FOIA

Non-Sequiturs: 08.27.13

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* Mike Brown, the man at the center of the would-be South Carolina restaurant racial discrimination suit, has a post over at xoJane telling his story. [xoJane]

* Time for a Team Prenda update! Now they are making really embarrassingly terrible “your mom” jokes. [Popehat]

* Contrary to Elie’s tweet, there is kind of a legal angle to the debacle at the VMAs that was Miley Cyrus dancing with an aging Michael Keaton dressed as Beetlejuice Robin Thicke. MuckRock has submitted a FOIA request to find out how many complaints were filed with the FCC. Unfortunately, my bet is that the number is more than zero, despite the FCC having no legal authority over indecency on MTV. If you have no idea what we’re talking about, here’s a collection of GIFs. [MuckRock]

* Shots fired! Law Librarian Blog snarks on Law Professor Blogs 2.0 re-design. Palace Intrigue: Blogger Edition. [Law Librarian Blog]

* A new website provides an online course in general deposition prep for witnesses. Will this work? Pro: Deposition prep involves haphazard application of life lessons from a lawyer’s individual career and a professionalized course is beneficial. Con: Why would a firm forfeit all those billable hours to a third-party? [The Perfect Witness]

* Not every law school is cutting back. San Joaquin College of Law is expanding its enrollment. It’s not ABA-accredited, so all these students are sure to land on their feet. [KFSN]

* Since we’re likely to be at war with Syria by the end of the week, here’s a thoughtful piece on the legality of intervention in light of the UN charter and moral obligations. [Boston Review]

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How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? Berkeley Law Edition

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Earlier this week, we took a look at faculty salaries at UVA Law School. They’re freely available online because UVA is a public law school. The UVA student newspaper obtained the records through FOIA and then posted them on the web. (If you have a problem with such information being made public, sorry. The best I can do is channel Justice Scalia and tell you: “Amend the statute.” )

We don’t want to pick on UVA, so we’re going to take a look at law professor compensation at a few state law schools. Going down the latest U.S. News rankings, we find ourselves at the ninth-best law school in the nation, Berkeley Law aka Boalt Hall.

The word “Berkeley” conjures up images of long-haired hippies smoking copious amounts of marijuana. But in light of their lush salaries, Berkeley law professors could roll joints using hundred-dollar bills….

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How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? UVA Law Edition

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UVA Law School

We write so many positive things about UVA Law School that we could be the school’s publicists. We gave UVA top honors in our ranking of southern law schools based on reader responses to the ATL Insider Survey. We praised UVA’s innovative public service fellowships for recent graduates. We pointed out that UVA is a top law school for government and public service jobs and for prestigious judicial clerkships, especially Supreme Court clerkships.

(UVA also excels when it comes to producing funny Law Revue videos. They won once in the past and have been in the finals several times. Don’t be shocked if they make an appearance again in this year’s contest, whose finalists we’ll be announcing on Wednesday.)

What are the secrets to UVA’s success as a law school? For one thing, they have an amazing faculty, full of leading scholars and inspiring teachers.

But such talent doesn’t come cheap. Let’s learn more about law professors’ salaries at UVA….

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Apparently Scalia Doesn’t Hold the Government in Very High Regard These Days

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‘Go pound sand, POTUS.’

Is it the law that the state of Virginia cannot do anything that’s pointless? Only the federal government can do stuff that’s pointless?

– Justice Antonin Scalia, commenting during oral arguments in McBurney v. Young on a Virginia FOIA law that favors requests from state residents.

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Morning Docket: 09.24.12

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‘I never look at those rankings.’

* Hey, “regular students” with “regular backgrounds,” you may be able to get a job as a SCOTUS clerk, because Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court’s honey badger in that he doesn’t give a sh*t about rankings. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

* Because $1.05 bill wasn’t quite enough, Apple is asking for additional damages in its patent war lawsuit against Samsung. Ohh, come on, Judge Koh, it’s just an extra $535 million. Everyone else is doing it, come on. Just give us the money. [Bloomberg]

* The D.C. Circuit suit about White House visitor logs is kind of like a recurring issue we see with law schools, in that transparency here means “[w]e will disclose what records we want you to see.” [National Law Journal]

* Skadden is teaming up with local legal aid groups to start a pro bono initiative in D.C. We hear they’ll be handing out gift cards as a show of appreciation to those who sign up. [Capital Business / Washington Post]

* Sumner Redstone recently donated $18M to BU Law. Will his successor be as charitable? From Columbia Law to Shearman & Sterling to media mogul: meet Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom. [New York Times]

* “The employment statistics really are the collective impact of individual choices.” And one of them was attending law school anyway, despite all of the negative media attention they’ve received. [Cincinnati Enquirer]

* Remember the Harvard Law student who ran for Student Government President and pledged to resign after rewriting the organization’s constitution? Well, he graduated, but at least he got a draft in. [Harvard Crimson]

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The Life and Death of the Michigan ‘Wolverine Scholars’ Program

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Way back in 2008, I noted with skepticism the University of Michigan’s “Wolverine Scholars” Program. I wasn’t the only one. The initiative allowed Michigan undergraduates with very high GPAs to get into Michigan Law without having to take the LSAT.

