Liberty Counsel

  • Morning Docket: 04.15.16
    Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 04.15.16

    * Ted Cruz may not like dildos, but he doesn’t seem to mind legal weed. Earlier this week, the Republican presidential candidate said that while he opposes federal legalization of cannabis, states should be free to experiment because the Constitution allows for it. Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana is safe and sound, for now. [Denver Post]

    * “It was a very pleasant meeting, but it has changed nothing.” Senate Republicans may want nothing to do with confirming D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, but they’ve sure been taking their sweet time telling him “no” during their courtesy meetings with him. Some of these seemingly pointless meetings have gone on for more than an hour. [New York Times]

    * Chief Judge Garland may be wasting his time with these lengthy meetings, though, because if the jurist isn’t confirmed before the upcoming presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders said during last night’s Democratic debate that if he wins, he’d ask President Obama to withdraw his nomination, as he doesn’t think that Garland would pass his progressive litmus test on Citizens United. Are you still feeling the Bern? [TIME]

    * Lawmakers in several states have passed bathroom bills that enable bigotry in the name of protecting religious rights, but what you may not have known is that there is one lawyer behind them all. Mathew Staver of Liberty Counsel — who was recently in the news for representing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis — says he’s doing it to push back against the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. [CBS News]

    * Professor Richard Sander of UCLA School of Law, whose claim to academic fame is his “mismatch” theory of affirmative action, has been trying to get more than 30 years’ worth of data from the State Bar of California for quite some time in an effort to continue his research into the “large and persistent gap in bar passage rates among racial and ethnic groups,” and now he’s finally going to get his day in court. [WSJ Law Blog]

    * David Gherity, a former Minnesota lawyer who was falsely accused of setting his girlfriend on fire using accelerants like alcohol, lotion, hair spray, and fingernail polish remover, has filed a civil rights suit against the police and prosecutors who kept him in jail for about two months. Gherity, who was suspended from practice in 2004, alleges a violation of the “protected interest in his good name.” [Twin Cities Pioneer Press]


    Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

  • Morning Docket

    Morning Docket: 10.06.15

    * While we’re loath to continue giving this woman airtime, it turns out that infamous Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s law firm, Liberty Counsel, was recently declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This fits the overall narrative here quite nicely, don’t you think? [Salon]

    * After 12 days of deliberation, the jury in the criminal trial of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former execs has shown no signs of reaching a verdict, but instead, signs of exhaustion. In fact, one juror needed medical attention because she deliberated too hard. [Am Law Daily]

    * This seems to be a common phrase lately: law firm mergers are breaking records again. Altman Weil says more firms announced mergers in the first three quarters of 2015 than in the first three quarters of any year in almost a decade. [Big Law Business / Bloomberg]

    * “I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death.” Thanks to Governor Jerry Brown, California is now the fifth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. The End of Life Option Act will take effect sometime in 2016. [Los Angeles Times]

    * If you’re an undergraduate student who’s planning to go to law school, then you better be building relevant lawyering skills. Master the art of bullsh*tting before you graduate and you’ll be ahead of the game. [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News & World Report]

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