Defamation

* Could this be the year that law firms break out of their cycle of tepid growth? [American Lawyer]

* In ordinary times, Roy Moore’s laughable lawsuit against Sacha Baron Cohen would be bigger news. We do not live in ordinary times. [Law360]

* One would have thought “independence” would be “having a lifetime job with no oversight and an impossibly onerous removal process.” But, “independence” really means “only answering hypotheticals that don’t raise potentially serious questions about a guy’s fig leaf of a judicial philosophy.” This is why it’s so important to be a textualist! [Courthouse News Service]

* It makes for a nice, vapid buzzword, but there actually is an “I” in “Team of Nine.” [National Law Journal]

* A federal judge has banned the Texas “bury your zygote” law. Don’t worry Texas, your boy Brett’s will make sure you don’t have to worry about this ever again. [NPR]

* Shocking no one, lawyers think Brexit was a bad idea. [Legalweek]

* Oh, and we’re going to “open up libel laws” now. [CBS]

* ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FILED! Against Rod Rosenstein. Alternative headline: In stunning turn, Rep. Jim Jordan demands accountability as long as it’s not for years of systematic sexual abuse. [Huffington Post]

* That Shook Hardy attorney who argued that a woman got pregnant in a diabolical nine-month scheme to delay trial? Yeah, he’s been suspended. [Daily Business Review]

* The Fifth Circuit’s James Ho isn’t so much a judge as a political hack in a robe. That Orin Kerr Tweet from April was just the canary in the mine. [NPR]

* Facebook GC Colin Stretch will pursue his lifelong passion of becoming the moderator of the Facebook Alumni Facebook Group. [Corporate Counsel]

* Trump’s ethics expert will also be leaving the job that he’s ostensibly been performing. [The Hill]

* Shareholder class actions are on the upswing this year. Gather ye rosebuds while ye don’t have Judge Kavanaugh declaring Rule 23 a First Amendment violation. [National Law Journal]

* Roy Moore sues PAC over negative campaign ads. Discovery should be fun. [Courthouse News Service]

* Larry Nassar wants a new sentencing hearing. See, this is what happens when judges grandstand and rip up letters to advance their political career — they just give these guys an in to try and futz with the sentence. [ESPN]

* Michael Cohen is publicly attacking Trump over being a Russian stooge. So much for earning a pardon. [NY Daily News]

* Speaking of Cohen, his adversary Michael Avenatti is now fighting for immigrant kids. I guess hating Trump makes strange bedfellows. [Daily Beast]

* Hogan Lovells is tasked with saving Papa John’s in the post-Papa John world. But can they make that awful stuff edible? [American Lawyer]

* Kushner family under investigation for harassing tenants hardly surprising anyone. [Law360]

* Tesla’s stock takes a hit as the guy Elon Musk randomly called a pedophile threatens to sue. [CNBC]

* The Brexit campaign succeeded by breaking election law. A massively disastrous electoral result brought on by improper electoral meddling? Welcome to the club. [TechCrunch]

* Town finally gets rid of its Footloose law. Spoiler alert: the town is in the South. [Allentown Morning Call]

* President Trump seems to be addicted to lawyers, and maybe someday he’ll be able to find another one like Michael Cohen who is “willing to sacrifice reputation, sanity, and perhaps a paycheck” to defend him. [Politico]

* Proskauer Rose and Jane Doe, the partner who sued the firm in a $50 million gender bias lawsuit, will be entering mediation to see if they can reach a settlement. At the same time, limited discovery will take place as to whether Doe is an “employee” under the anti-discrimination laws cited in the suit. [American Lawyer]

* Anthony Borges, a student who was shot five times while blocking a doorway to save other students during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has filed suit against Nikolas Cruz for for assault and battery. Perhaps we should be expecting more of these lawsuits in the future. [Sun Sentinel]

* Parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 have filed a defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones of Infowars. Jones responded to the lawsuit going on a 10-minute rant on his show about how his lawyers thought the suit was frivlous. [New York Times]

* Bonus season isn’t over yet — for staff members, that is. Mintz Levin recently awarded hundreds of its staff members with special bonuses to celebrate an increase in equity partner profits. [Big Law Business]

* The Incredible Shrinking Biglaw Partnership: Who’d have thought the idea of making more money by sharing it with fewer people would be so popular? [Law360]

* Mayer Brown has a new managing partner. [American Lawyer]

* In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the president just fired 256 judges for, by and large, not having law degrees. That’s so weird, over here our judging problem are all the unfit hacks with law degrees. [Al Jazeera]