The program seemed like a pretty obvious attempt to game the U.S. News rankings. It’s so obvious that the now disgraced former Dean of Admissions for Illinois Law, Paul Pless, who had a similar program at his school, had this to say about it:

I started a new program for U of I undergrads to apply in their junior year and we don’t require the LSAT. We have additional essays and an interview instead. That way, I can trap about 20 of the little bastards with high GPA’s that count and no LSAT score to count against my median. It is quite ingenious.

Pless was talking about Illinois’s iLeap program, which was substantially similar to the Wolverine Scholars program at Michigan.

The Pless quote came out earlier this month, as the admissions director was being ushered under the bus by Illinois Law as the “lone gunman” for its embarrassing admissions scandal.

With the spotlight on a Big Ten school that manipulated admissions statistics for years, Michigan very quietly canceled its Wolverine Scholar Program.

There’s been much less fanfare about the end of the program than there was about its start. In fact, we obtained FOIA documents that contain various emails from Michigan Law Dean Evan Caminker and Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss.

They talk about the program, and the how “the blogs” are covering it….

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Non-Sequiturs: 05.13.11

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* We expected this would happen. The Osama Bin Laden death photos have been FOIA’d. [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]

* Some Biglaw firms are freezing associate pay? Blimey! [Roll On Friday]

* What is Monica Goodling — now known as Monica Krempasky, since her 2008 marriage to RedState founder Michael Krempasky — up to these days? (Hint: three disobedient dogs may have “a Monica problem.”) [TPM Muckraker]

* Forget about peep-toe shoes. What do we think of hats, lady lawyers? [The Careerist]

* Sam Glover asks: “Can mentoring be replaced by blogs and social networks?” [Lawyerist]

* Today is Friday the 13th. We’re so glad this week is over — and it seems that we’re not alone. [What About Clients?]

* Good news for jobless 3Ls: you can now avail yourself of JD Match, the new career service founded by law-firm consultant and blogger Bruce MacEwen (previously mentioned here). [Adam Smith, Esq.]

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Want Osama Pictures? Better Ask A Lawyer.

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Where's the BLOOD?

Everybody has an opinion on whether or not the Obama administration should release kill shots of Osama bin Laden. It’s a tough question. And there are intelligent ways to disagree with the president’s opinion (see Jon Stewart’s impassioned plea). Or you could just call the president a pussy accuse the president of “pussyfooting” on Twitter, because that shows real leadership.

Those are fine responses for former half-term governors and pundits in the public eye. But lawyers are going about the picture issue in a much more interesting manner. Before asking if Obama “should” release the Osama photos, lawyers are wondering “does he have to,” if served with a FOIA request.

It depends, but the question itself is a helpful reminder that we are a nation of laws…

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John Roberts Pokes Fun at AT&T’s ‘Personal Privacy’

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Southwestern Bell payphone with new AT&T signage

Not human enough to warrant 'personal privacy'

There’s some good news this week for those people whose blood boils at the mention of Citizens United. The Supreme Court proved that it is not always sympathetic to the rights of corporations — and is even willing to have some fun at their expense.

Chief Justice John Roberts penned a tongue-in-cheek opinion lambasting AT&T lawyers’ legal reasoning that has Dahlia Lithwick at Slate asking whether Roberts is the funniest justice ever. (Cue a scowl here from the legions of Scalia lovers in the audience.)

The case at the heart of the hilarity is FCC v. AT&T. The telephone company was involved in a billing practices investigation in 2004, in which it paid a $500,000 fine but admitted no wrongdoing. Some clever rivals at CompTel — a trade association representing some of AT&T’s competitors — wanted to take advantage of FOIA to get documents from the investigation and find out more about AT&T’s inner workings and alleged wrongdoing.

AT&T claimed protection under the Freedom of Information Act’s “personal privacy” exemption. A lower court was sympathetic to AT&T: “Corporations, like human beings, face public embarrassment, harassment and stigma” when they get involved with investigations by authorities. In other words: artificial persons have feelings too!

The Supreme Court did not agree. John Roberts whipped out a can of dictionary definitions to explain why corporations aren’t entitled to “personal privacy.”

Read on at Forbes….

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