Harvard Law Review

Morning Docket: 02.19.13

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A future law student?

* Save for an unintelligible joke made last month, it’s been seven years since Clarence Thomas has spoken during oral arguments, much less asked a question, but with no offense to his colleagues, he’d rather “allow the advocates to advocate.” [Washington Post]

* Sorry, members of the American public, but something like 95 percent of you are too stupid to understand what’s going on during Supreme Court hearings, so there’s no point in having cameras in the courtroom to film them. (Sotomayor, J.) [New York Times]

* “Having an empty bench means people don’t get their cases heard,” but it seems like Senate Republicans could not care less. Obama’s facelift for the federal judiciary is going to have to wait a little while longer. [San Francisco Chronicle]

* A lawgasm for prestige nerds: the Harvard Law Review received federal trademark protection, and with that, the number three law school in the country gained some bragging rights over Yale. [Daily Report (reg. req.)]

* Oh my God, you guys, law school applications are down, no one can find jobs, and recent graduates are in debt up to their eyeballs. This is totally new information that no one’s heard before. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

* Turning to your parents for law school advice is perhaps the worst idea in the world — after all, they’re the cause of your “special little snowflake” syndrome in the first place. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]

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Morning Docket: 10.11.12

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* Everyone’s happy about the Dewey & LeBoeuf settlement except the Ad Hoc Committee and its LeBoeuf retirees, who called Judge Martin Glenn’s attempt to slap them down an “insult to injury.” [WSJ Law Blog]

* While South Carolina’s voter ID law wasn’t found to be inherently discriminatory, its enforcement was still blocked because people will be unable to get their sh*t together in time for the election. [Bloomberg]

* VP debate moderator Martha Raddatz’s 1991 wedding guest list has come under fire because Barack Obama was invited. Clearly there’s a conflict of interest worth arguing about here. [Washington Post]

* This man is nobody’s “butt boy”: Tom Keefe, the interim dean over at Saint Louis Law School, will be footing a $14,212 bill for his students in the form of ABA Law Student Division memberships. [National Law Journal]

* Strippers in California, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Texas, and Nevada will be making it rain, because they just scored a $12.9M class action settlement. That’s a whole lot of “college tuition”! [Courthouse News Service]

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The Life and Times of Erika Awakening, Professional Pickup Artist and Harvard Law Grad

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Erika Awakening

Sometimes attorneys are desperate to find a way out of the legal profession. Sometimes that desperation will lead them down a strange road to an entirely new career — and not just a new career, but a new way of life.

Meet Erika Frick, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School. After graduating from HLS, Frick worked for the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. But if you’re a member of the pickup artist community, you know Frick better as Erika Awakening, a New Age life coach and self-proclaimed guru of the seduction community. How frickin’ fabulous is that?

What would cause a Harvard-educated attorney on a rather prestigious career track to turn her focus to the Law of Attraction? Let’s find out….

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Morning Docket: 06.04.12

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* Dewey know how deep in the red D&L’s international operations were? Enough to make you shout bloody hell and sacré bleu: the U.K. and Paris offices had liabilities of at least $175M. [Financial Times (reg. req.)]

* “To the extent that we the estate have claims, we would like to settle those claims sooner rather than later.” The joke’s on you if you thought you’d be able to keep your Dewey defector money. [Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)]

* According to the allegations in former Cravath associate Ellen Pao’s sex discrimination suit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, the “Mad Men” culture seems to be alive and well in Silicon Valley. [New York Times]

* Who will be the first to puff, puff, pass the vote — Obama or Romney? It looks like the path to the White House in Election 2012 might depend upon the legalization of marijuana in key states like Colorado. [Reuters]

* Apparently you can’t take the “duh” out of “Flori-duh” when it comes to voting laws without a fight in the courts. A federal judge has blocked portions of the Sunshine State’s “onerous” voter registration law. [Bloomberg]

* “People want to go to our school, and why should we say no?” Because they can’t get jobs? Northwestern Law is considering shrinking its class sizes; John Marshall Law, not so much. [Crain's Chicago Business]

* Stop crying about coming in second in the U.S. News rankings, Harvard, because you can still brag about beating Yale in having the most-cited law review articles of all time… for now. [National Law Journal (reg. req.)]

* Gloria Allred is representing one of the Miami “zombie’s” girlfriends for reasons unknown. Maybe the zombie apocalypse is truly upon is and she saw an opportunity to stand up for undead women’s rights. [CBS Miami]

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Young Obama at Harvard Law School Talking About Race

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For the first black president, Barack Obama doesn’t really talk a lot about race. People talk about his race all the time, and once again it’ll be a critical factor in the campaign, but the president himself doesn’t often wade into racial controversies.

