* Everyone’s happy about the Dewey & LeBoeuf settlement except the Ad Hoc Committee and its LeBoeuf retirees, who called Judge Martin Glenn’s attempt to slap them down an “insult to injury.” [WSJ Law Blog]
* While South Carolina’s voter ID law wasn’t found to be inherently discriminatory, its enforcement was still blocked because people will be unable to get their sh*t together in time for the election. [Bloomberg]
* VP debate moderator Martha Raddatz’s 1991 wedding guest list has come under fire because Barack Obama was invited. Clearly there’s a conflict of interest worth arguing about here. [Washington Post]
* This man is nobody’s “butt boy”: Tom Keefe, the interim dean over at Saint Louis Law School, will be footing a $14,212 bill for his students in the form of ABA Law Student Division memberships. [National Law Journal]
* Strippers in California, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Texas, and Nevada will be making it rain, because they just scored a $12.9M class action settlement. That’s a whole lot of “college tuition”! [Courthouse News Service]
* Dewey know when Judge Martin Glenn will issue his ruling on the failed firm’s proposed partner contribution plan? If all goes according to plan, we can expect to learn if the PCP’s been approved or rejected as early as next week. [Am Law Daily]
* Hot on the heels of Google’s digital-book settlement, the company announced that it would be appealing its copyright infringement jury verdict in the Oracle trial. One thing’s for sure: Judge Alsup will be angered terribly by this. [Bloomberg]
* David Askew, formerly the director of Edwards Wildman’s pro bono program, will now lead the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms as CEO and general counsel. [Corporate Counsel]
* The American Bar Association submitted an amicus brief in support of using race as a factor in college admissions, because diversity in college education is a must for diversity in law schools, duh. [ABA Journal]
* Remember the family law judge who got caught beating his daughter in a video that went viral? Now he wants the Texas Supreme Court to reinstate him, over his ex-wife’s objections. Good luck with that. [CNN]
Flash back to 2005. Tom DeLay was the Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, living in a safe Republican district, and poised to chart the course of American politics forever. DeLay was nicknamed “The Hammer” for his brutal efficiency as Majority whip, crushing all dissent from backbenchers and building a solid GOP coalition — a nickname that the fundamentalist DeLay endorses because “the hammer is one of the carpenter’s favorite tools.” In other words, Tom DeLay was a tool.
Right now is a great time to be a Supreme Court aficionado. There’s a big new book out about the Court, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Oath (affiliate link). And the new SCOTUS Term starts in just a few days, on Monday, October 1.
Given the time of the year, it’s not surprising that SCOTUS preview events are as common as Ninth Circuit reversals pro se cert petitions. I attended one sponsored by the Federalist Society earlier this month, where Kannon Shanmugam of Williams & Connolly offered excellent insights into October Term 2012. Our Supreme Court correspondent here at Above the Law, Matt Kaiser, went to a preview talk sponsored by the American Constitution Society (which he turned into Kaiser’s Guide To Bluffing Your Way Through Knowledge About The Supreme Court’s New Term).
That sounds like more than enough SCOTUS previews. But I couldn’t help myself from attending one more, due to the starpower of the panelists: Paul Clement, the former solicitor general who’s now a partner at Bancroft, and Tom Goldstein, the noted Supreme Court advocate and founder of the invaluable SCOTUSblog.
What did Messrs. Clement and Goldstein have to say about OT 2012?
This doesn’t mean the same thing in all parts of the world.
It’s not unusual for politicians to spew racist or ignorant invectives about people and cultures when one is unfortunate enough to hear them speaking to their “base.” That’s just the sad fact of political life, and saying horrible things about “other” people is neither new nor uniquely American. All over the world, there are politicians who make their mark by inflaming the passions of the dumbest among us.
What’s unusual about this election cycle is that so far, politicians have really doubled down on their divisive, hateful, or frankly stupid speech when the red meat intended for true believers gets picked up by more moderate sources. We’re seeing it with Mitt Romney and this ridiculous notion that the world can be divided up between makers and takers. We’re seeing it with Todd Akin who has stubbornly refused to shut that whole thing down. And I’m sure it’s happening in local races all around the country.
A tipster sent us something about one such local race. Debbie Riddle is running for reelection as a Texas State Representative. She’s got some views which are the very definition of racism towards the Afghan people. But it’s not surprising that an openly racist woman has been elected by the good people of Texas. What’s surprising is how comfortable she is being this hateful even when talking to a student and fellow American citizen who just happens to be not white.
I mean, I’m not as prejudiced against this guy as Debbie Riddle is, even though he goes to some law school I’ve barely heard of….
October first is the start of the new Supreme Court term!
If, like many readers, you’re a few years out of law school, this may strike you with a mild sense of dread. You remember the heady days of law school when you followed every argument, opinion, and cert grant from One First Street Northeast with an excitement rivaled only by your enthusiasm for the starting salaries for first-year associates.
Alas, the years since law school haven’t been kind to your pants size or your level of engagement with the Supreme Court.
Now, I suspect, you worry that soon — at a family dinner, dropping off your kids at preschool, or anywhere else you interact with non-lawyers — someone will recognize that you are a lawyer, and ask you what to make of the new Supreme Court term.
You have three options for how to deal with this, now, before the media frenzy over the new Supreme Court term starts.
