Matthew Benedict

* Law firm expenses outpaced revenue for the first half of 2019 and there’s no way that’s going to come back and haunt us. [American Lawyer]

* The DOJ is siding with Led Zeppelin in the Stairway to Heaven copyright fight. Good to know this DOJ has everything else under control. [Rolling Stone]

* California has a new law that says police should only kill when “necessary” and consider the kind of dystopian world we live in where this needed to be spelled out in a law. [NPR]

* Barr announces new BOP head to exploit Epstein’s death for the sake of some boondoggle in prison spending. [Courthouse News Service]

* The NRA tried to insert itself into Oliver North’s deposition in an act of stunning chutzpah. They got denied. [Law360]

* A follow-up on law student’s suicide and his family’s efforts to help others. [Good Men Project]

* CFTC faces scrutiny for “being honest.” [National Law Journal]

He jumped to his death from the office building where he was working as a summer associate.

* Okay, fine, whatever, the Trump administration is apparently going to look for a way to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. We’re governing by tweet these days, and this is the latest information on this debacle. [Washington Post]

* And it looks like the way President Trump is thinking of adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census is through an executive order. The Justice Department has until this afternoon to straighten this out. [ABC News]

* Nope, you still can’t use money that was supposed to go to the Defense Department to build a border wall. The Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction on the use of these military funds just before the holiday. [Los Angeles Times]

* Which Biglaw firms have received the most money from presidential candidates’ 2020 election campaigns? As you might have guessed, lawyers from Jones Day have gotten a lot to Republicans, and lawyers from Perkins Coie have gotten a lot to the Democrats. [National Law Journal]

* Prosecutors have dropped the manslaughter charge filed against an Alabama woman who was five months pregnant and lost her unborn child after being shot in the stomach. Congratulations, Alabama! Way to be normal! [CBS News]

* If you’re interested in going to law school, you should know that the average debt for the class of 2018 was pretty hefty at $115,481 — that’s $130,900 for private school graduates and $89,962 for public school graduates. Good luck paying it off! [Nerdwallet]

* Matthew Benedict, a student at Buffalo Law, RIP. [New York Law Journal]