintaining your confidence. Frankly, learning how to deal with passive-aggressive jerks is an important skill for any working lawyer. [Corporette] * Law schools are in trouble, but something’s blocking reform: the ABA. Seriously, this article is probably a shocker if you haven’t been reading ATL for years. [Forbes] * Day 3 of the Sterling trial: wherein Donald calls his wife a “pig.” [mitchell epner] * Here’s why law students should care about legal funding. So they don’t screw up funding their cases as much as they did their education. [LFC 360] * Remember the brutal fan beating last year of a San Francisco Giants fan? A jury finds that the Los Angeles Dodgers acted negligently. [ESPN] * Corporate litigator leaves her gig to start a “Cat Cafe.” Which is exactly what it sounds like. [Denver Cat Co]

How's the Donald Sterling trial going? It's entertaining, to say the least.

* Mitchell Epner breaks down the Donald Sterling trial, which kicked off today. Or “tipped off” today. [CNBC] * Judge Kopf reviews Keith Lee’s The Marble and the Sculptor. Keith can take heart that His Honor didn’t tell him to STFU. [Hercules and the Umpire] * MoloLamken offers its comprehensive review of the Supreme Court’s recently concluded adventures from the perspective of businesses. Spoiler alert: businesses did really, really well. [MoloLamken] * Former seminary dean lied about his religious background and then tried to sue the guy who called him out on it. Benchslapping ensued in a fee decision: “Plaintiff’s sparse trickle of written argument gave way at the hearing to an overflow of objectively unreasonable claims…. Plaintiff either cast unsupported aspersions or asserted boldfaced contradictions, adopting whatever narrative best served him at the time.” In fairness, those sound like they might be assets in organized religion. [Religion Posts] * If you want to know what’s up in the energy sector, Breaking Energy now has a “Law Firms Perspective” feed. [Breaking Energy] * Discretion is the better part of valor: gamblers turned down around $1.5 million payout to sue casino for illegal detention… and then lost. [ATL Redline] * I’ve said before that I find the concept of legal tattoos fascinating. This one is incredibly meta….

* You’d think a tax attorney would remember to file a tax return. You’d be wrong. [SF Gate] * You think you have difficult clients? Try representing a sovereign hellbent on making political hay by contradicting every representation you make in court. [Reuters] * Dov Charney out at American Apparel. And he seemed like such a nice guy… [Slate] * The Central Park Five civil rights lawsuit has settled for $40 million — or roughly $1 million for each year the accused spent in prison. [New York Times] * It’s a bad week for everyone affiliated with the Miami Heat. Now they’re losing to bloggers. [South Florida Lawyers] * In an unfortunate follow-up, the effort to unionize some lawyers at Bloomberg has fizzled and the primary organizer has been fired with no severance and a baby on the way. Which is surely a complete coincidence and not related to his organizing activity at all. [Fortune] * Former Delaware Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Berger has resigned and she is not bashful that it’s all to do with being passed over as chief justice in favor of Leo Strine. [Delaware Law Weekly] * Save the date, D.C. The 2nd Annual Go Formal for Justice gala will be held October 18. [DC Bar Foundation’s Young Lawyers Network / Facebook] * Yale Law grad and former Senior Counsel to the World Bank, Karen Hudes, wants you to understand that JFK was killed over the gold standard and that there’s a species of coneheads in control of the Vatican. We should do a Career Alternatives on her. Video after the jump… [Starship Earth: The Big Picture]

* The Supreme Court won’t be blocking gay marriages from occurring in Oregon pending an appeal. Maybe it’s because the request wasn’t filed by the state, or maybe it’s because Justice Kennedy is the man. [National Law Journal]

* “To err is human. To make a mistake and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it — that’s judicial.” This Ninth Circuit judge wants his colleagues to get over themselves. Please pay attention to him, SCOTUS. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Cheerio mates! As it turns out, according to a recent stress study, lawyers at Magic Circle firms in Merry Olde England are more miserable than their American colleagues. [The Lawyer via The Careerist]

* Donald Sterling dropped his $1 billion lawsuit against the NBA and agreed to the sale of the Clippers to Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. Lawyers for Skadden have been sent back to warm the bench. [Bloomberg]

* In a surprise move, InfiLaw pulled its application for a license to run Charleston Law into the ground the day before a vote was supposed to be held. At least the opposition won this battle. [Post and Courier]

