Last night, on the eve of his sentencing hearing, Jerry Sandusky, Penn State’s former assistant football coach, released an audio recording from jail, and in it he continued to proclaim his innocence. This morning, it was up to the trial judge, Judge John Cleland, to dole out punishment for the man who had been found guilty on 45 of the 48 counts of child sex abuse against him.
* “I don’t think that we even need to have a race box on the application.” Abigail Fisher is getting even more time in the spotlight thanks to this media interview, which is sure to be the first of many. [New York Times]
* “[T]hey didn’t do anything wrong civilly — and they certainly didn’t do anything wrong criminally.” Tell that to the prosecutors who are looking into the circumstances of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s epic fail. [Wall Street Journal]
* Lateral hiring in midsize/regional firms seems to be up for those with “real-world experience,” but the starting salaries aren’t anything to write home about — they’re still on the “low” side. [Connecticut Law Tribune]
* Jerry Sandusky’s sentencing hearing is today, and in addition to the tape he already released, he’s planning to read a statement before he receives what’s likely to be a life sentence. WE ARE… kind of tired of hearing about his supposed innocence. [CNN]
* “There are fewer interviews and fewer schools interviewing.” This week, would-be law profs who attend the AALS “meat market” will get a taste of what recent graduates have been experiencing. [National Law Journal]
* Sarah Jones, aka “The Dirty Bengals Cheerleader,” reached a plea agreement in her sexual misconduct case. She won’t get jail time, but she wants to go to law school. Same difference, amirite? [Washington Post]
We’ve mentioned the proposed changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule before, which are currently under consideration by the FTC. The changes to COPPA, as it’s known for short, would require sites that collect personal information from children to secure written parental consent first. On first glance, it seems like a slam dunk: why wouldn’t we want to protect children’s privacy, and maybe put a dent in the absurd amount of tracking that constantly happens whenever anyone goes online?
Oh right, I forgot one little detail: free speech!
Facebook is protesting parts of the rule, because the company says it would restrict the free speech of pre-teens who want to “like” articles online. Because heaven forbid children who technically aren’t even supposed to use Facebook have to voice approval in a manner that doesn’t involve clicking a little blue thumbs-up button….
* This San Francisco attorney had a nice visit to the up-and-coming superpower across the Pacific. And by “nice,” I mean the Chinese tried to kill him and the U.S. State Department made things worse. [San Francisco Chronicle]
* I’m sure there’s some sort of serious social commentary here about how gay marriage is good or bad, but I can’t figure out what it would be. Either way, this poor kid has had quite the rough go of it. [Althouse]
* Monster Energy Drinks are under investigation from an as-yet unnamed state attorney general. Because apparently some people were unaware that drinking something that looks like liquid uranium may be unhealthy. [About Lawsuits]
* The suspect in this multimillion-dollar scam graduated from Harvard Law in 1972. You stay classy, Cambridge. [ABC]
* Glenn Reynolds explains why everyone just needs to suck it up and pay income taxes. [Instapundit]
* Justice Scalia is interviewed again about his new book. Shockingly, no one took any shots at Judge Posner this time! [LA Review of Books]
Hello. How are you guys? Working hard? Getting ready for the season of bonuses and profit distributions? Realizing that 3L year is just as useless as I’ve always said it was? I hope all is well.
You might have noticed that I was away last week. That’s because at 10:59 p.m. on September 24th, my wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Here’s my son, Claudius Elie Charles Mystal:
He’s a Libra, which means he’s supposed to have an affinity for lawyering. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to crush any law school dreams early on. Actually I’ve already got to start thinking about getting him into preschool. Bloomberg now has people going to school once they’re six weeks old.
Since I’ve got so much stuff to do, I’ll be out a couple more weeks. I’ve already learned that having a newborn is like going to jail in The Wire: you only lose two minutes of sleep, the minute you wake up and the minute before you get back to bed.
I had packed up my things and was about to turn off the light. That’s when the phone rang here at the CircumcisionLawDesk. The shrill tone of the ring sounded more urgent than usual. I put down my box of Pulitzers and picked up the receiver.
