* GW Law professor John Banzhaf is calling upon the D.C. City Council to bar local broadcasters from using the term “Redskins.” Two decades after the real emergence of “political correctness,” the “Redskins” name has held out against that all-out assault almost as long as the actual Native American society did against Phil Sheridan. [Huffington Post]
* People are still talking about the Yahoo!/Tumblr deal, but the most important deal for the legal profession has slid under the radar. Seamless and GrubHub are merging to make all your “3 a.m. and still haven’t had dinner at the office” dreams come true. [Wall Street Journal]
* Vivia Chen of The Careerist got some flack for suggesting that women taking their husbands’ names was a regressive trend. In (tongue-in-cheek) fairness, here are the good reasons to take your husband’s name. Example: “When you’ve been indicted or convicted.” [The Careerist]
* U. Chicago Law scheduled finals during Memorial Day weekend… while Chicago is closing Lake Shore Drive and cutting back on public transit. UChiLawGo responds. [UChiLawGo]
* A gospel singer is suing McDonald’s because she lost her voice. Normally I’d make fun of this, but she sounds like she has a good argument. [The Inquisitr]
* A review of the legal issues surrounding the DOJ/AP scandal. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Elie explains why the racist, nasty comments we receive don’t faze us at all. [Paidcontent.org]
* Well this is a novel use of fundraising: Speculation that Tim Lambesis (who we covered yesterday) used crowdfunding for a new Austrian Death Machine Schwarzenegger tribute album as the down payment on a hitman to murder his wife. Maybe this new album was going to have a Total Recall theme? [Metal Sucks]
* Stephen Colbert sits down with Caplin & Drysdale’s Trevor Potter to discuss the fact that Colbert’s SuperPAC has never been approved by the IRS. Video after the jump…
Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
Last night, former President Bill Clinton joined Stephen Colbert on his TV show, The Colbert Report. As many people have noted, at the very end of the program, Colbert told Clinton that he had taken the liberty of signing him up for a Twitter account, since Clinton does not currently use Twitter (he joked that he was afraid no one would reply to his tweets). The Twitter account is @PrezBillyJeff, and Colbert sent Clinton’s first tweet live while on the air. If you’re in the US or the one or two other places that Hulu actually works, you can see the exchange below (if you’re elsewhere, blame Viacom for being stupid):
It’s hard out here for authors of judicial memoirs who are not named Sonia Sotomayor. Just ask Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.), a federal trial judge in Brooklyn since 1994 and the author of an appealing new book, Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge (affiliate link). In Disrobed, Judge Block describes his surprising rise from small-town Long Island lawyer to Article III aristocracy, where he has presided over cases involving the Crown Heights riots, Kitty Genovese, mob boss Peter Gotti, and other headline-making subjects.
The book has received several favorable notices. Writing in the New York Times, Sam Roberts described Disrobed as an “engaging” book that provides “a rare look behind decision-making on the federal bench.” Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield called the memoir a “well-written,” “easy and quick read,” by a “quite well-regarded” judge. I’ve read the book myself, and I concur with Roberts and Greenfield.
But even though the book has sold well, exceeding the expectations of its publisher, Thomson Reuters, Disrobed hasn’t attained the bestselling status of Justice Sotomayor’s My Beloved World (affiliate link). And this makes Judge Block a little sad, as he confessed to me when I recently visited him in chambers.
Especially because Judge Block came painfully close to what would have been a big, big break….
Well, a piece of me would want her to become a justice instead of a person on television….
– Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in response to Stephen Colbert’s question — “When you go to the Bronx and you see a young girl on a playground there, do you think, ‘That child has the same opportunities I had when I was a child’?” — posed during last night’s episode of the Colbert Report. Sotomayor seemed generally confused, but attempted to play it off as if she had just pulled one over on Colbert.
(Continue reading to see a clip of the interview in question.)
That's sexual harassment, but you probably want to take it.
