If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
– Justice Antonin Scalia, in an appearance yesterday at Princeton to promote Reading Law (affiliate link), responding to a gay student who asked the justice why he draws parallels between laws against sodomy and laws against bestiality and murder.
(So, is homosexuality the new killing it? Read more, after the jump.)
The Defense of Marriage Act. California’s Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. These were two of the big issues that the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear this Term.
The Court just issued its certiorari orders. What happened?
Right now is a great time to be a Supreme Court aficionado. There’s a big new book out about the Court, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Oath (affiliate link). And the new SCOTUS Term starts in just a few days, on Monday, October 1.
Given the time of the year, it’s not surprising that SCOTUS preview events are as common as Ninth Circuit reversals pro se cert petitions. I attended one sponsored by the Federalist Society earlier this month, where Kannon Shanmugam of Williams & Connolly offered excellent insights into October Term 2012. Our Supreme Court correspondent here at Above the Law, Matt Kaiser, went to a preview talk sponsored by the American Constitution Society (which he turned into Kaiser’s Guide To Bluffing Your Way Through Knowledge About The Supreme Court’s New Term).
That sounds like more than enough SCOTUS previews. But I couldn’t help myself from attending one more, due to the starpower of the panelists: Paul Clement, the former solicitor general who’s now a partner at Bancroft, and Tom Goldstein, the noted Supreme Court advocate and founder of the invaluable SCOTUSblog.
What did Messrs. Clement and Goldstein have to say about OT 2012?
* Will the members of the Supreme Court announce which gay marriage issues they’ll be hearing this term any time soon? With Proposition 8 appeal and several DOMA appeals on hand, there’s certainly a lot for them to choose from. [CNN]
* It’s beginning to look a lot like Biglaw, everywhere you go: lawyers are miserable, clients are unhappy, and apparently profits per partner are all to blame. Gee, thanks for those rankings, Am Law, they were really helpful. [DealBook / New York Times]
* Instead of arguing over font size, the Department of Justice argued law yesterday during closing arguments in its attempts to convince a three-judge panel to strike down South Carolina’s voter ID statute. [National Law Journal]
* Unlike Elizabeth Warren, he’s no “Fauxcahontas”: Kevin Washburn, the dean of the University of New Mexico Law School, has been confirmed by the Senate to oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs. [Washington Post]
* If you’re going to allegedly slash someone’s face in an attempt to defend your honor, at least do it with class like this Columbia Law grad, and use a broken champagne flute as your weapon of choice. [New York Post]
* You can kiss your dreams of seeing Prop 8 being taken up by the Supreme Court goodbye if the justices decide to proceed with “more cautious DOMA challenges.” [Slate]
* Well, at least one person is getting annoyed by the endless back and forth between Posner and Scalia. But that’s just one person. We’ll continue to beat that horse until it’s extra dead. [Althouse]
* Is this like the new WebMD, but for law? With prompts like, “Can that crazy neighbor buy a gun?,” it looks like a suitable place for legal hypochondriacs to call home. [myRight]
* Oh yay, I don’t like to get into election law and politics, so it’s a good thing that The Simpsons did all my work for me on this one: “Stopping all Americans from voting is for the protection of all Americans.” [PrawfsBlawg]
* Kat over at Corporette wants to know what your top five tailoring alterations are — because after all, it’s pretty hard to dress for success in Biglaw if your pants are dragging on the floor. [Corporette]
* You’d have to be super-dee-duper high to think that disguising your pot plants as Christmas trees in the middle of the desert to throw the police off your tracks would actually work. [Legally Weird / FindLaw]
October first is the start of the new Supreme Court term!
If, like many readers, you’re a few years out of law school, this may strike you with a mild sense of dread. You remember the heady days of law school when you followed every argument, opinion, and cert grant from One First Street Northeast with an excitement rivaled only by your enthusiasm for the starting salaries for first-year associates.
Alas, the years since law school haven’t been kind to your pants size or your level of engagement with the Supreme Court.
Now, I suspect, you worry that soon — at a family dinner, dropping off your kids at preschool, or anywhere else you interact with non-lawyers — someone will recognize that you are a lawyer, and ask you what to make of the new Supreme Court term.
You have three options for how to deal with this, now, before the media frenzy over the new Supreme Court term starts.
First, you can admit to yourself that you’re no longer the gunner you used to be. You can tell people that just don’t follow the Supreme Court anymore, since you’ve gotten really interested in your exciting new life doing document review for a municipal bond arbitration.
But you’re not going to do that. If you were that good at being honest with yourself, you aren’t likely to be the kind of person who went to law school in the first place.
Second, perhaps, you can wade through the volume of information out there about the new term. Go through SCOTUSblog with the same passion you now spend tracking whether your friends from law school have better careers than you do. Maybe go to one of the OT 2012 preview events that clog every convention hall and small town library starting in mid-September.
