Tag Archives: Category: Bench and Bar

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.

The Blog of Legal Times: Senators moved with relative speed to confirm Judge Jennifer Zipps after President Barack Obama nominated her in June.

TheHill.com: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) on Tuesday called for President Obama to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress.

Eugene Volokh discusses the situation and constitutional implications at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Reuters: The Senate on Monday approved six nominees to fill judicial vacancies, addressing a backlog of 27 judicial nominees that were pending before the chamber.

Erwin Chemerinsky at the ABA Journal: Once more, as it has been for each of the last six years, it will be, from a practical perspective, the Anthony Kennedy Court. In ideologically divided cases, there are two blocs as distinct as any that have served on the court: Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the right; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan on the left.

CNN.com: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Red Masses in the past, but has said she grew tired of being lectured by Catholic officials. Ginsburg, like Breyer and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, is Jewish. “I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion,” Ginsburg said in the book “Stars of David: Prominent Jews talk About Being Jewish” by author Abigail Pogrebin. “Even the Scalias – although they’re much of that persuasion – were embarrassed for me.”

The Judiciary doesn’t have the final word on the meaning of the Constitution, and Congress could step in to protect the 14th Amendment rights of the unborn.

Trail Blazers Blog: And, in the Western District, Robert Pitman, a federal magistrate in San Antonio, becomes the state’s first openly gay chief federal prosecutor.

National Law Journal: But some law faculty members and alumni raised concern that the $600,000 startup funding for the center, which would be independent from the institute, would come from Art Pope, a prominent Raleigh businessman known for his staunchly conservative views and for his financial support of Republicans.

U.S. Supreme Court to decide major legal issues:
The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 2011-12 term that starts Monday, will examine . . .

The Hill: The lawmakers on Thursday asked the U.S. Judicial Conference to formally request that the Department of Justice look into Thomas’s failure to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars his wife has received from groups that want the healthcare law repealed. Their letter comes after 75 House Democrats in February asked Thomas to recuse himself from the case following reports that he’d failed to report his wife Virginia’s income since he joined the bench in 1991.

The Daily Caller: One of the interesting things to come out of our recent interview with former Speaker Newt Gingrich was his position on judicial reform — an issue that is point 9 of his “21st Century Contract with America.”

The Washington Post: Justice Department attorneys have sued Arizona and Alabama, where a federal judge on Wednesday allowed key parts of that state’s immigration law to take effect but blocked other provisions. Federal lawyers are talking to Utah officials about a third possible lawsuit and are considering legal challenges in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina, according to court documents and government officials.

The Washington Post: The news that the Justice Department had requested that the Supreme Court examine President Obama’s health care law means that a verdict from the nation’s highest court will likely come sometime next year — right in the heart of the 2012 race.

Senate Judiciary Committee: The Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing entitled “Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States” for Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 2:30 p.m. in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

National Law Journal on Law.com: The University of Illinois announced Wednesday that its law school reported inaccurate data to the American Bar Association on the academic credentials of its incoming students for the past three years, in addition to publishing inflated figures on its Web site this fall.

The Blog of Legal Times: Planned Parenthood has retained lawyers from Hogan Lovells as it prepares to respond to a sweeping new inquiry into how the organization and its affiliates use federal money.

Kansan.com: Dale Schowengerdt, an experienced litigator, argued against legalization of gay marriage during the discussion panel. “This rush to same-sex marriage is a passion of the hour,” Schowengerdt said. “This is such a radical change that it will produce a harmful effect on society.”

Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller at WSJ.com: This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

WorldNetDaily: The dispute over Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president erupted during the 2008 election campaign and featured among others a lawsuit filed on behalf of Ambassador Alan Keyes against California election officials who did not check whether Obama was eligibile. Now the 2012 campaign is charging ahead at full throttle, and the issue is still alive.

WSJ Law Blog: “Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent upon diversity in all other aspects of life seems bent on eliminating diversity of moral judgment — particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” he said, citing the suit against Catholic’s same-sex dorm policy.