* Listen up, internet pirates: if your license plate says “GUILTY,” it’s almost like you’re doing the DOJ’s job for them. More on this later. [Blog of Legal Times]
* Say cheese, because you’ll want to catch this first on camera. Sullivan & Cromwell is serving as lead counsel on Kodak’s bankruptcy case. [Am Law Daily]
* Protesting fail: looks like New York’s Occupy the Courts group won’t even be able to occupy the courthouse steps today. [Bloomberg]
* Stephen Colbert’s lawyer, Trevor Potter of Caplin & Drysdale, is now an internet celebrity. He’s a UVA Law grad, so pop your collars. [Chicago Tribune]
* Sexting extraordinaire Ken Kratz is fighting the suspension of his law license, because if he can’t practice as an “atty,” how can he be the prize? [Wisconsin State Journal]
* Apparently lots of DAs like to sexually harass their coworkers. Myrl Serra has been sentenced to one year for exposing himself at the office. [Denver Post]
* What’s funnier here? The fact that Stephen Colbert is running for “president of the United States of South Carolina,” or the fact that he’s already beating Jon Huntsman in the polls? [Washington Post]
* Notorious New Jersey defense attorney Paul Bergrin’s second racketeering trial has been postponed and may be delayed indefinitely, but he’s such a pimp that he doesn’t even care. [The Record]
* According to a new study, 80 percent of law students surveyed said they would attend law school again if they could start over. Hey, any way to escape a dead-end job market. [National Law Journal]
* Can you put a “White Only” sign outside of your apartment complex’s public pool? Nope, still illegal. That’s an antique that you might want to consider leaving up in the attic. [ABC News]
* Got fired because you love prostitutes and strippers? Don’t sue over your “hurt feelings,” because apparently all of the bros in the oil and gas industry love them, too. [The Snitch / SF Weekly]
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
After talking to so many happy small-firm lawyers, I have begun looking for my own niche to scratch. It came to me while driving in the suburbs a few weeks ago. There was a radio ad for an awesome night club (“18 to party and 21 to drink”) promoting ladies’ night and a wet t-shirt contest for the ladies until midnight.
As I got off the highway to head to the club, I realized that I had found my niche: ladies’ night is just for the ladies. What about man night? Where is the justice in the world? I should fight for all the men who are discriminated against by paying a cover charge on ladies’ night (well, except for those men who ultimately get preferential treatment from said ladies who enjoyed their free drinks).
Unfortunately for me, Roy Den Hollander took up this worthy cause before my fateful drive to the Boom Boom Room on Highway 12. Let’s learn more about him….
* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried by a military commission at Guantanamo, but John Yoo is still not satisfied. He wants to capture people and hold them indefinitely without trial proof that the Obama Administration can conduct terror trials successfully. Obviously, the elegant solution is to make KSM live in Yoo’s basement until one of them begs for an impartial arbiter. [Ricochet]
* If you ever read the warnings on your prescriptions, I think this is what you’ll see (by Jeremy Blachman). [McSweeney]
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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Ed. note: This post appears courtesy of our friends at Techdirt. We’ll be sharing law-related posts from Techdirt from time to time in these pages.
Non-Sequiturs: 05.21.13
By Joe Patrice* GW Law professor John Banzhaf is calling upon the D.C. City Council to bar local broadcasters from using the term “Redskins.” Two decades after the real emergence of “political correctness,” the “Redskins” name has held out against that all-out assault almost as long as the actual Native American society did against Phil Sheridan. [Huffington Post]
* People are still talking about the Yahoo!/Tumblr deal, but the most important deal for the legal profession has slid under the radar. Seamless and GrubHub are merging to make all your “3 a.m. and still haven’t had dinner at the office” dreams come true. [Wall Street Journal]
* Vivia Chen of The Careerist got some flack for suggesting that women taking their husbands’ names was a regressive trend. In (tongue-in-cheek) fairness, here are the good reasons to take your husband’s name. Example: “When you’ve been indicted or convicted.” [The Careerist]
* U. Chicago Law scheduled finals during Memorial Day weekend… while Chicago is closing Lake Shore Drive and cutting back on public transit. UChiLawGo responds. [UChiLawGo]
* A gospel singer is suing McDonald’s because she lost her voice. Normally I’d make fun of this, but she sounds like she has a good argument. [The Inquisitr]
* A review of the legal issues surrounding the DOJ/AP scandal. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Elie explains why the racist, nasty comments we receive don’t faze us at all. [Paidcontent.org]
* Well this is a novel use of fundraising: Speculation that Tim Lambesis (who we covered yesterday) used crowdfunding for a new Austrian Death Machine Schwarzenegger tribute album as the down payment on a hitman to murder his wife. Maybe this new album was going to have a Total Recall theme? [Metal Sucks]
* Stephen Colbert sits down with Caplin & Drysdale’s Trevor Potter to discuss the fact that Colbert’s SuperPAC has never been approved by the IRS. Video after the jump…
Tags: Associated Press, Austrian Death Machine, Caplin & Drysdale, Christian Metal, Colbert Report, Commenters, Department of Justice, DOJ, Eugene Volokh, Fast Food, George Washington University Law School, GrubHub, GW Law School, John Banzhaf, John F. Banzhaf, John F. Banzhaf III, Judge Wade McCree, Justice Department, McDonald's, Memorial Day, Michigan, Non-Sequiturs, Political Correctness, Professor John Banzhaf, Seamless, SeamlessWeb, Sex, Sex Scandals, Stephen Colbert, Super PAC, Taxes, Tim Lambesis, Trevor Potter, University of Chicago Law School, Vivia Chen, Wade McCree, Washington Redskins, Women's Issues