The Shark

laguna beach settles with erwin chemerinsky in dispute over rights of the homeless.

[cynthia]

You may remember Erwin Chemerinsky's lawsuit, on behalf of four homeless people, against Laguna Beach. It attracted national attention and raised the profile of the UC Irvine dean even higher at a time when his nascent law school was just getting its bearings.

Chemerinsky, and law firm Irell & Manella, claimed the city had mistreated its homeless citizens by interfering with those who chose to sleep in the streets.

Well, the city has settled, according to LA Legal Pad.

"Under the agreement, the city's police officers will not cite, arrest or harass people under state law simply for sleeping in public places, as long as there are no reasonable public health or safety concerns.

The agreement also establishes a process for expunging from the public record citations and convictions obtained under the city's previous anti-camping ordinance, key portions of which were repealed in February following the filing of the lawsuit last December."

blagojevich scandal reaches university of illinois law school admissions office.

[cynthia]

In case you hadn't heard, it's WTF Is Up With Law School Administrators Week.

In addition to the drama at DePaul, things at University of Illinois are also reaching a "oh no they did not" boiling point, due to some investigative work done by the Chicago Tribune when they asked themselves: "What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school?"

According to the Tribune and internal emails released earlier in the week, all it costs is a handful of jobs for U of I law grads. Now that's taking a creative look at career services!

"In one e-mail exchange, University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman forced the law school to admit an unqualified applicant backed by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich while seeking a promise from the governor's go-between that five law school graduates would get jobs. The applicant, a relative of deep-pocketed Blagojevich campaign donor Kerry Peck, appears to have been pushed by Trustee Lawrence Eppley, who often carried the governor's admissions requests."

When Law School Dean Heidi Hurd balked on accepting the applicant in April 2006, Herman replied that the request came 'Straight from the G. My apologies. Larry has promised to work on jobs (5). What counts?'

Hurd replied: 'Only very high-paying jobs in law firms that are absolutely indifferent to whether the five have passed their law school classes or the Bar.'

Hurd's e-mail suggests that students getting the jobs are to be those in the 'bottom of the class.'"

I'm not really sure what to say about that. It looks like Illinois politicians aren't sure what to say, either. So far, a state commission has been convened to investigate those administrators implicated.

Dean Hurd apparently spent a lot of her work-time hating her students, as the emails characterized her as one who "showed [her] disdain for the special admits and even worked behind the scenes to campaign against them" at the same time as she was "[operating] a parallel admissions review for clouted students."

"I'll do my best to keep the number of Provostian admits to a minimum, and extract payment for them," Hurd wrote to her admissions staff in 2003.

At least 24 "special interest" students were admitted over a four year span, indicating that despite their dislike of politically-connected students, they weren't willing to give up the lucrative possibilities of their admittance. In a sense, these "clouted" students were admitted for their potential to serve the school, like really fucked up and sad athletes.

So why'd they do it? My guess: the US News rankings, of course! Job placement after graduation accounts for 18% of a school's US News ranking score.

gray davis tells columbia grads to keep on keepin' on.

[cynthia]

You all may remember Brian reporting (with maybe some amusement?) on Gray Davis's scheduled appearance at Columbia Law's commencement.

Well, Davis got through the speech, which is now posted online (via Capitol Alert) for your perusal. To his credit, he didn't try to avoid the pink elephant in the room: he directly addressed his recall, and offered up some words of encouragement that might actually ease a struggling graduate's mind in these times:

"Rest assured, all of you will experience failure at some point in your life, deserved or not. I believe I am uniquely qualified to convince you that there is no defeat, no matter how devastating, that you cannot overcome."

much ado about yoo: padilla's civil suit rages on.

[julie anne]

If you thought that you wouldn't have to hear about U.C. Berkeley tenured law professor John Yoo for at least a little while, Yoo were mistaken.

Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District did not dismiss a civil suit brought by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla against Yoo for Yoo's role in the writing of memos that authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation methods", also known as "torture."

Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in 2002 for an alleged "dirty bomb" plot only to have the charges dropped three years later, and was jailed in January 2008 for separate charges of providing support to the Al-Qaeda terror network. He is now serving a 17-year prison sentence for terrorist activities, according to AFP.

White's ruling means that Yoo, who is being represented by the Justice Department, may finally have to answer for legal opinions that, according to the New York Times, subjected Padilla to “gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part off a systematic program of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr. Padilla’s humanity and his will to live.”