The Blog of Legal Times: Senate leaders have come to an agreement to consider 10 judicial nominees during the next several weeks, stepping up the rate that senators have been considering judges in recent months.

Kansas Law Free Press: The KU Federalist Society, KU OutLAWS and Allies, and KC Legal are pleased to announce this year’s inaugural event, “The Case for Same Sex Marriage: Practicum and Practice.” We are fortunate to have two respected speakers who will each give their arguments for the legalization of same-sex marriage. KU Federalist Society is proud to welcome Professor Dale Carpenter. Professor Carpenter is an Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at University of Minnesota. He will be discussing the “Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” with Dale Schowengerdt. Schowengerdt is a seasoned litigator who has worked with the Alliance Defense Fund since 2003. | Dale Carpenter has a related post at the Volokh Conspiracy announcing the forum.

Reuters: Several states that appoint judges are considering a switch to an elected bench, despite growing criticism from judges about the influence of money in judicial elections. One of the most active is Tennessee, where conservative legislators believe that appointed judges are out of touch with the electorate and unaccountable to voters.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Justice Scalia, the longest-serving member of the nation’s high court, hailed the importance of a moral background in rounding out an education in law and praised Duquesne for its commitment to a notion that, he said, is out of fashion.

Findlaw: Does anybody really enjoy being a law clerk? Let’s face it. Only a small minority of law students decide to spend their 3L summer compiling clerkship applications because they truly want to clerk for a judge. The vast majority are doing it for prestige . . .

Findlaw: “He’s going to go down as an absolutely historic figure,” Tim Goldstein, leading Supreme Court advocate and SCOTUSblog proprietor, told CNN earlier this year. Goldstein characterized Roberts as the “best Supreme Court advocate of his generation” based on Roberts’ 39 appearances before the Court in his days in the Solicitor General’s office and private practice.

The Blog of Legal Times: Public Defender Service attorneys Corinne Beckwith and Catharine Easterly appeared before a Senate committee Friday morning to testify on their nominations to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

ISI’s American Studies Institute: 1) What led you to become a political philosopher? The intellectual experience that changed my life, placing me on the path to becoming a professor and a political philosopher, was reading Plato’s dialogue Gorgias in a political philosophy seminar I took as an undergraduate at Swarthmore. Socrates’s questions to Gorgias and his other interlocutors in the dialogue led me to question my own beliefs and values. They made me think about existential, social, and political questions that I had not before paused to consider. My encounter with the dialogue caused me to see, for the first time, the overriding value of truth and the importance of the pursuit of truth, not merely as a means to other ends, but above all for its own sake.

J. Emilio Flores at the NYTimes.com: Given the abundance of candidates, it might seem strange that judges compete so intensely for interviews. Federal judges, though, are frequently fighting over a very small subset of law students from a few elite schools. After all, clerks are hired not only to research and write, but in some cases also to improve their bosses’ career prospects. “There are some judges who like to position themselves as feeders to the Supreme Court . . . ”

How Appealing links to relevant information.

Mirror of Justice carries the details.

Debra J. Saunders at Townhall: Ware may pay homage to “aspects of the federal judicial system that foster public confidence in the fairness and integrity of the process.” But fairness? Integrity? Ware treated the recordings as spoils that rightfully belong to the victor. Then he issued a ruling that found he was right to do so. In the cause of transparency. Otherwise known as hubris.

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law: In the November 2010 elections, three sitting Iowa Supreme Court justices were ousted as a result of the court’s unanimous ruling in Varnum v. Brien. The Varnum decision struck down, on equal protection grounds, a state statute limiting marriage rights to a union between a man and a woman. The conference seeks to examine the effect the ouster may have on judicial independence as well as its effect on future efforts to challenge, in state courts, laws that prohibit marriage for same-sex couples and to advance other civil rights for LGBT persons through state court litigation

More information here.

The Daily Tar Heel: A debate at the UNC School of Law today set two state legislators on either side of the Defense of Marriage amendment, arguing as lawmakers and as lawyers.

The Hugh Hewitt Show: HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show, a chance to talk in studio with Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer. Mr. Justice Breyer, welcome to the program, it’s great to have you here today . . .
SB: Very nice to be here, thank you.

