- California: “Feds Say Lawyer Took Bribe to Encourage Client to Lie in Immigration Case” [NLJ]
- “Before you celebrate [the] seemingly wise anti-litigation statement [of the “Skanks in New York” blogger], take note that she’s suing Google…” [Althouse, earlier here, here, etc.] Dispute is female-vs.-female, but feminist lawprofs inevitably spot gender discrimination [Citron, ConcurOp; Greenfield]
- “Ousted members of Florida chess board sue to reclaim their volunteer positions” [St. Petersburg Times]
- Man freed after serving 22 years on dubious child abuse charges, but prosecutor who went after him is doing fine [Radley Balko, Reason “Hit and Run”, Bernard Baran case, Massachusetts]
- Khalid bin Mahfouz, plaintiff in celebrated “libel tourism” case against Rachel Ehrenfeld in England, is dead at 60 [Wasserman/Prawfsblawg]
- Colorful University of Connecticut law professor lands in a spot of bother again after girlfriend’s arrest [Above the Law]
- Federal judge says prosecutor in Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office allowed witness to testify falsely [WSJ Law Blog]
- Deja vu? “‘Seinfeld’ joke gets man canned for harassment” [Des Moines Register, earlier Wisconsin case; & see Ted’s caveat in comments]
Posts Tagged ‘law schools’
August 10 roundup
- Annals of legal marketing: law firm says its flyers offering to sue landlords over sexual assault on premises were left indiscriminately on car windshields, and it didn’t mean to target the woman who found it on hers and assumed it referred to her case [New Jersey Law Journal, Legal Blog Watch, Legal Ethics Forum]
- “The Bankruptcy Files: Inside Michael Vick’s ‘Excessive’ Legal Bills” [AmLaw Daily]
- Panel spanks U. of Illinois law school for admitting students at behest of politicos, but goes easy on the pols themselves [Ribstein, more, earlier here, here, here]
- Youths who obtained big settlement in San Francisco Zoo tiger attack are having more encounters with the law [SF Chronicle, earlier]
- Czech Republic: Suit by communist professor against critical students still in progress after 18 years [Volokh]
- More thoughts on Florida lawmakers’ criminalization of purported gang signals, on MySpace and elsewhere [Citizen Media Law, earlier]
- RIAA case: does the Constitution restrain unreasonable statutory damages? [Kennerly]
- Eager law grad hoping to make a career of suing foodmakers over obesity [six years ago on Overlawyered]
July 16 roundup
- Bad move for GOP to call disappointed litigant as witness at Sotomayor hearing [Taranto via Barnett] Nominee’s disavowal of Legal Realism and identitarian/viewpoint-based judging should be seen as a victory for legal conservatism [Copland at PoL, related Examiner and NRO “Bench Memos”; Adler/WaPo; coverage in NYT] Why do Senators speechify instead of asking questions? “Why does the rain fall from up above?” [Althouse]
- “Illinois Law Dean Announces New Admission Policy in Wake of Scandal” [NLJ; earlier] “U of I Law School Got Scholarship Cash for Clout Admissions” [ABA Journal]
- Weird warning sign in Swedish elevator [BoingBoing; commenters there disagree as to whether the elevator in question is of an old continuous-motion type called a Paternoster which has fallen out of use in part because of its high accident risk, or an elevator of more conventional design but lacking an inner door]
- “Gambler Appeals; Wants More of His Money Back From Casino” [South Korea; Lowering the Bar]
- The price of one Ohio Congresswoman’s vote on Waxman-Markey [Washington Times via Coyote, who has a followup]
- “Want to live like tort king Melvin Belli?” [real estate listing in Pacific Heights; WSJ Law Blog]
- Fierce moral urgency yada yada: “Put nothing in writing, ever” advised Carol Browner on CAFE regs [Mark Tapscott, D.C. Examiner] Alex Beam zings Obama on signing statements [Boston Globe]
- Constitution lists only three federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. How’d we get to 4,500 today? [Ryan Young, CEI “Open Market”]
Defending the University of Illinois
Larry Ribstein thinks indignation over political influence on law school admissions would be better directed at the politicians who arm-twist university administrators. Earlier here.
Lawprof’s bias suit cites curriculum, panel imbalance
Catching up with a story from a while back: a law professor at Oklahoma City University, Danne Johnson, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the university of discrimination. Per this account six months ago in The Oklahoman, the lawsuit sounds as if it will raise issues of wider interest. It is apparently based at least in part on the handling of an October 2007 memo by four OCU law professors alleging, in The Oklahoman’s words, “sexual harassment, pay disparity and insensitivity”:
The female professors also complained the OCU law school has no regular civil rights course, criminal law classes don’t cover rape, and the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade is only covered sporadically in constitutional law.
