* GW Law professor John Banzhaf is calling upon the D.C. City Council to bar local broadcasters from using the term “Redskins.” Two decades after the real emergence of “political correctness,” the “Redskins” name has held out against that all-out assault almost as long as the actual Native American society did against Phil Sheridan. [Huffington Post]
* People are still talking about the Yahoo!/Tumblr deal, but the most important deal for the legal profession has slid under the radar. Seamless and GrubHub are merging to make all your “3 a.m. and still haven’t had dinner at the office” dreams come true. [Wall Street Journal]
* Vivia Chen of The Careerist got some flack for suggesting that women taking their husbands’ names was a regressive trend. In (tongue-in-cheek) fairness, here are the good reasons to take your husband’s name. Example: “When you’ve been indicted or convicted.” [The Careerist]
* U. Chicago Law scheduled finals during Memorial Day weekend… while Chicago is closing Lake Shore Drive and cutting back on public transit. UChiLawGo responds. [UChiLawGo]
* A gospel singer is suing McDonald’s because she lost her voice. Normally I’d make fun of this, but she sounds like she has a good argument. [The Inquisitr]
* A review of the legal issues surrounding the DOJ/AP scandal. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Elie explains why the racist, nasty comments we receive don’t faze us at all. [Paidcontent.org]
* Well this is a novel use of fundraising: Speculation that Tim Lambesis (who we covered yesterday) used crowdfunding for a new Austrian Death Machine Schwarzenegger tribute album as the down payment on a hitman to murder his wife. Maybe this new album was going to have a Total Recall theme? [Metal Sucks]
* Stephen Colbert sits down with Caplin & Drysdale’s Trevor Potter to discuss the fact that Colbert’s SuperPAC has never been approved by the IRS. Video after the jump…
Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
Last night, former President Bill Clinton joined Stephen Colbert on his TV show, The Colbert Report. As many people have noted, at the very end of the program, Colbert told Clinton that he had taken the liberty of signing him up for a Twitter account, since Clinton does not currently use Twitter (he joked that he was afraid no one would reply to his tweets). The Twitter account is @PrezBillyJeff, and Colbert sent Clinton’s first tweet live while on the air. If you’re in the US or the one or two other places that Hulu actually works, you can see the exchange below (if you’re elsewhere, blame Viacom for being stupid):
It’s hard out here for authors of judicial memoirs who are not named Sonia Sotomayor. Just ask Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.), a federal trial judge in Brooklyn since 1994 and the author of an appealing new book, Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge (affiliate link). In Disrobed, Judge Block describes his surprising rise from small-town Long Island lawyer to Article III aristocracy, where he has presided over cases involving the Crown Heights riots, Kitty Genovese, mob boss Peter Gotti, and other headline-making subjects.
The book has received several favorable notices. Writing in the New York Times, Sam Roberts described Disrobed as an “engaging” book that provides “a rare look behind decision-making on the federal bench.” Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield called the memoir a “well-written,” “easy and quick read,” by a “quite well-regarded” judge. I’ve read the book myself, and I concur with Roberts and Greenfield.
But even though the book has sold well, exceeding the expectations of its publisher, Thomson Reuters, Disrobed hasn’t attained the bestselling status of Justice Sotomayor’s My Beloved World (affiliate link). And this makes Judge Block a little sad, as he confessed to me when I recently visited him in chambers.
Especially because Judge Block came painfully close to what would have been a big, big break….
Well, a piece of me would want her to become a justice instead of a person on television….
– Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in response to Stephen Colbert’s question — “When you go to the Bronx and you see a young girl on a playground there, do you think, ‘That child has the same opportunities I had when I was a child’?” — posed during last night’s episode of the Colbert Report. Sotomayor seemed generally confused, but attempted to play it off as if she had just pulled one over on Colbert.
(Continue reading to see a clip of the interview in question.)
There are four justices in their 70s now. Ruth Ginsburg is 79. She’s probably the most likely to leave if Obama is reelected because she’s sympathetic to him politically.
The next two oldest are Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy who are 76, who probably don’t want to leave if Obama’s president, but they’re starting to get to the age where, you know, you don’t know exactly when your term is up, as they say.
* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo, but John Yoo is still not satisfied. He wants to capture people and hold them indefinitely without trial proof that the Obama Administration can conduct terror trials successfully. Obviously, the elegant solution is to make KSM live in Yoo’s basement until one of them begs for an impartial arbiter. [Ricochet]
* If you ever read the warnings on your prescriptions, I think this is what you’ll see (by Jeremy Blachman). [McSweeney]
The cutting-edge information and security practice of Hunton & Williams is getting the firm lots of media attention these days — but not of the positive variety. The firm’s lawyers are getting coverage due to their information becoming insecure after a hacktivist group leaked emails they exchanged with security firm HBGary.
Last night, the firm’s logo was flashed several times on the Colbert Report, as Stephen Colbert named the firm as the link between the DOJ, HBGary, and Bank of America, in coming up with questionable tactics for undermining liberal activists. (See our prior post, Hunton & Williams Gets WikiLeaked.)
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who we know isn’t a fan of the firm, was a guest on last night’s show, telling Colbert:
What is most significant here is that you have these plans that are clearly crossing a legal line, with very serious players involved. Law firms like Hunton & Williams are the most powerful in D.C. And no one at any point said, “Maybe this goes a little too far, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.” So willing to cavalierly to put a plan like this that clearly proposes illegal steps down on paper. It clearly shows that this sort of stuff in this world of corporate and government consortium of power is pretty normal, is par for the course.
Moral of the show: BigLaw + BigGov = Evil. Check out Colbert’s telling of the “techno thriller” tale (after the jump). Think Star Wars, with Bank of America as Darth Vader, HBGary and Hunton & Williams as commanders of the Imperial Forces, WikiLeaks as Princess Leia, and Anonymous as Han Solo….
If somebody is mildly angry, they might just give the middle finger. If they’re very angry, they might give it with some sort of words or facial expression that shows anger. And if they’re off-the-charts angry, they may give a double.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
Non-Sequiturs: 05.21.13
By Joe Patrice* GW Law professor John Banzhaf is calling upon the D.C. City Council to bar local broadcasters from using the term “Redskins.” Two decades after the real emergence of “political correctness,” the “Redskins” name has held out against that all-out assault almost as long as the actual Native American society did against Phil Sheridan. [Huffington Post]
* People are still talking about the Yahoo!/Tumblr deal, but the most important deal for the legal profession has slid under the radar. Seamless and GrubHub are merging to make all your “3 a.m. and still haven’t had dinner at the office” dreams come true. [Wall Street Journal]
* Vivia Chen of The Careerist got some flack for suggesting that women taking their husbands’ names was a regressive trend. In (tongue-in-cheek) fairness, here are the good reasons to take your husband’s name. Example: “When you’ve been indicted or convicted.” [The Careerist]
* U. Chicago Law scheduled finals during Memorial Day weekend… while Chicago is closing Lake Shore Drive and cutting back on public transit. UChiLawGo responds. [UChiLawGo]
* A gospel singer is suing McDonald’s because she lost her voice. Normally I’d make fun of this, but she sounds like she has a good argument. [The Inquisitr]
* A review of the legal issues surrounding the DOJ/AP scandal. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Elie explains why the racist, nasty comments we receive don’t faze us at all. [Paidcontent.org]
* Well this is a novel use of fundraising: Speculation that Tim Lambesis (who we covered yesterday) used crowdfunding for a new Austrian Death Machine Schwarzenegger tribute album as the down payment on a hitman to murder his wife. Maybe this new album was going to have a Total Recall theme? [Metal Sucks]
* Stephen Colbert sits down with Caplin & Drysdale’s Trevor Potter to discuss the fact that Colbert’s SuperPAC has never been approved by the IRS. Video after the jump…
Tags: Associated Press, Austrian Death Machine, Caplin & Drysdale, Christian Metal, Colbert Report, Commenters, Department of Justice, DOJ, Eugene Volokh, Fast Food, George Washington University Law School, GrubHub, GW Law School, John Banzhaf, John F. Banzhaf, John F. Banzhaf III, Judge Wade McCree, Justice Department, McDonald's, Memorial Day, Michigan, Non-Sequiturs, Political Correctness, Professor John Banzhaf, Seamless, SeamlessWeb, Sex, Sex Scandals, Stephen Colbert, Super PAC, Taxes, Tim Lambesis, Trevor Potter, University of Chicago Law School, Vivia Chen, Wade McCree, Washington Redskins, Women's Issues