* The Yale Law School Clinic is representing a deported Army veteran seeking a pardon and humanitarian parole. Aww, look at that, experiential learning can be beneficial for everyone involved. [Hartford Courant]

* Federal judges still have financial allegiances to their former firms that are reported on their mandatory annual disclosures. At least one appellate judge — Jay Bybee of the Ninth Circuit — made a killing after confirmation. [National Law Journal]

* After “a challenging 2013,” Bingham McCutchen is leaking lawyers like a sieve. Fourteen attorneys, including nine partners, recently decided to leave the firm, and they’re all headed to different Biglaw locales. [WSJ Law Blog via Reuters]

* Just one day after Donald Sterling was declared “mentally incapacitated,” he filed a lawsuit against the NBA, seeking more than $1 billion in damages. Skadden lawyers are stripping off their warm-up suits to take it to the court. [USA Today]

* This Am Law 200 firm thinks it figured out a way to help women combine their careers and home lives — by hiring a role model/mentor with an almost six-figure salary. Good idea or bad? [Dallas Morning News]

* We’ve got some breaking news for our readers from the “no sh*t” department: Law schools are competing to cut costs based on a shrinking applicant pool, but tuition is still quite unaffordable. [Houston Chronicle]

* Lewis Katz, co-owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and alumnus of Dickinson Law, RIP. [Onward State]

Shaq lays out his top three law school choices.

* Justice Scalia criticized law schools. Here come the butthurt law schools. [Legal Times] * Cass Sunstein on Rand Paul’s real father — Richard Epstein. [New Republic via PrawfsBlawg] * Irony alert: Rick Santorum endorsed the judge who just legalized gay marriage in Pennsylvania. [Slate] * What do you know? Donald Sterling is a dick. [Los Angeles Times] * A follow-up on a previous item: does this look like a law student kneed so hard he lost a testicle? [Barstool Sports] * In a development that should shock no one, it turns out the Chinese hackers may have been turning their attention to infiltrating law firms “which hold valuable intellectual property for their clients but often lack the security defenses of a larger corporation.” [Bits / New York Times] * Model suing hair salon for $1.5 million for ruining her career. That sounds funny, but the story is actually kind of horrifying. [New York Post] * Are we looking at an M&A boom in 2014? Frank Aquila of S&C thinks so. After the jump… [Mimesis Law]

* Partners from Patton Boggs and Squire Sanders may vote on their merger sometime this week. Get ready to say hello to Squire Patton, House of Boggs, Hodorific of Its Name. [Reuters]

* “[E]xcuse me, sir, you may not be here in five years.” Biglaw firms are becoming more “egalitarian” about office space because attorneys have expiration dates. [National Law Journal]

* After a flat year in 2013, and much to Biglaw’s chagrin, “[i]t is going to be harder to sustain year-over-year profitability gains.” Oh joy, time to power up the layoff machine. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

* Tech giants Apple and Google have called a ceasefire in their dueling patent suits in a quest to reform patent law — and so Apple can concentrate all of its efforts on suing the sh*t out of Samsung. [Bloomberg]

* GM’s in-house legal department is being heavily scrutinized in the wake of the car maker’s ignition switch lawsuit extravaganza. You see, friends, people die when lawyers don’t even bother to lie. [New York Times]

* Donald Sterling found a lawyer willing to represent him, an antitrust maven who thinks the NBA should take its ball and go home because “no punishment was warranted” in his client’s case. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Wal-Mart adds lawyer offices. No, this article isn’t about Infilaw. [ABA Journal] * Now we are! The faculty of Charleston Law is pleading with anyone who will listen to stop Infilaw. [Pro Bono Populi (Charleston School of Law Alumni Association)] * Has the college applications process become a monopoly? There’s an antitrust lawsuit contending it is. Maybe somebody will make the same sort of claim about the law school applications process with all its major security concerns. [Reuters] * The latest traffic stats for blogs edited by law professors. It’s good to see Brian Leiter wasn’t just wrong about being more popular than ATL — he was really, really wrong. [TaxProf Blog] * Goldieblox paid the Beastie Boys (or technically charity) $1 million over using their song for 10 days in an effort to promote smart toys for girls. Good job bringing the lyrics to life, Boys! [Hypebot] * Speaking of intellectual property suits, the University of Alabama sued a company for using a houndstooth pattern because Bear Bryant used to wear hats with a houndstooth pattern that some other company developed. They’ve settled. [SF Gate] * Judge Claudia Wilken has denied the NCAA’s latest effort to delay the Ed O’Bannon trial. At least the NCAA is nearing a settlement on a concussion suit. I wonder if that’ll end up favoring the players? [Associated Press] * Litigation financing meets intra-disciplinary disputes as philosophy professors chip in to help a student sue a Yale philosophy professor for sexual harassment. [Chronicle of Higher Education] * Porsche sued for building cars that are too fast and too furious. [ABC News]