First, you can admit to yourself that you’re no longer the gunner you used to be. You can tell people that just don’t follow the Supreme Court anymore, since you’ve gotten really interested in your exciting new life doing document review for a municipal bond arbitration.
But you’re not going to do that. If you were that good at being honest with yourself, you aren’t likely to be the kind of person who went to law school in the first place.
Second, perhaps, you can wade through the volume of information out there about the new term. Go through SCOTUSblog with the same passion you now spend tracking whether your friends from law school have better careers than you do. Maybe go to one of the OT 2012 preview events that clog every convention hall and small town library starting in mid-September.
That takes time and energy. Tom Goldstein sometimes uses really long paragraphs, and you really wanted to spend more time Googling for topless pictures of Kate Middleton.
Instead, you could let me to one of those events for you. For the truly efficient, follow the jump, sit back, and enjoy Kaiser’s Guide To Bluffing Your Way Through Knowledge About the Supreme Court’s New Term to Non-Lawyers….
* Wal-Mart allegedly ripped up a woman’s hundos because a cashier thought they were fake. The bills were, in fact, real, and now the woman, who just wanted to do some Christmas shopping, is suing. Beat that, Ebenezer Scrooge! [Daily Mail]
* A few weeks back, we challenged law professors to come up with 50 Shades of Grey-based hypos. This fellow took us up on it. So here you go: 50 Shades of Admin Law. [Lawprawfblog]
* Hey Romney, you can take our lives health care, but you’ll never take our pornography! [Forbes]
* “Now enterng the Klu Klux Klan Memorial Highway.” Yeah, I agree, that really doesn’t have such a great ring to it. [Thomson Reuters News and Insight]
* If you just started your 1L year and are already thinking, “I’ve made a huge mistake,” you may still have time to escape with your bank account intact. [Texas Lawyer]
* Speaking of, a recent Delaware Supreme Court opinion worked out to $35,000 per hour for winning attorneys in the case. Now the losers, Grupo Mexico, have appealed by arguing, “You guys made a huge mistake!” [WSJ Deal Journal]
It’s hard out here for an attorney, when you’re tryin’ to get money for the loans…
Especially when your legal work forces you to make enemies with an angry ex-husband who might try to, say, blow up your car. Or when you do contract work in a city nuisance department and wind up targeted by hit men for your work on the case against a local strip club.
No, this isn’t the trailer for Taken 2, it’s just two recent cases out of Texas and St. Louis.
Luckily, no one was killed in the car bomb attack or a strip club owner’s plan to kill the Fort-Worth Mayor and a mild-mannered contract attorney, but there’s plenty of stranger-than-fiction details to these cases….
Back in July, we brought you some news about the law firms that you should be considering if you’re in search of diversity — the latest Vault rankings for the Best Law Firms for Diversity. In an ideal world, everyone would be able to work at a firm that’s open, inclusive, and welcoming to all.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the world that we’re living in. Now that you’ve seen which Biglaw firms are the biggest on diversity, let’s head down south to the Lone Star state, where it’s anything but a small world after all.
Eighteen of the 20 largest firms in Dallas, Texas, just received failing scores for diversity in a report issued by the Dallas Diversity Task Force. The other two firms received grades of C+. Let’s see which firms made the grade….
* This is why you shouldn’t feed your illegal pet monkey Frosted Flakes — or own an illegal pet monkey, I guess. [Chicago Tribune]
* In other incredible pet law news, a Rhode Island woman is not pleased that her neighbor’s cockatoo has been calling her a “f**king whore.” Awk! Polly want a restraining order? [Legal Blog Watch]
* This is a pretty good round-up of the summer’s most whacked-out legal stories. Think naked people covered in Crisco, kids destroying thousands of dollars in MacBooks — by peeing on them — and a nasty death-by-sex situation. [Legally Weird]
* Making people log in to unsubscribe from junk email isn’t only annoying as sh*t, it’s also probably illegal (as it freaking should be). [Ars Technica]
* A “Man-gina” lawsuit from Texas. I don’t need to say any more. [Houston Press]
* This dude says smoking pot made him a better dad. I somehow doubt this is part of Elie Mystal’s preparation regimen for the stork’s impending arrival. [New York Times]
* Congratulations to everyone who just passed the MPRE — you can learn your score on the MPRE website. [MPRE]
A college graduate without student loan debt is akin to reading a kind quote about Kim Kardashian in a tabloid—it’s rare.
In the past eight years, student loan debt has nearly tripled to a whopping $1.1 trillion, and in the past 10 years, the percentage of 25-year-olds with such debt has risen from 25% to 43%
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that New York Fed economists warned last month that the burden of student debt could stilt consumer spending by twentysomethings, as well as further hamper the recovery of the housing market and economy.
To get a better idea of what massive student loan debt (we’re talking over $100,000 massive) looks like, we talked to an attorney who graduated with a large student loan debt. We also consulted LearnVest Planning Services CFP® Katie Brewer to see just how their repayment plans stack up.
S. Fischer, 36, Attorney Graduated: 2001
How Much I Borrowed: $100,000
What I Still Owe: $45,000
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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* Everyone’s happy about the Dewey & LeBoeuf settlement except the Ad Hoc Committee and its LeBoeuf retirees, who called Judge Martin Glenn’s attempt to slap them down an “insult to injury.” [WSJ Law Blog]