But the excellent people at Buzzfeed have hopped into the waaaay-back machine and uncovered video of Obama speaking eloquently about a racial controversy while he was president of the Harvard Law Review.

It’s a fun video, not just because of the content, but because it turns out that 20 years ago, Obama sounded exactly the same.

And as Huffington Post reporter Mike Sacks just gchatted me (and tweeted), Obama did this one without a teleprompter…

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Grammer Pole of the Weak: Split Infinitives

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In an event I did a few years ago at the University of Chicago with Judge Richard Posner (check out the podcast here), Judge Posner tossed out a delicious little blind item. He mentioned a federal judge in Chicago who would fire law clerks for what she viewed as a very grave offense: splitting infinitives in written work product.

But is splitting infinitives really such a crime?

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Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Leiter Than Air

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Sometimes LEWW scans a wedding announcement with bated breath, praying that we’ll find a law degree so we can write about a couple. We were crushing on Peanut Wong and David Hattaway before we even clicked on their link. But alas, she’s a dental student (of course she is), and he’s an electrical engineer. So we’ll just say this: If you eat the Wong Peanut, you could die.

On to this week’s featured couples:

Elena Saxonhouse and Tulley Rafferty

Kathleen McArthur and Matthew Gross

Alice Brown and Michael Leiter

Get the scoop on these couples — including their registries, résumés, and cheesy wedding websites — after the jump.

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Setting The Harvard Law Review Write-On Competition Ablaze

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I don’t think it’s going to come as a galloping shock to anybody that law review was not my kind of thing. My conversational style, inattention to detail, and aversion to boredom really didn’t mesh with anything law review was selling.

And after my 1L year, my grades were strong enough that I knew I’d get a Biglaw job somewhere during OCI; I didn’t need the résumé bump. Why in the world would I want to compete with individuals who really wanted it and would cut me to get on, when at the end the “prize” was being on boring-ass law review? No thanks.

When I received my law review application, I quickly ushered it into the trash.

A current Harvard Law student had a more expressive way of saying no to law review — a more combustible rejection…

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Non-Sequiturs: 02.08.11

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* BarMax has launched its new app, BarMax NY for iPad — and it’s giving away one BarMax NY to a lucky law student at each law school in New York. [Yahoo Finance]

* Nancy Gertner and Stephen Shay have been named Professors of Practice at Harvard Law School. Lat wonders if Judge Gertner will wear peep-toe shoes to class. I wonder how it came to pass that I know what a peep-toe shoe is. [Harvard Law School]

* Speaking of the Crimson diploma factory, the Harvard Law Review elected its first “openly” gay president. You see where I put the scare quotes? Yeah, you know it, baby. [Harvard Crimson]

* Professor Larry Ribstein explains why Malcolm Gladwell’s an idiot so I don’t have to. [Truth on the Market]

* The latest on American Needle, from Professor Marc Edelman. [Social Science Research Network]

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, Amy Chua's 'Tiger Cub'

* Once again, ABA president Stephen Zack seems to get why law school transparency is important. But we’re still waiting for him to actually do something to force law schools to divulge complete and accurate information. [Law School Transparency]

* A “Tiger Cub” talks about how annoying it is to live with “Tiger Mothers” like Amy Chua. You know, if some Western mother went to China extolling the benefits of a laid-back upbringing, wouldn’t the Chinese government just ban her book and get back to lending us money? I think American parents need to put Chua’s book down and go back to letting the television and nanny do their jobs. [Cornell Daily Sun]

* Confession? There’s an app for that (kinda). So, for those keeping score at home, you can pray to God via an iPhone, but you better not be texting about a CONDOM because that still pisses Him off. [Time / NewsFeed]

Disclosure: BarMax is an ATL advertiser.

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Minorities and Women and Law Reviews, Oh My!

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Earlier this month, roughly around the time that newly minted law review editors were hearing the good news, we raised the issue of how many minorities and women are being selected for law review.

It’s not a new debate; whether underrepresented minorities (URMs) and women are adequately represented on the nation’s leading law journals has long been a subject of controversy. But in light of the tough legal job market, in which credentials like law review membership are more valuable than ever, it’s certainly a subject worth revisiting.

We kicked off the discussion with this tip:

You may want to investigate proportions of URMs [underrepresented minorities] and women at some top 5 law reviews. I hear that [one school] took 29 1Ls, but only 7 women and no African-Americans. [Another school] took 45 first-year editors, about even male/female, but only 2 URMs in the bunch.

Which law journals are being referred to here? And how are URMs and women doing at other law reviews — perhaps yours is mentioned — around the country?

UPDATE: Please note that a few updates and corrections have been added since this post was originally published. Check them out after the jump.

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