Rape

This is a bad look for the legal system.

* Keys to success: remove your ego from the battle. [Katz Justice] * Yeah, this answer was pretty perfect. [Slate] * Russia is full on trolling the United States over election 2016. [Salon] * "Trains racing at unsafe speeds with volatile, difficult-to-contain oil is incredibly dangerous." Indeed. [Occupy.com] * Update from the Rolling Stone defamation trial over the magazine's now-retracted story about sexual assault at University of Virginia. [Jezebel] * What will Jones Day (the Trump campaign's lawyers) do after the election? [Law and More] * Tips for writing the all important chronology of events. [Law Prose]

Ken Starr tries in vain to return his reputation back UP to "the guy who wasted money on a blowjob case."

* The New York Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995, revealing a nearly $916 million loss that would have enabled him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. Marc Kasowitz, name partner of Kasowitz Benson, represents Trump, and has threatened the paper with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” for its publication of his client’s tax records. [New York Times]

* George Mason University will host a grand opening ceremony this week for the twice renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law Antonin Scalia Law School — a ceremony that five SCOTUS justices will reportedly attend — and some students and faculty are planning to protest the Koch brothers’ funding of scholarships by wearing red tape over their mouths to symbolize their voices being taken from them. [Big Law Business]

* Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is suspected of connecting Florida State University law professor Dan Markel’s alleged killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, with the family of Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, has been arrested on murder charges. According to police, she has “received numerous benefits from the Adelsons since Markel’s murder.” We’ll have more on this later today. [Tallahassee Democrat]

* According to Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, Orlando-based firm Butler & Hosch violated the WARN Act when it closed suddenly in May 2015 and conducted mass layoffs of more than 700 employees without giving them 60 days of advance notice. The firm, which is bankruptcy, could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. We may have more on this later today. [Orlando Sentinel]

* Following the embarrassment that was former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s light sentence in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman at his school, California Gov. Jerry Brown has broadened the state’s legal definition of rape to include penetration with a foreign object, mandate prison time if the victim was unconscious at the time of the assault, and forbid judges from granting probation or parole in such cases. [Reuters]

* “Frankly, USD has been a bit behind in that, in part, up until 2014, we had no problem with the bar exam. When you’re hitting in the high 80s or 90s, you don’t worry about much.” Unofficial results from the South Dakota bar exam are out, and after years of declines in passage rates for graduates of South Dakota Law, administrators are ready to take action now that only about 50 percent of graduates passed the test. [Argus Leader]

* “I was empty and then this woman walked into my life. I didn’t think it would happen again and it did. She is it.” LGBT rights pioneer Edie Windsor, the plaintiff whose Supreme Court case rendered DOMA unconstitutional in 2013 and laid the groundwork for the high court to declare that marriage equality was a fundamental right just two years later, remarried in New York last week. Our very best wishes! [New York Times]

* Game theory and the battle over the Supreme Court. [Harvard Business Review]

* No punishment for Professor Reynolds from the University of Tennessee Law School over questionable Tweets. [Knoxville News Sentinel]

* The blame game over Donald Trump’s bad debate performance. [Law and More]

* Check out this event with Gillian Thomas, attorney at ACLU Women’s Rights Project and author of Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work. [Rewire]

* A look at close cases at the Supreme Court. [Empirical SCOTUS]

* This is horrifying. [Slate]

This didn't happen overnight.

It's going to be a long, embarrassing decline.

* “We believe the magistrate judge’s decision that Brendan Dassey’s confession was coerced by investigators, and that no reasonable court could have concluded otherwise, is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law.” Prosecutors in Wisconsin have appealed the overturned conviction of “Making a Murderer” subject Brendan Dassey. He’ll remain in prison pending the outcome of the appeal. [New York Times]

* A Canadian judge is facing possible removal from the bench after asking this question to the accuser in a rape trial: “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?” The judge also made other inappropriate remarks during the trial, and blames it on his failure to understand changes to the country’s sexual-assault laws. [ABC News]

* Desperate times sometimes call for really desperate measures? California-based Prism Patents is cutting its executives’ compensation by two-thirds in an attempt to come up with some cash. Its general counsel’s salary fell from $240,000 to $90,000, and the company’s CEO now makes $12 (not a typo), down from $300,000. [Big Law Business]

* The battle between Houston Law School and the Houston College of Law (formerly South Texas Law) rages on, and now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is involved. Thanks to a complaint lodged by U. Houston, the USPTO has suspended Houston College’s trademark application for its new name. [Houston Chronicle via TaxProf Blog]

* It doesn’t matter if Romy and Michelle invented Post-It Notes or if serial inventor Alan Amron did, because your lawsuit against 3M is likely to be dismissed — especially if you’ve already settled a prior $400 million suit over the product’s inventorship for $12,000 and released the company from all of your future claims. [CBS Minnesota]