* How do you expeditiously sort through millions of pages of documents in a wide-ranging criminal investigation? That’s a question Robert Mueller’s team has, and one that legal technology can actually answer. [Legaltech News]

* Merely threatening frivolous defamation claims can be big business. Charles Harder made $93,000 off Trump’s fear of Fire and Fury. [CNBC]

* Neil Gorsuch seems to understand diversity in practice better than his colleagues. [Slate]

* Sheppard Mullin sets up a new lateral-fueled Dallas office. [Texas Lawyer]

* Now that the FBI is all up in his business, Squire Patton Boggs has cut ties with Michael Cohen. They had been working together in an amorphous strategic alliance that was almost certainly some kind of murky lobbying-related arrangement. [American Lawyer]

* Today is Equal Pay Day and in-house counsel hold the key to remedying pay inequality. [Corporate Counsel]

* This lawyer’s got 99 problems and all of them are a year in prison for trading sex for legal work. [Texas Lawyer]

* Trump advised that he can’t contribute to legal defense fund. This story assumes the phony billionaire has enough non-debt-financed disposable income to help his cronies, which is a very open question. [Bloomberg]

* In shocker, the Texas Supreme Court doesn’t understand homosexuality. [Slate]

* Wilmer and Foley Hoag seek documents to prove the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation drove the administration’s decision to ban transgender troops — since we know the general serving as Secretary of Defense wasn’t pushing it. [National Law Journal]

* Gawker’s liability releases hit snag. [Law360]

* No donation is too small, and no donor is too young: Former Senate candidate and former judge Roy Moore is begging his supporters via Facebook for cash for his legal defense fund because his “resources have been depleted” and he’s “struggled to make ends meet.” [Washington Post]

* The Trump administration wants to stop federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, and the Justice Department is using the travel ban case to ask the Supreme Court to “reject the deeply misguided practice.” Will SCOTUS put these “so-called judges” in their place? [Associated Press]

* Remember Claud “Tex” McIver, the Biglaw partner who shot his wife in the back and killed her, allegedly blamed the incident on a Black Lives Matter protest? Jury selection for his murder trial begins today. [Daily Report Online]

* No, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t advising LeadInvest, a company promoting cryptocurrency investments in Texas, and neither are former U.S. Solicitors General Theodore Olson, Seth Waxman, and Paul Clement. The Texas State Securities Board sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the company remove photos of the justice and the lawyers from its site. [National Law Journal]

* And the Oscar for Best Lawyer goes to… John Quinn of Quinn Emanuel has served as outside counsel to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1986, and he attends every show with the ABC contract in his pocket in case a legal issue pops up. [Corporate Counsel]

* Is it time to bring back the lists and rankings commemorating the “hotties of law”? Vivia Chen has a hot take, and thinks that in this puritanical era, it’s high time that we stop pretending lawyers are asexual. So long as both men and women are included on the lists, what’s the harm? Right now, a lot. [American Lawyer]

* Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris were both appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday afternoon. Booker is the first African-American man to ever serve on the SJC, and Harris is the second African-American woman to ever serve on the SJC. Congratulations! [The Hill]

* Rescind immigration protection from current DACA recipients? Dream on! That’s not going to happen under Judge William Alsup’s watch. He issued a nationwide injunction to block the Trump administration from denying program renewals for “dreamers.” [Washington Post]

* Sorry, North Carolina, but according to the Middle District, your congressional map is unconstitutionally gerrymandered. This is the first time that a federal court has blocked a congressional map because it was “motivated by invidious partisan intent.” [New York Times]

* Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen has filed defamation suits against Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed over the Steele dossier following Senator Dianne Feinstein’s publication of a transcript of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s interview with Fusion’s co-founder. The legal action was announced over Twitter, obviously. [POLITICO]

* “Lawyers like shiny things, and so there has been a huge spike in interest in blockchain law, especially over the last year.” This is just one of the reasons why so many Biglaw firms now have blockchain practice groups and task forces. [Big Law Business]

* Norton Rose Fulbright has closed its doors in Abu Dhabi, making it the largest law firm to shutter an office in the Middle East. [American Lawyer]

* Professor Toby Heytens of UVA Law has been named the next solicitor general of Virginia. He’ll be taking his second leave of absence from the law school during his term. He took his first leave to serve in the U.S. Solicitor General’s Office. [Daily Progress]

* No, contrary to popular belief, Radiohead has not filed suit against Lana Del Rey for similarities between their hit song “Creep” and her song “Get Free” — but the band really should consider doing so, and their lawyers ought to become as “relentless” as Del Rey claimed on Twitter. Take a listen, here. [Rolling Stone]