* Due to the extreme polarization of SCOTUS, with its near constant 5-4 opinion line-ups, “it becomes increasingly difficult to contend … that justices are not merely politicians clad in fine robes.” Yep. [The Upshot / New York Times]

* Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who first introduced the term “net neutrality” to the world, had two of his clerkships (Posner; Breyer) “arranged” by Professor Lawrence Lessig. If only we could all be so lucky. [New York Times]

* We’re getting the sinking feeling that the lack of diversity in law school is one of those problems that everyone and their mother claims to be trying to fix, but the lack of momentum keeps it from ever truly improving. [National Law Journal]

* When contemplating what law schools would have to do to get a bailout, this law professor has three ideas, and they involve changing her colleagues’ lives in uncomfortable ways. Well played. [Boston Globe]

* Cole Leonard is struggling to decide between going to law school and going to Mars. Well, he’s more likely to have a job doing anything on Mars than here on Earth as a lawyer. HTH. [Dallas Morning News]

* The L.A. Clippers have a new CEO, for the time being. Say hello to Dick Parsons, the former chairman of Patterson Belknap, a man who the world hopes is not quite as racist as his predecessor. [Am Law Daily]

* This guy used a cellphone jammer in his car to keep his commute interruption free. Guessing he’s not a lawyer. [Slate] * Let’s lay off Justice Scalia for his latest screw up. Because Justice Stevens screwed up once too. Oh, well, that settles it then. I think the real point is Scalia completely whiffed trying to make a hugely bitchy argument, but we’ll let the Scalia lovers have their moment. [The Volokh Conspiracy / Washington Post] * Not for the faint of heart. Audio of a guy killing two unarmed teens. Obviously they were breaking into his house, but his wingnut psyche is laid bare in his rambling justification for shooting first and never asking questions. He’s charged with first degree murder because the grand jury just wasn’t buying his story. [Gawker] * Meanwhile, the guys who really need guns can’t find where they left them. [Legal Juice] * The long-running “Commentgate” story from New Orleans — where federal prosecutors allegedly used anonymous comments to sway public opinion on their cases — has ended with the prosecutors agreeing to a ban from federal court. [Times-Picayune] * Did anybody know Donald Sterling’s son was suspected of shooting a guy in an argument? And the D.A. that the elder Sterling ran fundraisers for decided not to prosecute? Yeah, I’d missed that. [Bessette Pitney] * Martin Scorsese’s nephew is basically a bit player in one of his crime movies. [New York Daily News]

* The Senate confirmed nine judges this week, the highest one-week total since the current session of Congress began. They even managed to confirm a “controversial” nominee. Congrats! [Legal Times]

* If you need a reason for your merger-product firm’s poor financial performance, don’t use the verein structure as a scapegoat. Maybe your firms weren’t profitable to begin. Burnnnnn. [The Economist]

* Skadden lawyers await the day they’re called upon to provide the NBA’s defense against a potential suit filed by Don Sterling. They’ll be ready, because Skadden’s the best brand in the world, yay! [Am Law Daily]

* Mayer Brown is pulling out of the “comfort women” case, a decision one of its clients says is “totally crazy.” We suppose the firm was getting tired of being dragged through the mud. [Los Angeles Daily News]

* A suspect is being held by police in the fatal hit-and-run of Judge Dean Pregerson’s son. He’s been charged with vehicular manslaughter, and is expected to be arraigned on Monday. [Los Angeles Times]

* Fifty-five schools are being investigated for alleged violations of federal law in the mishandling of sexual assault and harassment cases. One professional school is on the list. Sup Harvard Law? [Huffington Post]