Many of you have been following the story of Austin Tice, a current Georgetown law student. Tice, a freelance journalist and former Marine, made headlines back in August, when he went missing in war-torn Syria.
Today we bring you news, both good and bad, about Austin Tice….
* Dear Mr. President: are you in favor of civil rights for gay people or not? Let me put it another way: do you think that you should be allowed to marry the fence that has been banging you for the last four years? [Huffington Post]
* Here are the 15 law schools whose underemployment numbers are higher than their employment numbers. No lie, I was able to name eight of the 15 off the top of my head. [Tax Prof Blog]
* Would you wear a hijab while defending the accused 9/11 terrorists? What am I talking about, unemployed lawyers running around out here would wear a clown suit and mount a goat if they thought it would help them get a client. [Simple Justice]
* Senate Republicans blocked a bill to freeze student loan interest rates. Obviously, students in debt aren’t rich enough to merit help from Senate Republicans. [New York Times]
* What do you do if your neighbors smoke pot and your wife is trying to get pregnant? Well, marijuana makes sperm just as lazy as everything else, but if you are honestly living in a building where you get a “contact high” in the hallway, you should move out and let some awesome people move in. [New York Daily News]
So let’s discuss what everyone else is discussing: the “Zombie Mohammed” case. Earlier this month, Judge Mark W. Martin dismissed a harassment charge against Talaag Elbayomy, a Muslim man who allegedly attacked Ernie Perce, an atheist who was dressed up as “Zombie Muhammad.” The incident took place during last year’s Halloween parade in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Since news of the ruling became public, things have gone crazy. Let’s discuss, and take an opinion poll….
* Remember Phillip Closius, the former dean of University of Baltimore Law, who said the university was raiding the law school’s funds? Yeah, he was totally right. Just guess what percent of the law school budget was going to the rest of the university. Starts with “A” and rhymes with “dot.” [National Law Journal]
* The humanity! Oklahoma’s worst fears have come true; American judges are enforcing Sharia Law! Whatever are we going to do? There is no solution in sight — except to maybe stop overreacting… [CNN]
* Mitt Bot won in both Arizona and Michigan last night. Can we send Santorum back to the 16th century yet? [Washington Post]
* Twenty-five suspected members of Anonymous were arrested across Europe and South America. They ain’t anonymous anymore. [New York Times]
* In other cyberlaw news, Google’s new privacy policy not only stinks, it probably violates European Union law. Hey Google, don’t be evil! [New York Times]
* “It seems no one can use dirty words, except Steven Spielberg.” Well, sh*t, I’ll be damned. Is Elena Kagan going to be the voice of reason in the Supreme Court’s FCC profanity case? [Los Angeles Times]
* Ken Cuccinelli filed an emergency motion to get Virginia’s primary ballots printed. You can’t wait three days for Perry’s hearing? It’s on Friday the 13th. You know how that’s going to go. [Bloomberg]
* The Tenth Circuit upheld a ruling to block an Oklahoma law barring the consideration of Sharia law in court decisions. If this pisses you off, go and watch Homeland. You’ll feel better. [MSNBC]
* What will an LL.M. get you in today’s job market? Not a whole lot. And if you’re counting that extra year of loan debt as something of value, then you’re just a masochist. [National Law Journal]
* Heather Peters, the former lawyer suing Honda in small claims court, may be SOL because of a SOL issue. Stay tuned for the results at her second hearing later this month. [Huffington Post]
Just because Nonie Darwish is controversial doesn't mean she shouldn't be allowed to speak.
It appears that some people have forgotten that they are free to not attend events sponsored by the Federalist Society.
There is a controversy bubbling at George Mason University School of Law because the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society has invited Nonie Darwish to speak at an event. Darwish has been described as a “notorious Islamophobe” who argues that Islam should be “annihilated.” Some people on campus, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have asked the law school to disinvite Darwish.
Come on, people. We live in a world where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets to speak at the U.N. (to say nothing of Columbia University). Ahmadinejad has been described (by me) as a “notorious a**hole” who argues that the Holocaust “didn’t happen.”
The world is just going to be a lot easier to navigate if the Federalist Society can invite whom they want and the American Constitution Society can invite whom they want…
* The oldest continually operating law firm in Austin, Clark Thomas & Winters, has gone the way of Howrey. [Austin American Statesman]
* If you want to teach high schoolers about privacy, speak to them in a language they understand: embarrassment. [Kashmir Hill / Forbes]
* Can a U.S. state prohibit pre-viability abortions based on concerns about fetal pain? Professors Glenn Cohen and Sadath Sayeed, of Harvard Law and Harvard Medical Schools, respectively, tackle this question. [SSRN]
* Will Maryland be getting medical marijuana? [Underdog]
* Here’s an interesting essay by a former supporter of traditional marriage who now supports marriage equality. [Two Cents and a Couple of Copecks]
* Is Douglas Kmiec, the former Catholic University law school dean now serving as U.S. ambassador to Malta, spending too much time writing about religion and not enough time “ambassading”? [CNN]
* Speaking of religion, Professor Ann Althouse analyzes the new French law targeting the wearing of veils in public. [Althouse]
* If you’re interested in the legal academic job market, check out this table of entry-level faculty hiring for 2011. [Prawfsblawg via Faculty Lounge]
* He might be a “litigious little man,” but I still dig Prince. Patterson Belknap just wants his billable time and his [insert guitar riff here] kiss. [New York Daily News]
* Star Magazine says that Katie Holmes is a drug addict. Which drug? Scientology. She might win the libel lawsuit, but her ultimate judge will be Xenu. [Reuters]
* A judge in Illinois won’t let a defendant who looks like the Crazy Cat Lady from the Simpsons get her hair done or wear makeup at trial. [Chicago Sun-Times]
* A judge in New York, on the other hand, will give a defendant the tie off his neck and the Brooks Brothers shirt off his back just so he can look stylish in court. [New York Post]
* Just because your kid went to the prom with a Muslim doesn’t mean that you’re down with Islam — especially not when you want to make it a felony to follow Shariah law. [Washington Post]
* Christina Aguilera got arrested for being drunk in public. Someone needs to put that genie back in her bottle before she heads the way of other infamous Mouseketeers. [ABC News]
* How desperate do you have to be to molest your kid in exchange for a date? How stupid do you have to be to think child porn therapy is real? The answer to both questions is VERY. [Detroit Free Press]
* The SEC has accused Goldman Sachs’s ex-director of insider trading. The next insider trading he’ll probably be doing is for cigarettes in the pokey. [Wall Street Journal]
Truck driver Vasant Reddy is not living the high life. Reddy, a Muslim, refused to transport a shipment of Miller Lite as part of his duties. He claims he was forced to resign because of adherence to his religious beliefs.
Normally refusing to deliver something would seem to be a pretty big problem if your job is to deliver things. But that’s why we have Title VII. As a religious objector, Reddy should still be able to work at his job, provided that he sincerely holds this religious objection and that making an exception doesn’t impose an undue hardship on Reddy’s employers.
Is delivering beer an essential function of being a truck driver? Let’s get into it (dear Muslim friends, you’ll probably want to skip the comments on this post)…
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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;
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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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