* A full run-down of the suspension of a 7-year-old for brandishing a danish shaped like a gun. He was loaded for bear… claw. [Lowering the Bar, Part I; LTB, Part II]
* U.S. drones are helping out the French in Mali. Jeez, drones are getting used everywhere from here to Timbuktu. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Do you need to report to the SEC if your company gets hacked? Probably… if you don’t tell them about possible violations how would they ever know? [IT-Lex]
* Someone wants help finding a WordPress theme for their law firm. Totally Best Magazine, bro. That’s hawt. [Yahoo Answers]
* Just a reminder, Ms. JD’s Fellowship applications are due March 8. [Ms. JD]
* Court rules that overlapping elements between romance novels do not amount to infringement. I mean, there’s only so many ways to phrase “throbbing member.” [Courthouse News Service]
* Pinellas County, Florida (Tampa Bay area) returns to using fluoridated water after a governmental sea change brought on by the issue. Don’t they understand the Communist plot to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids? [Tampa Bay Times]
* In fairness, I think pro se litigants generally have a pretty good ineffective assistance claim. [Lowering the Bar]
* The D.C. Circuit managed to irritate both environmentalists and industry by affirming Fish and Wildlife’s designation of polar bears as “threatened.” It’s a nice middle ground. You know who else would appreciate some middle ground? A polar bear clinging to a shrinking ice floe. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor thinks kids need a healthier respect for the American democratic process. It would be unfortunate if the will of a democratic majority could get hijacked by five partisan hacks. [Courthouse News Service]
* Following up on yesterday’s profile of Lindsay Lohan’s attorney Mark Heller, the judge declared him “incompetent.” Fair enough. [TMZ]
* Oh, but trust him, he’s a doctor (of law). [The Economist]
* To quote the inimitable Spencer Hall, “Fine, here, cry.” [New York Times]
* Should the mentally disabled receive the death penalty? Neither SCOTUS nor Georgia’s Supreme Court stayed Warren Lee Hill’s execution, but the Eleventh Circuit saved the day. [Washington Post]
* If you’re looking for a mishmosh of Biglaw news, from new offices to new hires to new firm leaders, then look no further. If only this list were in alphabetical order! [Law Firm Insider / U.S. News & World Report]
* Dewey know why this partner who was sued by Barclays in the U.K. over his capital loan is suing the bank in the U.S.? It involves an alleged fraud and Joel Sanders. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* So much for that “silly sideshow”: Judge Richard Sullivan of the S.D.N.Y. hasn’t made a ruling in the Greenlight case yet, but he says David Einhorn may have a “likelihood of success on the merits” if the matter proceeds further. [Bloomberg]
* One of the partners at this small law firm apparently watched Secretary a few too many times, and he’s now accused of threatening to “whip” his ex-assistant into shape because she was a “bad girl.” [New York Post]
* The University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law named an interim successor to former dean Hiram Chodosh, but we can’t say he’s a law dean hottie. He looks like Van Pelt from Jumanji. [Salt Lake Tribune]
* The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law will house the first clinic in the nation devoted to pardons and the law. It figures that a religious school would focus on legal Hail Marys. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Career alternatives for law school dropouts: mining magnate and financier of the Titanic II. Much like the value proposition of going to law school for today’s generation, this idea is unsinkable. [New York Times]
* Prosecutors have upgraded the charge against Oscar Pistorius to premeditated murder, and one could now say the track star doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to being released on bail pending trial. [CNN]
* D is for… divorce? Sesame Street is talking about divorce in a way that children can understand, but alas, the series neglects important topics like “why mommy is a whore” and “why daddy drinks.” [Law Firm Newswire]
Our victory today stands for the principle that “choice” goes both ways. Under Roe v. Wade and post-Roe cases, a teenage girl has the absolute legal right to choose life, even over the strong objections, pressure, and punishments of her parents.
If you are a recent law graduate without a job, you might want to skip this story. Because this is not a story about a law school taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from inexperienced kids and helping them find legal employment. Law schools don’t really do it.
Instead, this is a story about a law school charging a reasonable price to help lawyers-turned-homemakers get back into the practice of law. The job market might be pretty tight for recent graduates under 30. But this program is having success in helping graduates from back in the day who are over 40.
And, again, the law school is offering a reasonable price for the program!