As interesting as this latest development may be, what's even more stunning is what White, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his 42-page ruling.

this year's court clerks, brought to you buy corporate america.

[cynthia]

One might thing it would be a little conflict-y to put deferred (and still salaried) biglaw associates to work in courtrooms. But Legal Blog Watch is reporting that the Massachusetts Judicial Ethics Committee of the Supreme Judicial Court approved the practice last week. The chief administrator of the state's courts appealed to the governing body for permission to hire deferrees as "volunteer interns" while these "interns" remain on the payrolls of biglaw firms. The committee agreed it would be ok, sending images of corporate-sponsored court employees rippling through the heads of the blogosphere.

What makes it ok for these "interns" to be biglaw associates, you ask? Only this gargantuan catch: they must keep their associations secret, in what strikes me as a bit of Fight Club trickery.

"The committee acknowledged that allowing law firms to pay the salaries of judicial law clerks would implicate judicial ethics rules that require judges to avoid impropriety and appear unbiased. The interns' services could also be seen as inappropriate gifts to the judges from the law firms, the committee said. But all this could be circumvented, the committee concluded, if the clerks are forbidden from telling anyone -- even on Facebook or Twitter -- about their connections to their law firms."

Ahso so!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're a deferred associate right now, don't most of your friends know? Your family? Your blog's readers? Are you supposed to un-tell them to get a job with Massachusetts' courts?

Although the judicial ethics committee handed down its approval, despite outrage from members of the legal community, the plan will not go into effect until the State Ethics Commission issues its opinion on the matter. As Legal Blog Watch notes, it could be so long until this happens that "deferrals may well expire before the plan can ever be implemented."

And in other clerkship news, check out this Above the Law item on whether or not $250K signing bonuses for SCOTUS clerks are outrageous in this economy.

ABA's accreditation review process may signal that it's finally heeding criticism.

[julie anne]

Yesterday, The Shark via the ABA Journal reported that the American Bar Association is considering an overhaul to its law school accreditation process, a move that was met by nothing less than a “Hallelujah!” from an Above the Law blogger and is sure to get similar reactions from those who have criticized the process in the past.

Rather than focus on law school’s “input”, like its size, budget and campus, the ABA is looking to move to a more “output” based evaluation that would “focus on what students actually take away from their educational experience at a particular law school rather than what the school teaches, and how,” according to ABA official E. Christopher Johnson Jr. in an article in the ABA Journal.

Cue the heavenly choirs.

But before you recreate the last 10 minutes of Sister Act 2, it might help to know just what sort of demons the ABA has been dogged by regarding the law school accreditation process.

democrats should be comfortable with sotomayor, but uneasy about her nomination.

[patrick]

The news is full of commentary about the looming Sonia Sotomayor confirmation (has it really only been a week??) defined mostly by conservative frustration over her comments at Berkeley in 2001, and speculation about her potential politics as a Supreme Court Justice.

Given the Democrats' presence in the Senate, it seems to me that she'll be confirmed, and I think that's a good thing — a more liberal presence on the Court would serve the country well.

All the same, I'm a little disappointed. I think it's fantastic and even important that she represents a political minority that is often shut out of our country's high-powered legal circles. And I think that as a blanket rule the world tends to be a better place when women sit in judgement. From that perspective, the Court will improve.

Further, and from a raw credibility standpoint, it's great that she's also an appellate judge.

But is she really the leading intellectual voice for progressive jurisprudence in this country? And if not, why was that person passed over? When President Bush nominated John Roberts there was no doubt that he was one of our country's leading appellate voices, and eminently qualified to engage with the legal issues before the Court. Ditto Samuel Alito. I saw both of those appointments as politically disappointing, but reasonable and therefore not galvanizing. For example, Roberts' slippery handling of Roe v. Wade and abortion at his confirmation hearings impressed me, even while it made me uncomfortable.

I'm not sure Sotomayor falls in the same catagory, and that, in a nutshell, is the rub. Her selection, which seemed to be determined as much by proxies for diversity as by jurisprudential merit, strikes me as a bite from the same ugly political apple that Regan took with Bork.

This time, and under this administration, I approve — for personal and political reasons, I am confident I will stand behind most of what Sotomayor will say and do as a justice. I'm not confident, however, that her nomination has done anything to rise above the ugly and self-serving politics that have come to surround SCOTUS nominations in the last thirty years. And in the long run, I think that's a shame.

more on hastings: governor's proposal would create an $8k per student annual tuition increase.