The memo was sparked by two incidents: the alleged sexual harassment of two female professors at Dean Lawrence Hellman’s home in July 2007 and the all-male panel chosen for a Constitution Day program in September 2007. …
The memo notes the lack of women on a faculty appointment committee, which regularly included two university professors who are “openly hostile” to the idea of giving special consideration for women and minorities.
According to The Oklahoman, Johnson’s lawsuit cites as indicative of the university’s discriminatory stance that its general counsel, William J. Conger, “indicated the issues raised by Johnson and the other professors were misunderstandings or ‘cultural’ issues, rather than legal issues” (via Secunda/Workplace Prof Blog).
Illinois law school scandals/furors
Influence-peddling at the University of Illinois with state politicians including now-disgraced Gov. Blagojevich, per a Chicago Tribune investigation:
What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school?
Five jobs for graduating law students, suggest internal e-mails released Thursday.
The only surprising thing about this stuff is that none of these bigwigs (including a law school dean — apparently she never learned to think like a lawyer) can ever seem to remember that government emails are subject to FOIA requests.
Also in Illinois, a furor has broken out over DePaul’s firing of its law dean, Glen Weissenberger (per Paul Caron) “for reporting truthful information to the ABA in connection with its reaccreditation site visit”. John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum:
For some time now, I’ve been arguing on this blog that the most powerful form of ethics teaching that occurs in law schools is the open and widespread gaming of numbers and statistics for rankings purposes. Students are taught that gaming the numbers and then concealing it, fibbing about it, or rationalizing it, is what grown-ups do for a living in the real world.
More: Above the Law (with emails from U. of I.); Prof. Bainbridge (recalling his days on U of I Law’s admissions committee); and see comments below on this post for views of the DePaul episode differing from those linked above.
Further: The U of I dean at the time says her email remarks were facetious and are being misinterpreted [David Hyman, Volokh]. And Brian Leiter (via Glenn Reynolds): “Attacking university officials over this scandal is like attacking the victim of a robbery for handing over his money…. And, by the way, the same story is waiting to be written about admissions at every state university in the country.”
June 12 roundup
- Judge in Van Buren County, Michigan won’t approve adoptions unless one parent promises to stay home [Ken at Popehat]
- Critical view of proposed Performance Rights Act, under which radio would pay new fees to artists and copyright owners [Jesse Walker, Reason]
- Student threatens to sue school district: “You can say she was an exotic dancer and she was 18, but it was not an equal relationship.” [Boston Herald, columnist Margery Eagan, Worcester Telegram]
- More attention for U.S. Chamber’s movie trailers promoting awareness of lawsuit abuse [NY Times]
- Train didn’t actually strike her car at dicey RR crossing after gate closed behind her, but New York woman’s suing Metro-North anyway for the bad scare [Westchester, N.Y. Journal-News]
- Uh-oh: Defamation-and-privacy section of American Association of Law Schools keeps electing as leaders feminist lawprofs known for speech-restrictionist views [Greenfield, earlier]
- Cows and vows don’t mix: Oregon county says weddings may not be held on farm-zoned land [KTVZ]
- Paul Offit, author of noteworthy book Autism’s False Prophets, sued by anti-vaccine blogger [Confutata (scroll), Alyric, link to complaint (PDF) at Courthouse News]
Right to sue over “heightism”?
Reading law review articles can be so depressing, though at least in this case the author winds up rejecting the idea of a comprehensive federal law “that would flatly prohibit height-based employment decisions” (via).
Urge to scream dept.
Frank Wu in U.S. News & World Report: “Why Law School Is For Everyone”.
ConcurOp “cyberspeech as tort” symposium, cont’d
That lawprof chatfest promoting the idea of wider rights to sue over online speech has provoked a bit of a furor; see addenda to our earlier post as well as continuing coverage at Scott Greenfield’s site. Good! Better to have a controversy now than wait until after some academic consensus has already hardened around a MacKinnonite “of course we need to let people sue more widely over speech, or else women’s voices will be silenced” position. Update March 2010: David Kopel covers at Volokh.
The episode has also helped spin off a second, tangential controversy taking the form of a new round in the ongoing dispute between some “practical” law bloggers and their counterparts in legal academia, on which see Greenfield and Marc John Randazza.