* If you’ve been waiting for the definitive, Kashmir Hill, what in the hell is Catfishing article, here you go. [Not-So Private Parts / Forbes]
* Let me just say that societies that fully utilize the talents of women have an inherent advantage over the ones that don’t. With one rules change, we now have twice as many potential combat soldiers. Glory. [Daily Beast]
* A “Good Samaritan” gun owner defended a little boy from pit bulls by shooting at the dogs who were mauling the little boy. Look, as a dad, can I just say that if you see some pit bulls attacking my son, please help… by running at the pit bulls and saying, “Git, git away from that boy,” not by shooting a freaking hand cannon towards my child! [Cato @ Liberty / Cato Institute]
* Okay, who has standing to sue for a violation of the 27th Amendment? Who? I want this to happen. Come on, constitutional scholars. Make it happen. Let’s see who really cares about “all” the amendments, not just the ones that allow people to shoot each other. [The Note / ABC News]
* I mean we’re suing over sandwiches, aren’t we? [Legal Blog Watch]
* Slow your roll, NAACP. I’m pretty sure that the 14th Amendment doesn’t protect the rights of black people to become diabetic with oversized sugary drinks. [Gawker]
Pedophobia, the fear of children, is not something that makes the news very much. It’s not like anybody who suffers from pedophobia gets to have a Facebook account unless they want to be bombarded with terrifying images of other people’s children.
Since we know that pedophilia is a real thing, I totally believe that pedophobia is a real thing. That makes sense.
But, just as I don’t want pedophiles teaching in schools, I’m not sure that a middle school is the best place for a pedophobe.
An Ohio teacher suffering from pedophobia agrees. She’s suing her former school district for failing to accommodate her disability by moving her from a high school to a middle school.
If she doesn’t win her employment discrimination case, maybe she’ll have a claim under the Eighth Amendment….
This is a lot safer when Mom and Dad are holding you up.
I get pretty annoyed when the state tries to act like everybody’s mother. But the worst application of the “nanny state” is when the state actually supersedes the judgment of a caring parent. It just makes it worse when the government tries to ruin a family’s holiday season.
This summer, we had a report about a partner who was accused of providing alcohol for his daughter and a bunch of her friends during a party for her graduation. The charge has since been dismissed. Today, a tipster sent us a link about another Biglaw partner who has been charged with providing alcohol to her teenage daughter and some of her daughter’s friends, this time at a New Year’s Eve party.
Can we take a step back and ask why the government is running around charging people for letting teenagers drink at family parties?
It’s the last day of December, so it’s a good time to look back on the year that was. We’ll do what we’ve done for the past three years (wrap-up posts from 2009, 2010, and 2011 can be found here, here, and here) and identify the ten biggest stories of the past year as decided by you, our readers. With the help of Google Analytics, we’ve compiled a list of our top ten posts for 2012, based on traffic (as represented by pageviews).
By the way, for the third year in a row, the most popular category page on Above the Law was Law Schools. People have now been intensely focused on the declining value proposition of going to law school for as long as it takes to earn a Juris Doctor degree. Isn’t it time that we graduate from the current educational model?
The second and third most-popular categories on ATL in 2012 were Biglaw and Bonuses. Although this year brought us the largest law firm failure ever, nearly all other firms indiscriminately doled out offers to summer associates, and bonus season looked better for the first time in years. While the legal profession is still in transition, things are certainly looking up, and through the highs and the lows, we’ve been there to cover it all.
So what were the ten most popular individual posts at Above the Law in 2012? Let’s find out….
* Justice Sonia Sotomayor just ruined Hobby Lobby’s new year by refusing to block the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptives mandate. All of the members of the company’s legal team will have to scrapbook and crochet for hours to get over this loss. [Reuters]
* Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama is being feted as CNN’s “Most Intriguing Person of 2012,” but he’s currently trailing in fourth place in the most important year-end poll of all: Above the Law’s Lawyer of the Year competition. Get out there and vote! [CNN]
* Federal district court judges aren’t being confirmed as quickly as they once were, and it’s partly because our president isn’t submitting nominees as quickly as those who came before him. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* But even if the president nominated judges more quickly, he’d continue to face harsh opposition from the NRA, which matters because the gun group has an entire party in its pocket. [Opinionator / New York Times]
* A legal problem and a journalism problem wrapped up in a little pretty bow: David Gregory of NBC’s “Meet the Press” is being investigated for displaying an alleged 30-round magazine on the air. [Washington Post]
* One of New York’s most prestigious private schools agreed to settle the sex abuse suit brought against it by former students. Simpson Thacher partner Phil Culhane must be doing a victory dance. [New York Daily News]
* You got a fast car, and now this case will pay all our bills. Toyota settled a class action suit over unintended acceleration, and it’s touted as one of the largest product-liability settlements in history. [New York Times]
* Ay dios mio! You know that you’re never going to enjoy another vacation when you catch a hotel employee spreading his seed all over your clothes. But what did you expect? It’s Mexico. [Courthouse News Service]
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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* A full run-down of the suspension of a 7-year-old for brandishing a danish shaped like a gun. He was loaded for bear… claw. [Lowering the Bar, Part I; LTB, Part II]
