Personally, I think it would be more dangerous for Teresa Wagner to get drunk and file a lawsuit than it is for her to do what she’s charged with doing a couple of days ago.
Wagner has sued Iowa Law School for First and Fourteenth Amendment violations. We’ve talked about her because she argues that Iowa Law didn’t hire her as a faculty member because of her conservative views.
Iowa Law claims that she wasn’t hired because she wasn’t qualified.
Iowa City Police allege that she wasn’t very conservative when it came to drinking and then driving a few blocks from her home….
* Six Supreme Court justices attended last night’s State of the Union address, and although it was all hugs and kisses and handshakes to start off with, some looked as if they were due for naptime by its end (coughRBGcough). [Blog of Legal Times]
* It’s a clash of the Biglaw titans! In a face off between legal heavyweights, the Second Circuit has set aside time to hear arguments from Ted Olson and David Boies in the Argentine bondholder case. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Dewey know if this document specialist’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act lawsuit has got any legs to it? It certainly must, because Judge Martin Glenn very recently denied the failed firm’s motion to dismiss it. [Am Law Daily]
* Congratulations to Paulette Brown of Edwards Wildman Palmer. This Jersey girl is the uncontested nominee for ABA president in 2015, making her the first minority woman to hold the title. [New Jersey Law Journal]
* Send in the clowns (or loads of O’Melveny and Akin lawyers): Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has a low opinion of David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital lawsuit, referring to it as nothing more than a “silly sideshow.” [Reuters]
* “It is up to us in the academy to prepare our students for the future no matter what it holds.” Dean Frank Wu of UC Hastings seems to be on the right track when it comes to necessary law firm reforms. [Huffington Post]
* Poor, poor Teresa Wagner. She was allegedly denied a job because of her conservative views, and her case ended in a mistrial. That kind of a thing could drive a woman to drink… and drive. [Iowa City Press Citizen]
* Not only does Lehigh University ruin every college basketball bracket in the nation, but it also provides great “I’m suing you because of my crappy grades” fodder. Oh my God, I really miss you, Lehigh! [Morning Call]
* Thanks to the wisdom of the Ninth Circuit, we now know that, at least in Washington, a spit-laden hamburger from Burger King is grounds for emotional distress damages. Ugh, that’s nasty! [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
Ed. note: Happy Thanksgiving! We will resume our normal publication schedule on Monday, November 26. We hope you have a wonderful holiday, and we thank you for your readership.
* We’ve discussed this trend before, and it continues: administrations of the LSAT plunge further, reaching their lowest level since 1999. [Economix / New York Times]
* We’ve discussed this trend before, and it continues: judges are still offering unpaid clerkships (even though the days of law firm deferrals are behind us). [Salon]
* We’ve discussed this trend before, and it continues: law schools sometimes discriminate against conservatives, as jurors from the Teresa Wagner trial told Iowa’s leading newspaper. [Des Moines Register]
* Are you mooching off of someone else’s wireless internet? If so, consider yourself warned. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Are you a lover of Twinkies? If so, consider yourself warned (although it’s possible that a buyer might snap up the Twinkies brand). [DealBook / New York Times]
* Seven Am Law 200 firms are saying YES to work on a billion-dollar deal. [Am Law Daily]
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, the trial of Teresa Wagner — the would-be Iowa Law professor who claims she was denied a position because of her conservative views — ended in a mistrial. The jury found that Wagner’s First Amendment rights were not violated, but they couldn’t come to an agreement on whether her Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated by the University of Iowa College of Law.
The Wagner case was a pretty big deal. Conservatives who have long felt “under-represented,” “discriminated against,” and “disrespected” at our nation’s colleges and universities felt like Wagner had a really strong case for unconstitutional liberal bias. They really felt that Wagner was a “victim” here whose “qualifications” were questioned just because the faculty at Iowa Law irrationally “hated” her.
Man, that kind of prejudice must suck. I can’t imagine what that would feel like. Luckily, conservative pundits have showed me what to do when somebody goes to court with a claim that they’ve been unfairly discriminated against: pretend it never happened and denigrate the victim and those who defend her!
