Dear God, please allow the IRS to attack my church, so I can take them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
– Iowa pastor Cary K. Gordon, who is campaigning against three Iowa Supreme Court justices who voted for same-sex marriage, even though tax-exempt churches are prohibited from campaigning for or against specific political candidates.
Man, have things changed in Mississippi. Mississippi used to be a hotbed for rebellion against the Union, and now it’s putting lawyers in jail for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. That’s progress, baby! (Sorry, I just wanted to see what it would look like to write a paragraph portraying Mississippi as progressive about anything.)
Mississippi lawyer Danny Lampley was found in contempt of court and jailed for refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court. According to multiple reports, Lampley stood for the pledge and was “respectful,” but did not recite the words. Chancellor Talmadge Littlejohn (what a name!) then specifically asked Lampley to recite the pledge, and when he refused, he was held in contempt.
An Oxford, Mississippi lawyer who once hired Lampley covered the story on his blog…
Continue reading “Mississippi Lawyer Jailed — For Not Reciting Pledge of Allegiance”
If you spend any time around criminal defense lawyers, progressive lawyers, or people in a black barber shop, you’ll hear the claim that African-American criminal defendants receive harsher sentences than their white counterparts. People have done studies about this, people have written reports about this, people have held conferences about this institutional expression of discrimination.
Rarely do we see anybody trying to do anything about it. There are many reasons this fundamental unfairness persists, but only one of those reasons makes any sense: at the end of the day, nobody wants to be more lenient on a convicted criminal just because that criminal is black. And nobody wants to be more harsh towards a white criminal just because he’s white. So while we have these wide variations in sentencing outcomes, judges can’t re-balance the system from the bench. They have to sentence the criminal in front of them.
But that doesn’t mean judges are blind to the racial injustice of the system. And it doesn’t mean that judges can’t do what they have to in order to make sure that a particular punishment fits the crime.
I’m sure that Judge Joseph Williams of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, will be making all of those arguments shortly. Because he just threw out a plea on the grounds that the prosecutor had been too lenient on the young criminal, just because the criminal is white.
And to be clear, this wasn’t a passing or offhand remark from Judge Williams. Instead, he really laid into the prosecutor in this case…
Continue reading “Judge Rejects Plea Deal as Something ‘That Only Goes to White Boys’”
This is the most bizarre story we’ve seen in quite some time. And we always appreciate the opportunity to use our State Judges Are Clowns tag. (Federal all the way, baby.)
So, Isaac H. Stoltzfus is a judge from Intercourse — yes, Intercourse — Pennsylvania. As for the rest of the story….
Eh, res ipsa loquitur. Just click on the link below.
Judge from Intercourse, Pa., gives women condom-stuffed acorns
[Associated Press via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
Do public officials in Michigan need to jump in the lake? Last week, we covered an assistant attorney general in the Wolverine State who is on the hunt for a gay student at the University of Michigan. Today we bring you news of a misbehaving judge.
According to court records, Judge James M. Justin, a state district judge in Jackson County, dismissed nine traffic cases against himself and his wife. The Jackson Citizen Patriot reports that the judge fixed four illegal-parking tickets that he received from 2002 to 2004. He also dismissed five traffic tickets received by his wife, Kim R. Justin, over a ten-year span. Who says chivalry is dead?
Judge Justin’s tickets were, amusingly enough, “dismissed after explanation” — to himself. Presumably Judge Justin found his explanations very convincing.
So what does His Honor have to say about all this?
Continue reading “Judge of the Day: ‘I find myself… not guilty!’”
The Democratic primary for the new New York Attorney General is on Tuesday. Earlier this week, I broke down the candidates and liveblogged the debate between the five Democratics that want to follow in the footsteps of Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with the frontrunner, Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice. But I’ve got nothing on retired Brooklyn criminal judge, Amy Herz Juviler. Judge Juviler is definitely not going to vote for Rice. And she doesn’t want her friends to vote for her either. Freed from the bench, she’s been emailing her friends encouraging them to avoid Rice like the plague.
In the email, Judge Juviler gets right to the point:
Friends —
In considering who to vote for in the Democratic Primary, eliminate from your consideration Kathleen Rice.
Bang! Politico has the full email, let’s take a look…
Continue reading “Retired Brooklyn Judge Blasts NYAG Candidate Via Email”
Liveblogging of this interesting panel about judicial nominations at the National LGBT Bar Association’s Annual Lavender Law Career Fair and Conference, after the jump.
Continue reading “Understanding Federal Judicial Nominations”
Back in June, we bestowed Lawyer of the Day honors upon two of the nation’s top litigators: Ted Wells and Martin Flumenbaum, the co-chair and former chair, respectively, of the renowned litigation department at Paul Weiss. Given the sterling reputations of the two lawyers and their firm, it was a surprising development.
We recognized Messrs. Wells and Flumenbaum after a New Jersey judge sanctioned Paul Weiss and its co-counsel — Lowenstein Sandler, one of the Garden State’s leading law firms, and Wells’s former home (before he jumped across the Hudson) — for pursuing a “frivolous” and “ridiculous” legal claim on behalf of billionaire Ronald Perelman against his ex-father-in-law, Robert Cohen.
In June, Judge Ellen Koblitz ordered Paul Weiss and Lowenstein Sandler to pay Cohen’s fees and costs for opposing the claim; she scheduled a hearing to determine the amount. The hearing took place last month, and now we know the amount.
It’s nothing to sneeze at, even for firms as well-heeled as Paul Weiss and Lowenstein. And to add insult to (financial) injury, Judge Koblitz got super-snarky in the opinion setting forth her reasoning….
Continue reading “A Jersey Judge Benchslaps Paul Weiss and Lowenstein Sandler — Hard”
If you’ve ever tried to write a lead paragraph for a story, you’ll know that the New York Daily News staff writers deserve drinks on the house for this impressive opening:
A cleavage-crazed criminal court judge — who fathered a son with a young Legal Aid lawyer — quit after officials found a massive porn stash on his work computer, sources said Thursday.
Bang. Erato herself couldn’t have been more titillating. So I’m assuming you’re going to want some details about Judge Jerks-A-Lot…
Continue reading “‘Cleavage-Crazed’ Judge Resigns After Porn Found on His Work Computer”
John Mantooth
Meet John Mantooth. The University of Oklahoma Law School grad and former JAG is running for a district judgeship in Oklahoma.
Now meet John Mantooth’s daughter and son-in-law, Jan and Andrew Schill, creators of a website called Do Not Vote for my Dad. On July 20, Jan Schill wrote:
District 21 judicial candidate John Mantooth is not a good father, not a good grandfather and in my opinion a review of his 37 year record as an attorney in Cleveland, Garvin and McClain Counties reveals that he would not be a good judge.
The Schills are shrill; in their next post, Andrew Schill — another Okie Law grad who worked in Mantooth’s office for a year — lambastes his father-in-law for giving them a crappy Christmas basket, including worm-ridden chocolates…
Continue reading “Daddy Issues Now on the Platform in a Judicial Race in Oklahoma”
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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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