Clerkships

Morning Docket

Morning Docket: 02.08.19

* Earlier this week, Justice Samuel Alito blocked a Louisiana abortion law, and now a divided Supreme Court has done the same, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining with the Court's liberals to protect women's right to choose without undue burdens. Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned the dissent -- so much for "precedent on precedent." [USA Today] * After some back and forth over the threat of a subpoena, Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has agreed to testify publicly on the Mueller probe before the House Judiciary Committee bright and early tomorrow morning. [Washington Post] * "There’s no doubt that the talent wars in tax have definitely heated up." As it turns out, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is really living up to its name in that it's creating a lot of new jobs -- for tax lawyers and accountants, that is. [Wall Street Journal] * "I always thought of him as a good lawyer. I’m not so sure I think the same thing about him today." Now that he's serving as Trump's counsel, New York lawyers simply "don't understand" who the new and improved(?) Rudy Giuliani is. [Law.com] * Students at Harvard Law really want the school to continue its support of a pilot federal clerk hiring program that prevents judges from offering clerkships until applicants have completed their second year of school. [Harvard Crimson] * Lawyers representing Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic student who went viral after his run-in with a Native American elder during a D.C. protest, have sent an evidence-preservation letter to CNN prior to suing for defamation. [Daily Report]

By Staci Zaretsky
Morning Docket

Morning Docket: 01.07.19

* Senator Ted Cruz has proposed a constitutional amendment that would set term limits for those in the Senate (two six-year terms) and House of Representatives (three two-year terms) because "[t]erm limits on members of Congress offer a solution to the brokenness we see in Washington, D.C." [Business Insider] * Speaking of terms, the grand jury's 18-month term in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation was set to expire this past weekend, but Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the D.C. District Court extended it for up to six months since the jurors' work is "in the public interest." [CNN] * The federal judiciary has enough money to stay afloat until January 11, and then, per a spokesman for the U.S. courts, "[i]t’s really a judge-by-judge, court-by-court determination" when the courts start operating under the Antideficiency Act "to support the exercise of Article III judicial power." [Fortune] * Hot on the heels of its decision that a ban on racist trademark registrations violated the First Amendment, the Supreme Court will decide whether a similar ban on "scandalous" marks is unconstitutional as well. [Law360] * Do we need a Rooney Rule for federal law clerks? According to Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California, it might be the solution to increasing the amount of diversity -- of people of color and of law school representation -- in the clerks' candidate pool. We'll have more on this later today. [National Law Journal]

By Staci Zaretsky