Hugh Hewitt at San Francisco Examiner: There is no war in the offing, thank God, but the Court and its brethren on the federal and state benches may be too insulated from the turmoil of the present day to grasp just how deeply antagonized millions of ordinary citizens are from their government. It is reassuring that the justices can carry on calmly amid many storms, but we have to hope that a majority of them at least understand that they are responsible for making much of the weather the rest of us experience.

USCourts.gov: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has named eight judges as new committee chairs for the Judicial Conference of the United States, and has extended the service of three judges as committee chairs.

Concurring Opinions : What we have seen is really a combination of two distorted beliefs: the traditional belief that lawyering is a lucrative profession and the reasonable belief that jobs achieved post-law school are legal jobs. Law schools are also aware of these distortions, lending to an information asymmetry which schools have very few incentives to correct. In short, we have a recipe for trouble.

Mirror of Justice: On May 2-4, 2012, Touro Law Center will host the biennial Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools. The Conference will explore a variety of important issues related to the general theme of “The Place of Religion in the Law School, the University, and the Practice of Law. ”

Robert George at Mirror of Justice: During my recent visit to Notre Dame to participate in the wonderful conference in honor of John Finnis organized by Gerry Bradley, I also had the opportunity to give a lecture for the ND Law School Federalist Society chapter. The campus newspaper called the Irish Rover has published a story on my remarks, but the reporter, though plainly well-intentioned, didn’t quite manage to report everything accurately. So here is the text of what I actually said . . .

Chron.com blog: Chief Justice John Roberts has publicly called for an end to Senate gridlock in judicial appointments. In his 2010 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary he summarized his concerns about judicial vacancies . . . [see the chart]

SFGate.com blog: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke Thursday at the same San Francisco forum where, a year earlier, Justice Antonin Scalia had declared that the Constitution — as properly interpreted — doesn’t prohibit sex discrimination.

Cynthia Hsu at Findlaw: U.S. Supreme Court Justice and resident Constitutional stalwart Clarence Thomas’ recent Nebraska trip served up some insight into his legal jurisprudence. And his view toward elite, Old Guard law schools.

The Blog of Legal Times: The three candidates recommended to the White House are Roy McLeese III, chief of the appellate division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia; District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz; and private practice attorney Geoffrey Klineberg.

Philly.com: While the spectacle of a Pittsburgh-area state senator being tried for improperly aiding her sister’s state Supreme Court election campaign is bad, at least the case could give a welcome push to renewed efforts to enact reforms that would help shield all Pennsylvania appellate judges from politics.

News from The Associated Press: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says the nation’s highest court would benefit from more geographic diversity among its justices

Religion Clause: In Signs for Jesus v. Town of Chichester, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 103430 (D NH, Sept. 13, 2011), a New Hampshire federal district court refused to grant costs and attorneys’ fees under 42 USC Sec. 1988 to a group that ultimately prevailed at the town Planning Board and obtained permission to put up an electronic message sign to display Christian Bible verses . . .

Appellate Daily: Circuit Split Watch: Federal appellate courts have recently split over the requirements for posthumously conceived children to receive Social Security survivor benefits. One petition for certiorari is already pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and two more could follow soon. The most recent case in the split, decided at the end of August, is Beeler v. Astrue, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

LaTimes.com: Two liberal groups have asked the Judicial Conference of the United States to investigate whether Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has violated the federal Ethics in Government Act. The prospect of such an investigation is remote, but the conduct cited by Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice is troubling.

The Blog of Legal Times: One nominee, Jesse Furman, the deputy chief appellate attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, faced tough questions during his confirmation hearing. Republican senators asked about opinion columns he wrote in college, which he disavowed, and a brief he wrote in private practice about the use of public school facilities by religious students. Furman said he would follow precedent in establishment-clause cases if confirmed.

Concurring Opinions : Barry Friedman and John C.P. Goldberg have a new book out on how to take law school exams called Open Book: Succeeding on Exams from the First Day of Law School. It is something different and really worth recommending. Here are a few reasons why I would love my students to read the book and its online content.