* The ABA is finally cracking down on law school accreditation… and ham-fistedly came down on the wrong school. [Big Law Business]

* The EU Playboy verdict could undermine the online press. [Engadget]

* Today, on the anniversary of the Attica uprising, prisoners across several states planned a mass work stoppage to protest systemic injustices. How does something like this come together? [Wired]

* Meanwhile, across the pond, the Supreme Court is selling off art made by prisoners for £30-£500 a pop. [Legal Cheek]

* We need more judges like this. [Katz Justice]

* A chat with activist Amanda Nguyen on the occasion of President Obama’s expected signing of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. [NPR]

* The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline is generating as much buzz as anything can over the cacophony of the election and football, but is there a legal case to be made for putting a stop to the project? [The Atlantic]

* Forget about the Prime Directive, why doesn’t Star Fleet have a duty to warn about some of the crazy stuff they run across? [The Legal Geeks]

* Speaking of Star Trek, the National Marine Fisheries Service just delisted nine humpback whale populations from the endangered species list. Thanks, Admiral Kirk! [Courthouse News Service]

These allegations are now the subject of a $25 million civil suit against the ex-judge.

* Dentons asks its European partners to kick in more money. Is this no big deal or something they should be verein worried about? (Ugh.) [Legal Week]

* Melania Trump is suing the Daily Mail over escort stories. [Law360]

* Judge Rakoff sides with Beyoncé in “Lemonade” suit. He stated the result and added that “a memorandum explaining the reasons for this ruling will issue in due course, at which time final judgment will be entered.” All the greats build hype before their next opinion drops. [Hollywood Reporter]

* After Brock Turner, California passed a new rape law… and it could backfire badly. [Rolling Stone]

* USC linebacker accused of raping a woman twice and sending pictures of it to her ex. [Deadspin]

* “So you want to sue your firm.” [Law.com]

* For your long weekend, here’s a deep dive into the tale of the pair of lawyers who lost a massive civil suit over framing a PTA rival. [LA Times]

* Suicide bombing kills 12 at Pakistani courthouse. [BBC]

Fare thee well, Judge Starr!

* Does the future of transgender rights go through the Supreme Court? [Constitution Daily]

* There’s been a lot of chatter about it, but what do the rules say about the scenario of Donald Trump dropping out of the presidential race? [WSJ Law Blog]

* The Olympics is great fun for nationalism, but there is a dark side behind it, as Professor Ilya Somin explains. Here is one idea to do away with that. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* The latest on what went on behind closed doors at Fox during Roger Ailes’s reign. [Law and More]

* In-house lawyer Suleen Lee, general counsel to The Barre Code, gives new meaning to “character and fitness.” [Chicago Lawyer]

* Law professors in defense of the working legal standard in campus rape cases. [Huffington Post]

* Shearman & Sterling partner Richard Hsu interviews leading legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin, author of the new book American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (affiliate link). [Hsu Untied]

* And Randy Maniloff of Coverage Opinions interviews legendary law professor Arthur Miller. [Law.com]

* Congrats to Orrick’s D.C. associates on more than doubling their contribution to Legal Aid’s Generous Associates Campaign this year! [Orrick]

* Which law firms fared the best in front of the Supreme Court this Term? [Empirical SCOTUS]

* Charles Fried, Solicitor General under Ronald Reagan, really, really doesn’t like Donald Trump. [Slate]

* Even David Boies couldn’t stop the shipwreck of the S.S. Theranos. [Law and More]

* Here’s what you need to know about the “bomb robot” used to take out the Dallas shooting suspect. [Buzzfeed]

* Union busters seem to be getting some help from the judiciary. [Lawyers, Guns and Money]

* Title IX has been a failure on campus rape. Here’s why. [Deadspin]

The severity of Brock Turner's sentence depends on just how much you take into account.

Judges should not be stripped of sentencing discretion or recalled because of one sentence out of whack with what many view is fair.

* Justice Thomas calls a woman a "venireman." First of all, say what you will about PC language policing of generic terms, but when "juror" is available, you consciously chose to be a sexist. Plus, the proper term is veniretrix. [Clear Writing] * The pay raises on this of the Atlantic are helping our legal brethren on the other side too. [Legal Cheek] * Best. Press release. Ever. Nicely played, Nancy Pelosi. [Wonkette] * These are the law firms that GCs actually recommend to their friends. [Law360] * Read Joe Biden's moving letter to the survivor of the Stanford rape. [Buzzfeed]

A former sex-crimes prosecutor shares her views on the case of Brock Turner, the former Stanford student convicted of rape.

Criminal defense lawyers should keep the power of social media in the back of their mind.

How can a lawyer screw something up this badly?