David Tatel

But the bigger problem is the Federalist Society.

* Corporate Counsel names the finalists for its best legal department awards. Come see if FTX made the list! [Corporate Counsel]

* Taylor Swift hires Venable attorney as general counsel. [Minute Mirror]

* Tom Cotton doesn’t actually legislate, but he does write letters like an elderly shut-in complaining to the local paper about the weather. His latest attempt at making a pen pal involved writing 51 law firms to warn them that he thinks hiring diverse attorneys violates the Supreme Court’s college admissions opinion. [Law360]

* Senate panel poised to pass Supreme Court ethics package that will die on the vine after this. [Reuters]

* Government unveils new merger guidelines to replace the old guidelines that encouraged bigger and bigger mergers. When people say the government keeps losing antitrust cases, a big part of that is the pre-existing pro-merger guidelines that the government just made up decades ago. [New York Times]

* A profile of retired Judge David Tatel as he heads to Hogan Lovells to work on pro bono matters. [Bloomberg Law News]

* The other day we featured a story about a lawyer leaving the job to cycle through the Americas so it’s only fair to balance that with a two-time Olympic cyclist who became a lawyer representing injured cyclists. [ABA Journal]

* While others talk layoffs, Paul Weiss announced it’s still looking at first-year applicants. And when it comes to job security, Paul Weiss has a strong reputation. [Intuitive Career Coaching]

The effort to pass laws to bar alleged terrorists from the U.S. court system so they're forever locked up on extra-judicial island is pretty much a failure.

Legal nerds and Supreme Court devotees will enjoy Scalia/Ginsburg, Derrick Wang's new comic opera about the two iconic SCOTUS justices.

* Even JFK had mommy issues. Unfortunately, his came with possible nuclear armageddon. [Lowering the Bar] * Washington, D.C. is a horrible back-biting hellhole. Except for the D.C. Circuit, where Judge Tatel and Chief Judge Sentelle apparently hold weekly kumbaya circles and talk about their feelings. [Concurring Opinions] * Prosecutors file motions to keep George Zimmerman’s lawyers from bringing up Trayvon Martin’s past in the trial. Probably because “getting into school fights” is not particularly probative of “deserved to get murdered.” [WKMG] * Another look at the DOJ/AP scandal from a unique perspective: a privacy lawyer who used to be a journalist. [Inside Privacy] * Jones Day landed the plum job as restructuring counsel for Detroit by one “point.” [AmLaw Daily] * When you’re choosing an expert witness, you should really look for that elusive “part-Don Draper, part-Lois Griffin” type. [The Expert Institute] * This was an actual problem I encountered when I had to edit the bills of some of my colleagues. [First World Lawyer Problems]

Who are the five brilliant young lawyers just selected for Bristow Fellowships at the U.S. Solicitor General's Office? And which law schools and lower-court judges have produced the most Bristows over the past few years?