Tag Archives: Category: Bench and Bar

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy: I agree with most of what co-blogger Eugene Volokh writes about the benefits of have a wide range of student groups at law schools, including ones that focus on specific ethnic or religious groups.

Statesman Journal: It will mark the first time in almost 25 years that two justices will retire and leave their seats to be filled by election rather than appointment by the governor.

David L. Hudson at First Amendment Center: One may believe that Justice Thomas is an outlier with his establishment-clause position. But his latest dissent hits the mark when he identifies that the Court is inconsistent when fielding church-state separation questions.

The Blog of Legal Times: President Barack Obama on Monday withdrew the nomination of a U.S. magistrate judge whom he tapped for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

PR Newswire – sacbee.com: U.S. News Media Group and Best Lawyers® have released the 2011-2012 “Best Law Firms” rankings, marking the second edition of this highly-anticipated annual analysis.

LaTimes.com: Beating up on federal judges is nothing new for conservative politicians. But the near-unanimous embrace of that tactic by the 2012 Republican presidential field is nevertheless depressing. Candidates who trumpet their support for the Constitution are seeking to hobble one of that document’s central protections: an independent judiciary.

The National Law Journal’s Law School Review: U.S. Legal Education is in the midst of a large, structural transformation. This structural shift is driven by a confluence of factors, which includes three significant trends:

The Hill reports on the expected confirmation today of Stephen Higginson to serve on the fifth circuit court.

Balkinization: Nearly 90% of graduates have law school debt. The average debt for the class of 2010 was $92,500 (not including undergraduate debt). To comfortably manage the monthly payment on this debt, a graduate needs to earn $120,000 . . .

The Washington Post reports on Obama’s latest nomination to the D.C. Circuit.

Orrin Kerr reports at The Volokh Conspiracy: From today’s per curiam summary reversal in Cavazos v. Smith, a habeas case from the Ninth Circuit . . .

Yahoo! News: So who is paying? The new study — by New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and the Justice at Stake Campaign, a non-partisan reform group — found that a small group of super spenders plays the biggest role, using their money to buy the kind of judges they want hearing their cases.

Findlaw: Attention attorneys: Want to know where you should move to stretch your dollar? NALP has the best cities for attorney salaries. Just take a look at the “buying power index” for the class of 2010.

The Washington Post: An Illinois Supreme justice’s successful bid to keep his seat last year was the nation’s costliest retention election in a quarter century, legal-reform groups said Thursday in a report raising worries that increased money going into once-ignored races could undermine the judicial system.

Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, LLP – Attorneys at Law: Columbia associate Jay Thompson was recognized with the 2010 Scarborough Award . . . Mr. Thompson also represented the Alliance Defense Fund and provided legal advice and assistance on S.C. law regarding constitutionality of prayer at city council meetings. He handles criminal domestic violence cases as well.

Lisa Miller at The Washington Post: That Justice Antonin Scalia believes in execution as a moral form of punishment is a well-known fact. That he is an observant, traditional Roman Catholic is, similarly, well-known.

CNSnews.com (includes video): First Lady Michelle Obama told two audiences at Democratic fundraising events on Tuesday that the justices her husband appointed to the Supreme Court will protect the right to “love whomever we choose.”

How Appealing links to the report: “The New Politics of Judicial Elections: 2009-10; How Special Interest ‘Super Spenders’ Threatened Impartial Justice and Emboldened Unprecedented Legislative Attacks on America’s Courts”

The Denver Post: The three men vying to be Colorado’s next state Supreme Court justice hail from all points of the political compass, though none considers himself politically active.

NJ.com: Despite a tongue-lashing last week from the governor, a Superior Court judge ruled today that state judges do not have to pay more for pensions and health plans while the state is appealing a ruling that declared the increases unconstitutional.

Award honors ‘significant efforts in promoting and defending religious liberty…and constitutional originalism’

The debate was sponsored by the Federalist Society and is here. The video runs just over 80 minutes.

SCOTUS Blog: Blue Mountain School District. v. J.S. . . . Whether and how the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) applies to online student speech that originates off campus and targets a member of the school community

Lambda Legal: Lambda Legal, along with several Iowa-based legal organizations, will host two forums on how best to preserve a fair and impartial judiciary after last year’s ouster of three Iowa Supreme Court justices.

Religion Clause: UPI reported yesterday that a Florida state appeals court has affirmed without opinion a decision of a state trial court that Islamic law can be used in deciding whether to enforce an arbitration award between a mosque and certain trustees of the mosque who had been removed from office.

Joe Nocera at the NY Times: The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork.

John Yoo at WSJ.com: This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution’s greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering.

The Hill: The states, NFIB and the Justice Department have all said that’s the case the court should take, and DOJ has asked the court to hold other suits until it rules in that one. For the most part, the two sides want the same thing: a quick hearing focused on the merits of whether the individual insurance mandate is constitutional.

Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy: To what extent does the First Amendment protect public university professors — including untenured professors — from being disciplined or fired based on their scholarship or public commentary? The matter is not entirely clear, partly because of Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), which held that the government has a largely free hand in making employment decisions based on an employee’s speech that’s part of his job duties.

NYTimes.com: Republican presidential candidates are issuing biting and sustained attacks on the federal courts and the role they play in American life, reflecting and stoking skepticism among conservatives about the judiciary.

Education News: The American Bar Association and 200 law schools it accredits are under growing pressure from Congress to quell complaints that colleges are misleading students about job prospects and saddling graduates with loans they can’t afford to repay.

San Francisco Chronicle: U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer says he will transfer to senior status with a limited caseload by the end of the year, creating another vacancy on the federal bench in San Francisco.

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Cleo Elaine Powell was formally sworn in today as the first African-American woman on the 232-year-old Virginia Supreme Court.

WSJ Law Blog: We’ve been tracking the legal job market here at LB, and as we’ve said, the news isn’t good, with recent law grads being hit the hardest. Now, along comes the annual salary guide from legal placement firm Robert Half Legal, which says some of the legal job trends aren’t necessarily what you might think.

Findlaw: t’s that time of year again, which means The Princeton Review has released its newest edition of The Best 167 Law Schools. Now, we know you normally only care about the all-powerful U.S. News rankings. But this year’s Best list has some possibly useful information.

LifeNews.com: As to my political policy view on abortion, I am 100% pro-life. End of story. I will appoint judges who understand the original intent of the Constitution.

Video – Opinion Journal: The Law School Bubble–Glenn Reynolds on whether law schools have too many students – WSJ.com.

The Volokh Conspiracy: “I do not think that the Kelo opinion is long for this world,” Scalia said. “My court has, by my lights, made many mistakes of law during its distinguished two centuries of existence. But it has made very few mistakes of political judgment, of estimating how far … it could stretch beyond the text of the constitution without provoking overwhelming public criticism and resistance. Dred Scott [legalizing slavery [note: Dred Scott did not actually “legalize” slavery, which was already legal in many states; it prevented Congress from forbidding it in federal territories, though states were still permitted to ban it — IS]] was one mistake of that sort. Roe v Wade [legalizing abortion] was another … And Kelo, I think, was a third.”

News from The Associated Press: The Obama administration and challengers of the president’s health care overhaul are pushing for Supreme Court consideration of the law in late March, judging by the speed with which they are filing legal papers.

The Blog of Legal Times: The District of Columbia Judicial Nomination Commission released the names Wednesday morning of 20 applicants vying for retiring Judge Joan Zeldon’s seat on the District of Columbia Superior Court bench.

St. Louis American: Gov. Jay Nixon made history today by appointing Judge George W. Draper III to the Missouri Supreme Court. Draper will be the second African American in Missouri to serve on the state’s highest court.

OneNewsNow.com: Phill Kline angered pro-abortion politicos by conducting a probe of Planned Parenthood when he was attorney general, finding that the abortion provider was performing abortions on minors without parental involvement and without reporting the crimes to authorities.

Terry Jeffrey at Townhall : U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle, a Clinton appointee, ironically provided evidence last week that seals the case that Justice Elena Kagan is required by law to recuse herself from cases challenging Obamacare.
The law in question is 28 U.S.C. 455.

VPR News: Shumlin announced Tuesday that he’s tapped Beth Robinson to fill a vacancy created when Justice Denise Johnson announced her retirement.

LaTimes.com: The choice of Paul Watford for the overburdened federal appeals court draws praise from both sides of the political aisle. Some see a smoother path for him to Senate confirmation.

Ashby Jones and Joseph Palazzolo at WSJ.com: That’s the message a swath of cost-slashing corporate America is giving the nation’s law firms, which for decades have essentially passed along the cost of training their youngest, greenest lawyers to their clients in the form of big hourly bills.

Findlaw: Any country can have a Bill of Rights, but as reported by the Los Angeles Times, Scalia believes it’s the Constitution’s structure that makes ours unique.

Tuesday round-up : SCOTUSblog: One of yesterday’s grants was United States v. Alvarez, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to lie about having received military honors.

Brian Faller at The Olympian: However, the full record of our nation’s history may provide the best reason for choosing judicial pragmatism or not. So far it suggests to me the risk of judicial tyranny from pragmatist judges is lower than the risk of judicial tyranny from originalist judges who would uphold irrational laws that deprive us of liberty or oppress unpopular groups.

MiamiHerald.com: Gov. Rick Scott has approved a $45.6 million loan so Florida’s court system can avoid an impending deficit due mainly to a decline in mortgage foreclosure filing fees.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYTimes.com: Michele Bachmann was 22 and newly married when, in the fall of 1979, she and 53 other aspiring lawyers arrived on the manicured campus of Oral Roberts University here. They were the inaugural class in an unusual educational experiment: a law school rooted in charismatic Christian belief.

Clarence Thomas’ Influence On The Supreme Court : NPR (includes audio): Twenty years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest margin in 100 years. He’s the most conservative justice since the 1930s, and, in his passion for his own version of “original intent,” he’s willing to reverse whole lines of previous rulings. He’s an enigmatic figure — silent at oral arguments, beloved by his law clerks and court employees.

