Earlier this week, President Barack Obama reiterated his interest in shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay: “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not in the best interests of the American people.”
President Obama isn’t alone in being troubled by goings-on at Guantanamo. This morning I attended an interesting panel discussion where a retired admiral, the former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, spoke out in favor of closing Gitmo….
* 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]
* 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]
* These are some sad times in Texas, y’all. It really hasn’t been a very good week for the Lone Star state in the courts. First their redistricting plan got thrown out, and now their voter ID law has been struck down. [CNN]
* Jeh Johnson of the Defense Department may take legal action against the former Navy SEAL who wrote a book about the Osama bin Laden raid, calling it a “material breach” of duty. Must be good; go buy it! [CBS News]
* Bros will be bros: disbarment has been recommended for an attorney who failed to disclose to clients that he had been suspended for banging an underage chick who worked at his office. [National Law Journal]
* Here are 15 Northeast law schools ranked by employment rate. After getting excited that mine was on the list — albeit dead last — I realized I’m seriously a low expectation havin’ motherf**ker. [Boston Business Journal]
* George W. Huguely V, the UVA lacrosse player who beat his girlfriend to death, was sentenced to 23 years in prison. Distasteful joke alert: for his sake, we hope the prison uniforms have poppable collars. [Bloomberg]
* A Maryland lawyer with autism and Sensory Processing Disorder has created a way for people to stop getting up in your personal space while riding public transportation. Say hello to the Sensory Shield! [Huffington Post]
– a rising 3L I met at a recent summer associate event, commenting on his law school experience thus far. Prior to going to law school, he served in the United States Army in Afghanistan.
Last month, we solicited law school success stories from you, our readers. We’re often quitecritical of law schools around these parts. So, to even out the scales a bit, we’re going to be running a series of happy stories, focused on graduates who are glad they went to law school.
We’ve tried to organize the success stories under a few broad themes, to lend some structure to the discussion. Some of the themes exist in tension with each other, and not all themes will apply to all readers. By the time the series is done, however, we hope that the stories will collectively shed some light on the question of whether one should go to law school.
Let’s launch into our first collection of law school success stories. They could be grouped under the theme of “go cheap, or go home”….
* With 269 partners to go, Dewey need to start panicking yet? Twelve additional partners, including practice group leaders, have jumped ship, bringing the grand total of partner-level defectors to 31 since January. [DealBook / New York Times]
* Late-breaking news: law schools’ numbers still don’t add up. The New York Times has already said its piece on the problem with law schools, so the Wall Street Journal decided that it was time to chime in again. [Wall Street Journal]
* Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the man accused of going on an Afghan killing spree, will be represented by Ted Bundy’s lawyer. In the court of public opinion, that’s equivalent to pleading guilty. [Bloomberg]
* “I have had it with these motherf**king snakes breastfeeding women on this motherf**king plane!” A mother has settled a lawsuit with her airline over being kicked off a plane for nursing her child. [Businessweek]
* Here’s a fashion tip for law firm staff: you wear orange shirts in prison, not at the office. Think twice next time before you wear that color to work, because you might get fired like these folks in Florida. [Sun-Sentinel]
* Let’s face it, there is no escape from the law, not even in your free time (if that even exists). That being said, here’s a lawyerly crossword puzzle, inspired by Nina Totenberg’s reporting on legal affairs. Have fun! [NPR]
Is peeing on somebody’s dead body a war crime? What about peeing on their grave? What about an important monument? As I’ve spoken about before, one of my life’s goals is to pee in every river that was important to the Confederacy. If I relieve myself in the Chickamauga, can a true son of the Cumberland bring me up in front of a war crimes tribunal?
The video of those American Marines urinating on dead Afghan bodies is so disturbing that it somehow demands a legal response. Mitt Romney might never want to “apologize” for America, but maybe that’s just because he’s used to being able to metaphorically urinate on those hoping some of his wealth trickles down.
And yet — 1Ls, say it with me — “most of international law does not exist.” Aside from whatever punishment the United States Marine Corps wants to impose on these guys, there isn’t a whole lot the international community can do to punish them.
Unless we want to call urinating on somebody a “war crime.” But is punishing some jackasses worth diluting the term?
The former military intelligence analyst accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks has spent the last four days in a Maryland military court, undergoing a hearing to determine whether or not his case will proceed to court-martial.
For those new to the party, 24-year-old Bradley Manning is accused of committing the biggest security breach in American history. He has been in detainment for the last 19 months, and he faces a multitude of military charges.
The Article 32 hearings, which began on Friday, are something akin to grand jury proceedings in civilian court. At the end, Investigating Officer Colonel Paul Almanza, an Army Reserve officer and Justice Department prosecutor, will decide recommend whether Manning’s case will proceed to court-martial.
So far, the hearings have been interesting to say the least. Let’s see what’s going on….
* DLA Piper is blaming the Occupy Wall Street movement for Biglaw’s sad, 2011 bonus season. It looks like we can expect a Cravath match from that firm. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* This Senate victory for gay servicemembers came with unintended consequences. It’s now kosher to have sex with men, women, and everything else under military law. [Washington Post]
* Prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty against Stephen McDaniel. If being drawn and quartered were an option, maybe this medieval scholar wouldn’t mind so much. [Macon Telegraph]
* Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Although Ben Stein is the keynote speaker at this year’s ABA Techshow, legal tech nerds will likely be unable to win his money. [ABA Journal]
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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Earlier this week, President Barack Obama reiterated his interest in shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay: “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not in the best interests of the American people.”