* Covington, Skadden, and Proskauer really like representing professional sports leagues: from 2010 to 2011, the NHL paid a combined total of $8.8M to all three, and Covington received $16.3M from the NFL over the last three years. [Am Law Daily]
* The Department of Justice sued Bank of America yesterday for doing the “hustle.” No, not the popular disco disco dance, but rather, a supposed elaborate scheme to defraud the government out of billions of dollars. [DealBook / New York Times]
* Rajat Gupta was sentenced to a whole two years behind bars for insider trading, but my colleague Elie Mystal thinks that the more appropriate punishment would’ve been to force him to reenact the seminal 80s film, Trading Places. [HuffPost Live]
* Unfortunately, Siri wasn’t able to be helpful with this one. A federal judge had to recuse himself in a patent case involving the Siri voice assistant app because of his “interest” in Apple (likely stock ownership). [CNET]
* Was Wednesday the day of departing deans? NYU’s Richard Revesz said farewell, and so did Sydney Beckman of Duncan Law, but the latter flat out quit amid accreditation uncertainty. [Knoxville News Sentinel]
* “We’ll fight another day. This is not over.” While a jury found that Teresa Wagner’s First Amendment rights weren’t violated by the University of Iowa College of Law, the judge declared a mistrial on her equal protection claim against the school. [Huffington Post]
* Somebody really should’ve told Lawrence Taylor that when testifying in an underage sex trafficking case, it’s probably not a good idea to mention that your accuser was “very, very pretty” and “very sexy.” [Associated Press]
* “Whether or not the law is dictating it right now, the people are dictating it.” In light of First and Second Circuit DOMA decisions, in-house counsel are considering benefits for same-sex spouses and domestic partners. [Corporate Counsel]
* “I’m a woman of integrity. My emotions got the best of me.” A Dish Network executive had to publicly apologize for accosting a Gibson Dunn litigation partner’s elderly father outside of a courtroom after the Cablevision trial. [Am Law Daily]
* A potential farewell to the typical liberal bias in education: at the end of the day, Teresa Wagner’s political bias case against Iowa Law could alter hiring nationwide in higher education. [Iowa City Press-Citizen]
* Not prepared for the bar exam, and currently without a law job? Let’s give that school a “B” rating. The results of this survey pretty much conclude that recent law school graduates are out of their minds. [WSJ Law Blog]
* A soon-to-be high school graduate wants to know if he can “go into a creative career” with a law degree. You silly little boy, the law is where creativity goes to die. Hope that helps! [Law Admissions Lowdown / U.S. News]
DSK wants to know: since when is having a libido a crime?
* What effect will the Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller v. Alabama, striking down life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders, have in the real world? [New York Times]
* Coming out of the First Circuit, some good news on attorneys fees for civil rights lawyers. [WSJ Law Blog]
* Speaking of fees, which firms are raking them in as emerging market companies starting emerging onto the M&A scene? [American Lawyer]
* You’ve got to fight… for your right… to teach legal writing at the University of Iowa. At least if you’re a conservative. That’s the allegation by an aspiring academic, Teresa Wagner, which hits a courtroom this week. [Houston Chronicle]
* Former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn wants to know: is enjoying the occasional orgy such a crime? [Gothamist]
* Career alternatives: Mary Wittenberg — chief executive of New York Road Runners, which puts on the New York Marathon — is a Notre Dame law grad and former Hunton & Williams lawyer. [New York Times]
* Former Senator Arlen Specter, an active participant in historic Supreme Court nomination battles, RIP. [Philadelphia Daily News]
Conservative law professors need help. They don’t want to admit it because conservative orthodoxy holds that the only people who can ask for help in this country are small businessmen and the institution of marriage, but make no mistake, conservatives who want to get a tenure-track job in legal academia need a leg up. That’s because they’ve been discriminated against, both currently and historically. Law school faculties are thought to be a bastion of liberalism, and the problem has gotten so bad that conservative law profs probably need a “plus-factor” in order to overcome this ingrained systemic bias.
Diversity is important in law schools, and if we’re going to have an intellectually diverse faculty, we need to find a way to integrate more conservatives into teaching positions, even if that means a qualified, liberal law professor loses his or her “spot” on the tenure track for a colleague that leans a little harder to the right.
I’d be all for that. But conservatives can’t admit that they made need a diversity program to combat generations of systemic selection bias. So instead, they’re just going to bitch about the fundamental unfairness. Or fire off employment discrimination lawsuits….
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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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Personally, I think it would be more dangerous for Teresa Wagner to get drunk and file a lawsuit than it is for her to do what she’s charged with doing a couple of days ago. 
