Politics edition:
- Mother ship? White House staffers depart for Harvard Law School [Politico]
- New York: “Lawmakers consider lawyer-friendly med-mal bills,” even as many key legislators moonlight at personal injury firms [Reuters]
- David Brooks on explosive political potential of Fannie Mae scandal [NYTimes] After Kentucky bar panel’s vote to disbar Chesley, Ohio AG pulls him off Fannie Mae suit [Adler, Frank, Beth Musgrave/Lexington Herald-Leader]
- Alabama legislature removes Jim Crow language from state constitution — but black lawmakers oppose the idea [Constitutional Daily]
- AAJ lobbyist Andy Cochran works GOP turf, has convinced trial lawyers to sponsor Christian radio program [Mokhiber, "Seventh Amendment Advocate"]
- Centers for Disease Control funnels grants to allies for political advocacy on favored public-health causes [Jeff Stier, Daily Caller]
- Must have mistaken her for a jury: “John Edwards Sought Millions From Heiress” [ABC News] “One thing [worse than Edwards's] conduct is the government’s effort to put him in jail for it.” [Steve Chapman]
Tagged as:
Alabama,
Barack Obama,
Harvard,
John Edwards,
litigation lobby,
mortgages,
New York,
politics,
public health,
wrong right
Just four weeks to official publication date (now March 1) for my book, and it seems as if everyone’s talking about the state of the law schools:
- Bruce Antkowiak (Duquesne): “Why Law Schools Must Reform” [Dan Hull, WSJ Law Blog] “Law Schools: Tournaments or Lotteries?” [Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Ed] Law schools still reluctant to grapple with oversupply problem [George Leef, Pope Center] Oregon joins trend toward restoring mentorship/apprenticeship as part of legal training [AtL] “…because there was no compelling need for additional law graduates” [1985 Missouri decision via AtL]
- Study: free representation from Harvard legal clinic actually worsened outcomes for jobless claimants [Greiner/Pattanayak via Ayres/Freakonomics ("Iatrogenic legal assistance?"), Hoffman/ConcurOp, more, yet more]
- Critical Race Theory makes good? Noted CRT-er Angela Onwuachi-Willig in line for possible appointment to Iowa high court [Wenger, ConcurOp]
- “The rise and fall of law faculty blogs” [Kerr]
- Too much heed paid to “consent,” “autonomy”? Noted feminist Prof. Robin West praises Ohio State’s Marc Spindelman for proposal to have more lawsuits over HIV transmission [Jotwell] Some high-profile lawprofs call for less online freedom in pages of new book ["The Offensive Internet"; Citron, Greenfield, Ron Coleman]
- All publicity is good dept.: along with the glowing advance notices, my forthcoming Schools for Misrule has also drawn brickbats [Brian Leiter; some ABA Journal commenters].
Tagged as:
AIDS,
Harvard,
Iowa,
law schools,
online speech,
Schools for Misrule
- Charged $21K at purported “gentleman’s” club: “Plaintiff Has No Recollection of What Transpired in the Private Room” [Lowering the Bar]
- Census Bureau sued for discriminating against applicants based on criminal, arrest records [Clegg, NRO] Class action against Accenture for screening job applicants based on criminal records [Jon Hyman]
- Virtual indeed: “Virtual Freedom” author wants government to regulate Google’s search engine [ConcurOp]
- Contingency fees for public sector lawyering could take California down dangerous path [CJAC]
- “Harvard Law vs. free inquiry: Dean Martha Minow flunks the test” [Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard]
- There’ll always be an AAJ: seminar for trial lawyers on “Injuries Without Evidence” [ShopFloor] More: The Briefcase.