That takes time and energy. Tom Goldstein sometimes uses really long paragraphs, and you really wanted to spend more time Googling for topless pictures of Kate Middleton.
Instead, you could let me to one of those events for you. For the truly efficient, follow the jump, sit back, and enjoy Kaiser’s Guide To Bluffing Your Way Through Knowledge About the Supreme Court’s New Term to Non-Lawyers….
The issue of gay marriage can be divisive, but the book has in many ways been uniting. In addition to bringing together Corvino and Gallagher — who have done numerous joint events to promote the book, despite their very divergent views — even the book’s blurbs have made for strange bedfellows. In the words of Dan Savage, author of the Savage Love sex advice column, Debating Same-Sex Marriage “is the first and, without a doubt, the last book in the whole sordid history of books that will be blurbed by both me and Rick Santorum.”
Over the weekend, I interviewed Corvino about the issues discussed in the book, with a focus on legal issues relating to same sex-marriage….
* Chief Justice John Roberts, in his capacity as circuit justice for the Fourth Circuit, has given the green light — for the time being — to Maryland’s continued collection of DNA samples from people charged with violent felonies. [New York Times]
* Professor Dan Markel isn’t a fan of the practice, arguing that it “is yet another abuse of the presumption of innocence.” [PrawfsBlawg]
* And in other gay marriage news, yet another federal judge — Judge Vanessa Bryant (D. Conn.), a Bush II appointee — has struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. [Chris Geidner / BuzzFeed]
* The mother of a man who died during a police chase has sued the SFPD over her son’s accidentally shooting himself. Opines SFist: “It remains unclear to us why [Kenneth] Harding has been chosen to serve as a martyr, given his not-so-stellar record and the self-inflicted wound.” [SFist]
* Poor Professor Campos — does his self-loathing know no bounds? The prominent law professor, one of legal academia’s harshest (and most eloquent) critics, has now turned his powerful fire on baby boomers — of whom he is one. [Salon]
* The Ninth Circuit denies en banc rehearing in the Prop 8 case. Can we please hurry up and get this thing in front of the Supreme Court already? [Ninth Circuit via Metro Weekly]
* AOL’s attorneys at DLA Piper sent a nastygram to a Maryland blogger, alleging intellectual property infringement, based on the blog’s aggregation. Because you know, AOL/the Huffington Post has never aggregated anything. [Maryland Juice]
Laura Flippin
* Speaking of DLA Piper lawyers, just before she was found guilty of public intoxication, partner Laura Flippin was also accused of lying under oath by the judge in the case. In short, things did not go as well they could have. [The Flat Hat]
* Remember the law school martyr Phillip J. Closius? He may no longer be Dean of University of Baltimore Law, but he has not finished his crusade to improve the financial security of students. Keep fightin’ the good fight, Phil. [Baltimore Sun]
* Congratulations to the 15 firms that made the NLJ’s 2012 Appellate Hot List. Most are Biglaw shops, but three elite boutiques made the cut: Bancroft, Horvitz & Levy, and Kellogg Huber. [National Law Journal]
* Ever wondered what life in prison is like? Check out this podcast, in which Jeffrey Deskovic, who served 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, is interviewed by Professor Zachary Shemtob (disclosure: Shemtob is Lat’s co-author and special friend). [Cruel and Unusual: A Podcast on Punishment]
* Dewey know the firms that have been tapped to represent the groups that this failed firm owes money to? Yes, we do! Brown Rudnick for the unsecured creditors’ committee, and Kasowitz Benson for the former D&L partners. [Am Law Daily (sub. req.)]
* The Ninth Circuit is supposed to be issuing an order today regarding an en banc reconsideration request on the Prop 8 case. They really ought to slap a big fat denial on that motherf’er and call it a day so we get some SCOTUS action. [Poliglot / Metro Weekly]
* Matthew Kluger, most recently of Wilson Sonsini, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison, which is the longest sentence that anyone’s ever received in an insider trading case. Uh yeah, he’ll be appealing. [Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)]
* Hughes Hubbard & Reed has billed more than $17M in the first four months of its work on MF Global’s unwinding. Will the firm will be handing out spring“special” bonuses like they did last year? [Reuters]
* Mattel is appealing MGA’s $310M copyright award, claiming that the judgment was based on “erroneous billing invoices.” Don’t you call my billable hours into question, Kathleen Sullivan. [National Law Journal]
* Jerry Sandusky’s accusers will be named in court thanks to this judge’s ruling. But don’t worry — there’s no tweeting, texting, or emailing allowed in his courtroom. Like that’ll make a difference. [Legal Intelligencer]
* Trust me, I’m a lawyer: a now-disbarred Colorado attorney managed to scam a convicted con artist out of more than $1 million. Now that’s some pretty sweet karmic intervention for you. [Missouri Lawyers Media]
* A bus driver is suing a hospital because he claims that instead of treating his painful erection, the staff watched a baseball game on TV. Whatever, that was a really great Yankees game. [Associated Press]
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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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If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