“Hell-” “You’ve gotta write quick, Mister! Gawker ran a story on circumcision and it’s crazy!” I replied that I was too old for this game. Tracking down every circumcision tip had left me a hollow shell of a man. But the kid was insistent. “What about the babies???” Now you listen here, you sniveling punk, I said. I was never in it for the babies. Heck, I never could figure out just what I thought about circumcision. Mutilation, health, hygiene, aesthetics. The whole racket made my head spin. And that’s when the young punk said something that set me on my present course.
“There might be a lawsuit. Some Jews are crazy-mad about a new regulation passed by the City of New York and they’re threatening all kinds of holy hell over it. It’s not that New York is outlawing circumcision. It’s not about that. It’s that… well, it’s that some of these Jewish folks do something.” Out with it! “I can’t… I don’t wanna say… It’s that these Jewish fellas, some of them… Well…”
After what feels like years of schools trying to regulate every aspect of children’s social media lives, it looks as though we may have finally hit a threshold. There may actually be an electronic bridge that schools cannot cross in their attempts to spy on educate underage students.
In a particularly egregious case, a Minnesota federal court handed down a ruling that protects off-campus speech and prohibits schools from forcing students to hand over private login information. The ruling will hopefully put the kibosh on a practice that never should have been acceptable to begin with…
* Cass Sunstein provides a calm, well-reasoned discussion about how much personal opinions about sources matter in shifting people’s beliefs. Whatever, I hate that pinko commie. [New York Times]
* So you know that whole “NYC hires big scary Proskauer to evict old, folk-hero newspaper vendor”? Yeah, well, maybe let’s replace “folk-hero” with alleged “back-door dealer” and “scary Proskauer lawyer” with “former NYC attorney trying to help her city out pro bono.” [New York Magazine]
* This Ohio inmate says he’s too fat to be executed. That’s nuts: his extreme obesity might actually save his life. Eat your heart out, American Heart Association.[Columbus Dispatch]
* “Don’t tase me bro!” Then don’t act all crazy and try to enter the courtroom with a camera… bro. [Jonathan Turley via Legal Blog Watch]
* Oh snap! The Winklevii are back, and they’re investing in a new social network… for investors. Hmmm… was kind of hoping after such an extended absence they’d have come up with something with a little more pizazz. On the upside, they still look creepily identical! [SF Weekly]
* Big government is completely out of control! First they try to kill grandma, and now they won’t even let two-year-olds drive cars! I can’t take this socialist nonsense anymore; I’m moving to Canada. [Legal Juice]
I’m not a mathematician, but I am a diligent consumer of news. And based on a casual scan of recent headlines and stories that have dominated multiple news cycles, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that every child in America is getting, or has gotten, raped. From a Catholic church that has exhausted anyone’s ability to be surprised to a football program arrogant enough to talk of a Grand Experiment, the institutions that have been sullied by serial child rape have also been ones that were previously thought of as bastions of strong moral fiber.
And to this Hall of Shame, we can now add the Boy Scouts of America. This Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published an exposé suggesting the Scouts should Be Prepared to get sued for all they’re worth. It could be a real Jamboree for plaintiffs attorneys.
After the jump, see if I can pull off the ridiculously difficult Pinewood Derby reference.
Last summer, we brought you news about Saddle River, New Jersey, the beautiful town where my colleague David Lat spent his childhood (I grew up just one town over, in Upper Saddle River). But like every charming suburb, Saddle River apparently has a dark underbelly.
In July of last year, we discovered that Edward De Sear, a 64-year-old man who was an Allen & Overy partner at the time, had been arrested at his home and charged with distributing child pornography. The charge of distributing child pornography carries a mandatory minimum penalty of five years in prison and a maximum penalty of 20 years and a $250,000 fine.
De Sear was released on a $250,000 bond with electronic monitoring and never entered a plea. But it looks like the FBI was able to dig up some more information on his alleged pervy sexual preferences, because the ex-A&O partner was rearrested yesterday on eight additional kiddie porn charges.
Let’s learn more about the allegations against Ed De Sear, including details on where he supposedly viewed and trafficked child pornography….
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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Last night, on the eve of his sentencing hearing, Jerry Sandusky, Penn State’s former assistant football coach, released an audio recording from jail, and in it he continued to proclaim his innocence. This morning, it was up to the trial judge, Judge John Cleland, to dole out punishment for the man who had been found guilty on 45 of the 48 counts of child sex abuse against him.