- Congress may expand law to enable more age-bias suits [BLT]
- “FTC Closes First Blogger Endorsement Investigation” [Balasubramani, Spam Notes; Citizen Media Law]
Tagged as:
AAJ,
age discrimination,
California,
contingent fee,
criminal records and hiring,
FTC endorsement rules,
Google,
Harvard,
search engines,
strippers and exotic dancers
- Speech-curbing proposals continue to get polite academic reception: NYU’s Jeremy Waldron, big advocate of laws to curb “hate speech”, delivered Holmes Lectures at Harvard this past week [HLS, schedule]
- Lawsuit over collectible baseball hit into stands by Phillies’ Ryan Howard, his 200th career homer [Howard Wasserman, PrawfsBlawg; NJLRA]
- Orchid-importer prosecution a poster case for the evils of overcriminalization? Maybe not [Ken at Popehat]
- Texas State Fair and city of Dallas don’t have to allow evangelist to distribute religious tracts inside the fair, judge rules after three years [Dallas Observer blog]
- Drug maker: FDA’s curbs on truthful promotion of off-label uses impair our First Amendment speech rights [Beck and Herrmann and more, Point of Law and more]
- Did plaintiff Eolas Technologies go to unusual lengths to ensure Eastern District of Texas venue for its patent litigation? [Joe Mullin, IP Law and Business via Alison Frankel, AmLaw]
- Update: “Lesbian Denied Infertility Treatment Settles Lawsuit” [San Diego 6, earlier]
- Even in the Ninth Circuit, “psychological injury resulting from a legitimate personnel action” is not compensable [Volokh]
Tagged as:
baseball,
crime and punishment,
Dallas,
Eastern District of Texas,
emotional distress,
FDA,
forum shopping,
free speech,
Harvard,
hate speech,
law schools,
off-label,
patent litigation,
prosecution,
workers' compensation
25 of the 44 presidents have been lawyers; the WSJ law blog has a list. Only one other besides Barack Obama has been a graduate of Harvard Law. It would take a trivia expert (or perhaps a Harvard grad) to identify that one: Rutherford B. Hayes.
P.S. See also, in comments, John Peralta’s list indicating that lawyer-nominees have lately been more common on the Democratic side than the Republican.
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
Harvard,
lawyers
- M.D.s and J.D.s in cahoots: when neuroradiologists over-read MRIs in search of “disc herniations” and “cord compression” [ER Stories]
- Lawyer burns his Harvard law diploma, and stop with that joking in the back row about whether there’s some way to burn all of them [ABA Journal]
- Latest lawsuit arising from fad for photos of “Hot Chicks with Dorky Men” (that’s a paraphrase) [TMZ, QuizLaw, earlier]
- Kid draws scary Hallowe’en mask, and next thing you know the police are called [Savannah Morning News]
- Great moments in international human rights: “Modern European navies are now so mindful of the legal loopholes they face in tackling pirates that they often instruct commanders to simply let them go.” [Telegraph; earlier here, here]
- China has four times the number of people we have in the U.S., while we have seven times the number of lawyers [Elefant]
- “Vaccine injury” lawyer Clifford Shoemaker fails in effort to curtail public access to fee information, so we get to learn more about his $211,663.37 bill to the government [Seidel, Neurodiversity; related here and here]
- More about that Milberg basketball team and its 6′ 8″ ringer [Supreme Dicta]
Tagged as:
Harvard,
international human rights,
medical,
Milberg Weiss,
vaccines,
zero tolerance
I’ve got an op-ed in today’s L.A. Times (Walter Olson, “Slavery reparations: what happened?”, Oct. 31) based on a longer article forthcoming in City Journal. (The short answer to what happened: 9/11, public opinion, and the courts.)
The City Journal article is in turn a much condensed version of a draft chapter in my book-in-progress about the influence of the law schools. As I show in that chapter, there were few places where reparations enthusiasm burned hotter than in legal academia, with conferences and law review articles galore devoted to advancing the cause. The most prominent law school advocate of the reparations cause back then, Harvard’s Charles Ogletree, is back in the news these days because of his role as mentor (and, reportedly, chief advisor on racial issues) to Democratic candidate Barack Obama; he’s being mentioned as a possible civil rights chief in the next administration. Not surprisingly, Ogletree has had much less to say about the reparations cause this year than he did eight or nine years ago; I have a feeling that in an Obama administration he’d be under strict orders not to get near the issue, but of course I could be wrong.
