Robert Barnes

This is why we can't have nice things.

* The government can work out exactly how NSA contractor Reality Winner leaked classified documents, but no one seems capable of explaining how America gave Top Secret clearance to someone named “Reality Winner.” [Quartz]

* An open letter to Tiffany Trump from one of her future classmates. [Teen Vogue]

* A profile of Don McGahn that begins “By day, Don McGahn is a straight-laced lawyer, but by night, he’s a long-haired rocker.” Oh? An affluent middle aged white guy sublimates his sad existence through a Peter Pan complex… tell me more! [NPR]

* If you were wagering, we now know that Robert Barnes picked up his client Cassandra Fairbanks on Twitter. I’d have bet on the Pepe the Frog subreddit. [National Law Journal]

* Kokesh puts kibosh on SEC disgorgement. [Corporate Counsel]

* Chamber wants a rule to expose litigation financing. [Law.com]

* Now the Trump administration is hitting firms in the wallet — with partner Charles Tobin moving to Ballard Spahr, bailing on Holland & Knight over their alleged policy of never taking on matters adverse to Donald Trump. [Legal Intelligencer]

* Speaking of Ballard Spahr, they’re moving to a new office in New York. [NY Post]

They're all distinguished conservative jurists, although not the most diverse group.

Why did he have such a sudden change of heart?

Is the oldest member of the Supreme Court going to be retiring any time soon?

* Bank of America agreed to pay $2.43 billion, one of the biggest securities class-action settlements in history, to put the Merrill Lynch mess behind it. According to Professors Peter Henning and Steven Davidoff, B of A “is probably quite happy with the settlement given that it could have potentially faced billions of dollars more in liability in the case.” [DealBook / New York Times]

* “Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting.” Here is Robert Barnes’s take on the SCOTUS Term that starts today. [Washington Post]

* And here is Professor Garrett Epps’s review of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book on the Supreme Court, The Oath (affiliate link). [New York Times]

* How Dewey justify paying a big bonus to a member of the management team “when it has been widely pointed out that excessive compensation to the firm’s upper management significantly contributed to the firm’s collapse in the first place?” [Bankruptcy Beat via WSJ Law Blog]

* A high-profile Vatican trial raises these questions: “‘Did the butler do it?’ Or rather, ‘was it only the butler who did it?’” [Christian Science Monitor]

* Ben Ogden, an Allen & Overy associate who was killed in a Nepalese plane crash, R.I.P. [Am Law Daily]