Laurence Tribe

* Plaintiff seeks sanctions against Rudy Giuliani in breach of contract lawsuit. This seems like… not the most pressing of the former NYC mayor’s legal woes. [New York Law Journal]

* Norton Rose Fulbright partner Vincent Dunn is working on the road from Australia. That’s because his daughter, Crystal Dunn, is playing for the U.S. Women’s National Team in the World Cup. [National Law Journal]

* 96-year-old Judge Pauline Newman wrote a pointed dissent amid questions of her competency. [Law360]

* Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe weighs in on the case against FTX crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried, on behalf of the defendant. [Reuters]

* Georgia district attorneys are suing over a new law giving the state the power to remove the elected officials over discretionary decisions. [Bloomberg Law]

* Friday the 13th comes for Donald Trump, as the Trump Organization entities pegged with tax fraud are sentenced today. [Reuters]

* This is the economic cycle where clients will drive work toward the Am Law second hundred in earnest. We say that every economic downturn and it never really ends up happening and this recession isn’t actually materializing, but… it’s gonna happen! Kidding aside, it might, but probably because companies are slashing legal department budgets regardless of the economic climate. [Law.com]

* Maybe not all legal departments… Apple’s top lawyer got a pay bump. [Bloomberg]

* Laurence Tribe joins Kaplan Hecker & Fink. Didn’t see that one coming, but if he joined any firm, this is the one that makes sense. [American Lawyer]

* Sam Bankman-Fried’s pre-trial blogging continues bashing Sullivan & Cromwell’s bankruptcy efforts and offering insights into his defense strategy. [Law360]

* Also, happy birthday week to Judge Richard Posner, who just turned 84!

* Adam Feldman poses — and answers — an interesting question: are particular justices more or less partial to certain lawyers’ or law firms’ positions? [Empirical SCOTUS]

* Speaking of the federal judiciary, Carrie Severino offers this helpful scorecard of President Donald Trump’s track record on judicial appointments — which underscores, as she notes, the importance of the 2020 elections. [Bench Memos / National Review]

* And speaking of President Trump, Joshua Matz and Laurence Tribe have this excellent explanation of why the Supreme Court does not have a role in adjudicating impeachments. [Take Care]

* In the wake of the Mueller Report, Ilya Somin pushes back against conventional wisdom and takes this position: “Not all foreign interference in elections is unjustified. Far from it, in fact.” [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* Fair use in the copyright context is an infamously amorphous concept — so the Fourth Circuit’s recent ruling in Brammer v. Violent Hues Productions deserves your attention. [All Rights Reserved]

* Congratulations to Westlaw Edge, voted the “best new analytics product” by the readers of Dewey B Strategic. [Dewey B Strategic]

* And congrats to Kira Systems on being picked by Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner as its AI solution for “high-volume workstreams” across the firm. [Artificial Lawyer]

* If you’re a libertarian-leaning lawyer with two to six years of experience under your belt, check out these great employment opportunities over at IJ. [Institute for Justice via Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* Nancy Gertner and Laurence Tribe take Alan Dershowitz to task for his unorthodox analysis of the sentencing proceedings of General Michael Flynn. [Boston Globe]

* In this elegant essay, Jane Chong uses two notable new books — To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz, and the updated edition of Charles Black’s classic, Impeachment: A Handbook, with a new preface and additional chapters by by Philip Bobbitt (affiliate links) — as the jumping-off point for reflections on impeachment, law, and politics. [Los Angeles Review of Books]

* Judges often struggle when it comes to sentencing — and that’s as it should be, according to veteran defense lawyer and former prosecutor Joel Cohen. [New York Law Journal]

* Yes, more of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees have been rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association compared to the nominees of his four most-recent predecessors — but as Patrick Gregory explains, there are some reasons for this (most notably, the Trump Administration’s decision to stop giving the ABA a sneak peek at nominees, which allowed past administrations to simply pull nominees the ABA deemed unqualified). [Big Law Business]

* Jonathan Adler has many problems with the recent ruling by Judge Reed O’Connor (N.D. Tex.) on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — including the fact that Judge O’Connor ruled in the first place. [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* Former public defender Stephen Cooper flags an issue that many reporters probably haven’t thought much about: “When Will Journalism Grapple With the Ethics of Interviewing Mentally Ill Arrestees?” [CounterPunch]

* As 2018 draws to a close, the U.S. Chamber offers up its annual list of the year’s Top 10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits.
[Faces of Lawsuit Abuse]

* Looking ahead to 2019, the new year could ring in new legislation that could help lower drug prices by facilitating the timely entry of generics into the market, as Alaric DeArment reports. [MedCity News]