[cynthia foster]

Although the governor's new budget proposal, which includes cutting off all state funding of Hastings, has not been approved and is being "viewed skeptically" by state legislators, it's a scary piece of news for Hastings students, both current and future.

If California does indeed revoke it's $10M annual payment to the school, and the school is forced to pass along the cost to its students, tuition would go up $8,175 per year for each of Hastings' 1,250 students.

According to the Cal Law story on the news (free reg. req.), "the governor [is] targeting Hastings and other state-funded programs that don't have a federal mandate." The switch would effectively make Hastings a private institution.

Unsurprisingly, the issue of UC Irvine and its new law school has come up:

"Why would we start a new law school when we've had Hastings around for 100 years, and it has a great reputation?" said Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego.

breaking: governator wants $10M from hastings to add to the budget cut pot.

[cheryl miller]

As part of an effort to cut $5.5 billion from the state budget, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday proposed eliminating almost all state funding for Hastings College of the Law. The $10.3 million cut amounts to roughly one-quarter of the school's academic budget, said Hastings' chief financial officer, David Seward.

More on this as news develops later today.

SCOTUS shortlist: kathleen sullivan and pamela karlan are not in fact the same person.

[cynthia foster]

In the last installment of our SCOTUS shortlist way back when feature, we bring you two Stanford law professors who have made their reputations on campus. Unlike some of the other contenders for the nomination, politics and business have played little role in the careers of Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan.

Kathleen Sullivan, Stanford Law professor
Alumna: Harvard Law School, 1981

• A close colleague/mentee of Lawrence Tribe, who was her professor in her 2L year, and who enlisted her to work on various appellate cases with him.
• Won the Ames Moot Court Competition, an annual upper level competition at Harvard.
• A recipient of numerous fine teaching awards, including the Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard.
• Became the first female dean of any of Stanford's schools when she was appointed dean of the law school in 1994. She left that position in 2004 to found the Stanford center on constitutional law. (Stanford)
• During her deanship, she created Stanford's LLM program.
• She failed the California bar exam in 2005, after being hired by Quinn Emanuel to start an appellate practice group. She passed the Feburary 2006 exam.
• She supported Hillary Clinton via a donation during the Democratic primary. (Campaignmoney.com)
• She is openly gay.
• For a video of Sullivan and beleaguered Professor John Yoo of Berkeley hashing out the relevance of the Rehnquist court (Sullivan more than holds her own), click here.

Pamela Karlan, Stanford Law professor
Almuna: Yale Law School, 1984

• Formerly taught at the University of Virginia.
• Took a job as Assistant Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund out of law school.
• Moved to Stanford after Virginia Law. There she became the founding director of Stanford's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
• Also the faculty advisor to Stanford's chapter of the American Constitutional Society.
• Has a Facebook group created to support her addition to the SCOTUS shortlist. (Facebook)
• She is openly gay.
• A very well-regarded commencement speaker, whose remarks at graduations at both Yale and Stanford have been disseminated across the web with bloggers calling her "funny," "scary smart," "clever," and "inspiring." Excerpts below.

"Would I like to be on the Supreme Court? You bet I would. But not enough to have trimmed my sails for half a lifetime. Sure, I’ve done lots of things I regret over the years. But the things I regret aren’t the things that keep someone from being nominated or getting confirmed. I regret being unkind to people I love and respect and admire. I regret getting frustrated by little things. I regret never taking a summer off. I regret not being able to stick to a diet. But I don’t regret taking sides on questions involving the Voting Rights Act. I don’t regret helping to defend the constitutional rights of criminal defendants. I don’t regret litigating cases on behalf of gay people. I don’t even regret being sort of snarky." - Stanford Law commencement, 2009 (Ms. JD)

"You’re not facing a choice between being a public interest lawyer or being a sellout. Truly great lawyers take both paths from the fork. They use their gifts to give back to the community, as well as to take care of themselves and the people they love. They make corporations more responsible. They prosecute crime. They pave the road for new technologies to bring life-saving and life-enhancing products to the market. They defend the accused. They remember a wonderful insight from one of my favorite poets and readers of poetry, Randall Jarrell: "If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times." The best of times .... the worst of times. Rather than quoting more from A Tale of Two Cities, – “it is a far, far better thing” and all that – let me point to the opening sentence of David Copperfield. It goes like this: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." The pages of the briefs you file and the memoranda you write and the opinions you publish in F.5, or whatever we’re at when you become judges, should be a part of making your own life heroic." - Yale Law commencement, 2007 (.pdf)