We’ve covered reparations litigation extensively at Overlawyered.
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
Harvard,
law schools,
reparations,
Walter Olson
- Significant if true: Ninth Circuit may have finally decided that judges should stop micromanaging Forest Service timber sales [Lands Council v. McNair, Adler @ Volokh]
- GMU lawprof/former Specter aide whose law review output grabbed big chunks of others’ work without attribution doesn’t belong on the federal bench, though he may have a future at Harvard Law [Liptak, NYT; WSJ law blog]
- Update on gift card class actions (earlier) filed by Madison County, Ill.’s mother-daughter team of Armettia Peach and Ashley Peach [MC Record; more background here and here]
- If you regard demand letters from attorneys as menacing and aggressive, maybe you’re one of those “lawyer-haters” with cockamamie notions of loser-pays [Greenfield, and again]
- Just wait till Public Citizen goes after those “charities” that spend more on telemarketing than they raise by it — oh, wait a minute [LA Times via Postrel]
- U.K.: nursery schools urged to report as “racist” incidents in which pre-schoolers say “yuk” about spicy foreign foods [BBC, Telegraph, Taranto; the author speaks, via Michael Winter, USA Today]
- Blawg Review #167 creatively assigns each of 50+ blog posts to its own “state”, though it took some doing to associate us with “Maryland” [Jonathan Frieden, E-Commerce Law]
- I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… I will NOT go around saying Miami-Dade judges are being paid off… [Daily Business Review, earlier]
- “‘I’m thinking of getting disability.’ … This individual figured that [it] was tantamount to a career choice”. [physician blogger Edwin Leap]
Tagged as:
environment,
Florida,
Harvard,
law schools,
Madison County,
nastygrams,
Ninth Circuit,
political correctness,
Public Citizen,
United Kingdom
In its many lawsuits against critics of its activities (see Jan. 5) the Islamic Society of Boston has added as a defendant Muslim reformist Ahmed Mansour, a former visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. (Jeff Jacoby, “Muslim reformer still a target”, May 17; Dean Barnett, “Mosque meltdown”, Weekly Standard, Mar. 24; Miss Kelly, Mar. 24).
Tagged as:
free speech,
Harvard,
Massachusetts
The CJAC has an idea for the Harvard School of Public Health: rather than make an embarrassing decision to give a “Health Award” to the facile celebrity, why not give the award to Norma Zager, the Beverly Hills Courier reporter who exposed Erin Brockovich’s quackery? (May Habib, “Brockovich Awarded SPH’s Highest Honor”, Harvard Crimson, Oct. 19; Jessica Heslam, “Lawyer group protests award for `Erin Brockovich’”, Boston Herald, Oct. 18). Earlier coverage: Oct. 6 and especially Sep. 30 and links therein.
Tagged as:
environment,
Erin Brockovich,
Harvard
Tom Bray of the Detroit News weighs in on the controversy over the Harvard School of Public Health’s decision to give an award to Erin Brockovich (earlier: Sept. 30) and points out that the glamourpuss toxic-tort-chaser is making a push into TV:
She is listed as the executive producer of an upcoming NBC series titled “Class Action,” which will lionize a team of fictional plaintiff’s attorneys who specialize in class-action lawsuits.
(”Radical parody threatens environmental movement”, Oct. 2)(via Toxic Tort News).
Tagged as:
Detroit,
environment,
Erin Brockovich,
Harvard
“What does a high-powered Harvard Law School professor do when he gets in a dispute with a neighbor? He sues, of course — even if that neighbor takes care of his young son after school every day.” The lawprof, for those who don’t want to follow the link, is executive-compensation-scourge Lucian Bebchuk, who’s joined with a few other Harvard-affiliated property owners to fight their neighbor, the nonprofit Agassiz Neighborhood Council, which would like to install a children’s art studio on its property. (Steve Bailey, “Sue thy neighbor”, Boston Globe, May 6).
Tagged as:
environment,
Harvard