The Hill: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) subpoenaed Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday for documents related to the “Fast and Furious” gun tracking operation.

SCOTUSblog: The scattered schedule that lawyers have followed in filing appeals on the constitutionality of the new federal health care law has contributed to the creation of a puzzle for the Court to work out in deciding when, and how, to treat the cases. It now appears that, if the Court wants to wait and act on all six appeals that have now been filed, at the same time, it probably would not consider them until its Conference of December 9.

The Order list is here.

Today you have judges who are dictatorial and arrogant, who pretend that they are the dominant branch and who issue orders that clearly are against the Constitution,” he told CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday.

Balkinization: Get ready law schools: A Senate hearing on the ABA regulation of law schools might be coming. That is the subtext of Senator Boxer’s most recent letter to the ABA. It’s overdue.

OneNewsNow.com: Geoffrey Surtees of the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), who represented Judge DeWeese, contends that the “‘Philosophies of Law and Conflict’ display, which includes the text of the Ten Commandments, is simply not an Establishment Clause violation. It was our hope that the Supreme Court would take the opportunity [to] correct the lower courts on this point of law, but for whatever reason, it chose not to do so.”

ABC News:“I’m hoping that the ‘ living’ Constitution will die,” Scalia said, adding that the controversial nature of recent confirmation proceedings is partly attributable to a notion that the Constitution evolves. “It’s like having a mini-constitutional convention every time you select a new judge.”

TheHill.com: In a shocking development Thursday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) triggered a rarely used procedural option informally called the “nuclear option” to change the Senate rules.

LifeSiteNews.com: 30 years ago last week Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the US Supreme Court. During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan made a promise to nominate the first woman to high court. He got that chance shortly after taking office when Justice Potter Stewart left the bench. A review of O’Connor’s career reveals why the judicial nominee process has become so heated and why new laws had to pass what I call ‘the O’Connor test.’

Paul LintonLifeNews.com: Roe can be overturned only by a decision of the Court itself overruling Roe or by a federal constitutional amendment–neither a federal statute enacted under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment defining the word “person” as used in § 1 of the Amendment, nor a statute removing the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over abortion cases would have that effect.

The Blog of Legal Times: Addressing reporters today at the White House, President Barack Obama said he has “complete confidence” in how Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is running the U.S. Justice Department.

The Blog of Legal Times: “It will certainly take time as vacancies occur to have a judiciary that does have more diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and that certainly includes a diverse pool of women on the bench,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, in an interview Wednesday.

News from The Associated Press: Federal officials are warning California medical marijuana dispensaries they must shut down within 45 days or face criminal prosecution and having their property confiscated.

Inside Higher Ed: A legal team on Wednesday announced plans to sue 15 law schools, charging them with misleading applicants about their job prospects upon graduation. These suits, building on a suit filed in August against two other law schools, signal a rapid expansion of a push to draw attention to the tough job market facing new lawyers, and to allegations that law schools aren’t being honest about how their graduates are faring in that job market.

Washington Times: Partially lifting the veil that usually guards their actions, two Supreme Court justices on Wednesday painted the court as a bulwark for the Constitution and said some of today’s cynicism about government stems from the public’s scanty understanding of the founding document.

News from The Associated Press: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (AN’-toh-nihn skuh-LEE’-uh) says the quality of federal judges has suffered because there are too many of them.

POLITICO.com: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is turning up the heat on Eric Holder, demanding the attorney general “come forward and at least admit” he knew about “Fast and Furious” long before he told Congress he learned about the gun program.

Michael Walter Fitzgerald, whom President Obama nominated in July to the bench, is the fourth out federal judicial nominee chosen by the White House.

NewsObserver.com: An online legal services company is suing the N.C. State Bar over a long-simmering standoff that highlights the uneasy relationship between private-practice lawyers and inexpensive, do-it-yourself online help for simple law problems. The lawsuit by LegalZoom.com, filed in Wake County Superior Court, asks that a judge declare that the company is entitled to sell standard legal forms on its website and that it be allowed to register in this state to sell prepaid legal services.

USATODAY.com: As the Supreme Court raised the curtain on its new term Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts heralded the 25th anniversary of the justice who has become a showman of the bench, Antonin Scalia.

David Ingram at National Law Journal: The price of hiring former U.S. solicitor general Paul Clement to defend the federal ban on recognizing same-sex marriage could go as high as $1.5 million, according to a new modification of Clement’s contract with the U.S. House of Representatives.

PR Newswire at sacbee.com: A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization is calling on Virginia’s George Mason University School of Law to disinvite Nonie Darwish, a notorious Islamophobe who has stated that Islam is a “poison to a society” that is “based on lies” and must be “annihilated.”

The Blog of Legal Times: Noting the pending nomination of a sitting magistrate judge, D.C. Superior Court is advertising the position in anticipation of the potential new vacancy.