Drugs

* Ding ding ding, we have a winner: with a bid of $135 million, Univision has prevailed in the auction to buy Gawker Media’s assets (held at the offices of Gawker’s bankruptcy counsel, Ropes & Gray). [Politico]

* The Ninth Circuit rules that the feds can’t spend money to prosecute people whose actions comply with state medical marijuana laws. [How Appealing]

* Protip for millennial law students: don’t call your law professor by her first name. [WSJ Law Blog]

* “Is $88,500 Salary Too Much for a Deputy General Counsel?” (Hint: no.) [Big Law Business]

* Is it time to rethink antitrust enforcement, especially when it comes to Big Tech? [DealBook / New York Times]

* Judge Timothy Dooley has been censured by the Alaska Supreme Court for his rude remarks in open court. [Alaska Dispatch News]

* Hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen can’t trade in CFTC-regulated commodities markets until 2018, as part of a settlement with the commission. [Bloomberg]

* Sigfredo Garcia, one of the two men accused of killing law professor Dan Markel, isn’t getting bond just yet. [Tallahassee Democrat; WCTV]

* Drugs, sex, and death. A lawyer lands in hot water after his teenage lover dies. [CNN]

* The Good Wife took its final curtain call, and it was pitch perfect. [Slate]

* Properly preparing for the LSAT might make you a little difficult to take in social situations. But you probably knew that already. [Pre-law Guru]

* Should this lawyer tone down his ads? They’re very… Better Call Saul. [Law and More]

* A lawyer’s run for a Florida state judgeship is cut short over 20 cents. The devil is indeed in the details. [Miami Herald]

* Where did that case come from? An analysis of where cases before the Supreme Court originate. [Empirical SCOTUS]

* Within North Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ bill, they also eliminated the wrongful discharge cause of action for discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics. This just gets better and better. [Lexology]

* Kansas senator Jerry Moran is the latest Republican saying that Merrick Garland deserves a hearing on his nomination. Given his strong conservative credentials, this is a real victory for the Dem’s messaging. [Huffington Post]

* Some advice for lawyers looking to end the cycle of addiction. [Law and More]

* Hey! There’s good news out of Florida! Governor Rick Scott signed into law a bill to test the backlog of rape kits. [Slate]

* If you want to talk about traditions, then you should support a hearing on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. [Trib Talk]

* On conquering anxiety. [Forbes]

* The video you didn’t even know you needed. RuPaul’s Drag Race takes on the Supreme Court. [YouTube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUCRHrnSQGk

* According to a statement filed in court by 50 Cent, the cash the bankrupt rapper has been flashing in all of his Instagram photos isn’t real. He claims the bills he was posing with were just props. Unfortunately, it seems that Fiddy is a wanksta, so he really needs to stop fronting. [Hartford Courant]

* Not that she was a likely choice to begin with, but AG Loretta Lynch says that a Supreme Court nomination would “curtail her effectiveness in her current role,” and has graciously asked that she not be considered for the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia. [Associated Press]

* “I am very concerned about the harm caused to the law school, our students, and our alums by the inaccurate info being put out there.” Dean Michael Schwartz of Arkansas School of Law (Little Rock) seems worried about Professor Robert Steinbuch’s FOIA lawsuit seeking access to the school’s admissions data. Wonder why… [Campus Reform]

* From the Big House to the White House: more ex-convicts are heading to law school and successfully starting their lives anew. Christopher Poulos, for example, used to be a cocaine dealer who did time in federal prison, but he recently completed an internship with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. [Washington Post]

* “I never had a problem with the article. My problem is the videotape. It’s on the Internet. It lives forever.” Hulk Hogan (aka Terry Bollea) took the stand yesterday in his invasion-of-privacy case against Gawker, and his testimony became “extremely explicit” as his sex life and sex organs were discussed at length and in detail. [USA Today]

* Senior White House adviser Brian Deese has assembled a crack team to help President Obama choose a Supreme Court nominee who will be able to win confirmation before an angry Senate to replace Justice Scalia. Let’s see which way the 2009 Yale Law School graduate steers this important project. [Reuters]

* Australian law firm Slater & Gordon is feeling the pain of being the world’s first publicly traded law firm after a $958.3 million first-half loss. The firm, which is now being referred to as a “corporate catastrophe,” hopes to lay out a restructuring plan in the next few months amid the likelihood of multiple shareholder suits. [Herald Sun]

* Texas State District Judge Julie Kocurek returned to court this week after a shooter opened fire on her in November 2015 in what police are now calling an assassination attempt. She lost a finger during the shooting, but says she feels “very lucky that is all [she] lost.” Welcome back to the bench, Your Honor! [Austin American-Statesman]

* Sorry, FBI, but a judge has ruled that Apple doesn’t have to help the security service unlock an alleged New York drug dealer’s iPhone. This isn’t binding precedent for the tech company’s San Bernardino case, but you can bet your ass its legal team will try to convince the judge handling the order at issue that it should be considered. [NBC News]

* If you’ve been waitlisted at the lowest-ranked law school you applied to this admissions cycle, it doesn’t mean you’ll be rejected from every other school you applied to this admissions cycle — it just means you may have to work a little bit harder on all of your letters of continued interest. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News & World Report]

* Law firms aren’t the only businesses that go through break-ups; the communications firms that represent these elite firms apparently have rocky relationships, too. Spencer Baretz and Cari Brunelle of Hellerman Baretz Communications have split to found their own firm, and they took the entire HBC team with them when they left. [Business Wire]

* Remember Kent and Jill Easter, the married lawyers who planted bags of weed and pills in the car of Kelli Peters, a PTA volunteer at their son’s school? Kent’s law license was suspended, Jill was disbarred, they’re now divorced, and to top it all off, a jury recently awarded Peters $5.7M in her case against them. [Orange County Register]

* The horror! The horror! Not only did Marco Rubio get his ass handed to him during this weekend’s Republican debate, but it turns out he’s accused of having been a law firm lobbyist for Florida firms Becker & Poliakoff and Broad and Cassel. [BuzzFeed News]

* A proposed ABA resolution that local bar groups think has to do with non-lawyer ownership of law firms — they’re not entirely sure, of course — is making the hair stand up on the back of attorneys’ necks. What could possibly go wrong? [WSJ Law Blog]

* Career alternatives for attorneys law school deans: David Yellen, dean of Loyola Law – Chicago for more than a decade (and former ATL columnist), will be leaving the law school game to assume the presidency at Marist College. [Poughkeepsie Journal]

* Applications may be down at Yale Law School when compared to prior years, but administrators aren’t exactly concerned about it. Come on, get real: It’s Yale, and the law school “still [has] more qualified applicants than [it] can accept.” [Yale Daily News]

* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the legal profession celebrated the New Year by shedding 1,400 jobs. Don’t worry, 2016 graduates, there’s still a chance the job market could improve, but we’ll have to wait it out. [Big Law Business / Bloomberg BNA]

* Miriam Cedarbaum, longtime federal judge of the S.D.N.Y., RIP. [New York Times]