Well, that didn’t take long. Those topless sunbathing pics of Kate Middleton only went up a few days ago, and a French court has already slapped the offending tabloid around a little. A judge has sided with the royals and ordered Closer to fork over the pics and a little bit of cash for causing everyone the trouble.
Thank goodness privacy and a sense of old-world decorum have been restored. Except not quite, owing to this little thing called the internet…
I think it’d be funny if each country could apply for a special cultural diplomatic immunity. Like, one law your diplomats could break anywhere because the practice is culturally accepted in your country. Sure, by funny I mean “horribly racist,” but it really would be entertaining to see what each country picked. America would probably pick the “name your price” ability: our diplomats would be able to buy anybody off, anywhere, without being charged with “bribery.” China would get the “putting lead in stuff” immunity.
I can’t imagine what the French would ask for.
Thought experiments aside, the diplomatic immunity that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn wanted was laughed out of a New York court today. Like I said, it’s funny to see what people ask for…
Continue reading “No Diplomatic Immunity, Even For Allegedly Horny Frenchmen”
Yesterday, a French judge charged embarrassing grandpa and former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn with “aggravated pimping” for his role in a prostitution ring run out of upscale hotels in Lille, France. The charge is the latest in a series of sexual allegations against liver-spotted DSK, including attending sex parties with hookers, sexually assaulting his goddaughter, raping a maid in a hotel, and having sex at age 63.
DSK’s most recent charge raises an important issue: What is aggravated pimping? And if pimpin’ ain’t easy, isn’t all pimping “aggravated pimping”? According to this blogger, whose analysis sounds good to me because I’m too lazy to check it, the French charge of “aggravated pimping” likely involves some aggravating circumstance, such as paying for prostitutes with corporate funds or paying for annoying prostitutes with your own money. Apparently most U.S. states also have “aggravated promotion of prostitution” statutes, which make angry pimping a more serious crime than relaxed pimping — which makes sense from a public policy perspective.
But what about the millions of permissible P.I.M.P.s who just happen to be having a bad day? Are they at risk of breaking the law? And where do we draw the line between perfectly legal Big Pimpin’ and illegal aggravated pimping?
To help make sense of this mess — and to keep you on the legal side of where the true players are at — see my Guide to Pimping chart below….
Continue reading “Fame Brief: The Busy Lawyer’s Guide to ‘Aggravated Pimping’”
Give me a break. I 'raised' 23 foster kids.
* Members of the Occupy Wall Street brigade were allowed to continue to be dirty hippies living in a park without toilets this morning. So fresh and so clean! OMG, yippee! [Wall Street Journal]
* French prosecutors have dropped another yet another rape charge lodged against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Seriously? It looks like nothing sticks to this man except money. [CNN]
* Recognizing that it’s really hard to get someone to pick up a partner from the drunk tank when there’s a Blackberry outage, DLA Piper is thinking about switching to iPhones. [Reuters]
* RajRaj was literally the biggest target in the Galleon case, but one of his buddies was sentenced, too. On Wednesday, Michael Kimelman got 2.5 years at the luxurious Club Fed. [Daily Record]
* It took Michele Bachmann seven years to graduate from law school (whereas most graduate in three). She can get things done, but apparently only on her own time. [New York Times]
* Food fight! Things are getting really dirty in this Food Network lawsuit. Guy Fieri not only likes to cook with alcohol, but he allegedly speaks like an angry drunk behind the scenes. [City Pages]
Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir? You’d think that when women ask that question of men in France, they’d be receptive. In fact, in my experience, French men are overly amorous. When I was a French exchange student at the ripe old age of 15, an older guy approached me at a club and tried to woo me with this line: “Did you know zat Frenche men make ze best loveurs?” I didn’t care to find out.
Well, times have changed, because apparently the French aren’t such great lovers anymore. A 2010 poll taken by the French Institute of Public Opinion found that 76% of people surveyed were having relationship problems due to a poor sex life. And it seems that a poor sex life was what brought about a divorce between Jean-Louis B. and Monique, a middle-aged couple in the birthplace of the language of love.
But after enduring 21 years of a near sexless marriage, a divorce was simply not enough for Monique. Mrs. B. wanted to be compensated for the lack of sexual rendezvous with her ex-husband, so she sued him for it….
Continue reading “Putting the ‘French’ in ‘Kiss’: Man Sued By Ex-Wife Over Lack of Sex”
* I’m sure the soon-to-be first-year associates out there could use this guide on who to bill their hours to. [Going Concern]
* Everybody has advice for when lawyers should step back and remain calm. When is the appropriate time for lawyers to freak out, start screaming and pounding things, and run around saying “we’re all gonna die!”? I mean, I try to do that at least once a week and it makes me feel so centered. [Tips for Young Lawyers]
* As the son of a Haitian immigrant, I do have some Creole roots. But I think it would be awesome to be full-on French for at least one day. I’d definitely have sex with a hotel maid, pee on an airplane, and find a German to surrender to. [Times of Malta]
* True story: when I was a kid, I thought the difference between white men and black men was their hair. So like, a brother with relaxed hair like Al Sharpton was “white” to me, and a guy with a big Jew-fro was “black” to me. I didn’t learn my error, until I walked that nice Jewish girl home from school that one time and saw the look on her parents’ faces. [Gawker]
* I don’t think a lawsuit can sufficiently capture what should happen to a doctor who incorrectly amputates a penis. Next time I go in for surgery I’m writing “do not remove under any circumstance” on that bad boy. Yeah, it’ll fit. [MSNBC]
Toréador, en garde ! Toréador ! Toréador ! Et songe bien, oui, songe en combattant Qu'un œil noir te regarde.
My fellow Americans, I have some terrible news to tell you. I’ve just been made aware of a terrible secret. Apparently all the fears you’ve heard from the far right about the desire of certain liberal justices to impose foreign law on the Unites States of America were justified. I know, I know — I’m as shocked as you are.
I don’t know how else to make sense of what is going to happen tomorrow. The far, far right was right. They just got the kind of foreign law wrong. The Supreme Court doesn’t want to impose Sharia law on us; instead, they want to impose French law on us.
I know this because on Friday, July 22, Justice Stephen Breyer is going to go to that bastion of liberal elitism, Harvard Law School, and deliver an entire address in French. Sacré bleu!
Let’s look at the announcement….
UPDATE (5:30 PM): Please see the update added to the end of this post.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to be the key witness in a sexual misconduct scandal involving a rich and powerful Frenchman. After you are savaged in the international press, be prepared for the prosecutor handling the case to abandon you.
From the New York Times:
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released from house arrest on Friday as the sexual assault case against him moved one step closer to dismissal after prosecutors told a Manhattan judge that they had serious problems with the case.
Prosecutors acknowledged that there were significant credibility issues with the hotel housekeeper who accused Mr. Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her in May. In a brief hearing at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, prosecutors did not oppose his release; the judge then freed Mr. Strauss-Kahn on his own recognizance.
If Strauss-Kahn’s strategy was to attack the credibility of the witness, it worked…
Continue reading “Things Fall Apart: Now Starring Dominique Strauss-Kahn”
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
Keep reading »
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
Keep reading »
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