Student Loans

* Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks that the people of Alabama should choose Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a write-in candidate to replace alleged pederast Roy Moore on the ballot for his former seat, but the AG has no desire to return to the Senate. [NPR]

* The Ninth Circuit has temporarily allowed part of Travel Ban 3.0 to proceed. While that means issuances of visas to citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen will be restricted, there’s a catch. Applicants with concrete ties to the country will be exempt. [POLITICO]

* Wisconsin is so desperate to get lawyers to help indigent criminal defendants in rural areas that lawmakers have introduced new legislation that calls for the state to fund law school loan payments of up to $20,000 a year in exchange for the representation of these clients in need. [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]

* Newsflash: In-house legal departments are planning to spend more on outside counsel in 2018. This is the first time this will have happened in more than a decade. Hopefully Biglaw’s fee hikes don’t come back to bite them. [Corporate Counsel]

* After a two-month national postal survey, Australians have voted “overwhelmingly” in favor of same-sex marriage. Now it’s up to the country’s government to work out the details of the bill that will bring marriage equality down under. Congrats! [CNN]

* Former President Barack Obama has been called for jury duty in November, and unlike most Americans, he’s not looking for a way to get out of serving. [ABC Chicago]

* The pivot you’re looking for is in another castle: Now that a grand jury’s approved the first charges in the Russian collusion investigation and someone’s about to be taken into custody, President Trump took to Twitter to demand that Hillary Clinton be investigated. [New York Times]

* Paul Manafort is turning himself in. Surprise! (Is this really a surprise?) [CNN]

* Like it or not, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is planning to be around for the long haul. Don’t count on this “flaming feminist litigator” retiring any time soon. [The Hill]

* Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court, the state’s Tweeter Laureate, hasn’t tweeted a single time since he was nominated to the Fifth Circuit. How long will this god-awful silence from everyone’s favorite Twitter judge last? [Texas Lawyer]

* So long, borrower-defense rule? Betsy DeVos is thinking about only partially forgiving loans for students who were defrauded by for-profit schools. [AP]

* Fresh off his six-month stint as White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus will be returning to Am Law 200 firm Michael Best and Friedrich, where he’ll serve as president and chief strategist. He’ll lead the firm’s government affairs practice group, and he plans to help clients with their Trump problems. Best of luck, those clients might need it. [POLITICO]

* Sorry, consumers, but the Senate had to call in VP Mike Pence in the middle of the night to kill the the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule banning mandatory arbitration clauses in credit card and checking account agreements. Damn all those “frivolous lawsuits by special interest trial lawyers”! [The Two-Way / NPR]

* Author John Grisham was inspired to write his latest novel, The Rooster Bar (affiliate link), after reading an article in The Atlantic by Paul Campos about for-profit law schools and the student loan crisis. Well, at least someone is going to make some money after learning about a for-profit law school. [CBS News]

* Biglaw firms are trying to reduce the amount of their leased square footage. According to the CBRE Group, on average between the first quarter of 2016 and the second quarter of 2017, firms in 26 markets were able to shrink their office space by about 27 percent. But did their headcount shrink along with it? [Wall Street Journal]

* Major lateral hire alert: Paul Basta left Kirkland & Ellis this summer, and now he’s landed at Paul Weiss, where he’ll be working as the co-chair of the firm’s corporate restructuring practice. Alan Kornberg, the practice group’s current chair, called Basta’s arrival at the firm “sort of a dream come true in a way.” [Big Law Business]

* According to a study conducted by Professor Carlos Berdejó of Loyola Law School, prosecutors tend to give white defendants better plea deals than black defendants. We needed a study to confirm that some prosecutors discriminate based on race? [Slate]