Category: News Feeds

WASHINGTON: The US should push hard to overhaul the entire international legal framework for outer space — including replacing the foundational 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), a new report from the Atlantic Council says.

As it moves to do so, the US also should more aggressively court allies with an eye to establishing a “collective security alliance for space” among likeminded countries to “deter aggression” and defend “key resources and access.”

“The 1967 Treaty is dated. It was written, literally, in a different era,” said former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James in an Atlantic Council briefing today. “At present it is too broad, and in some cases it’s probably overly specific.”

The year-long study, “The Future of Security In Space: A Thirty-Years US Strategy” was co-chaired by James and retired Marine Corps Gen. Hoss Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In essence, it argues that the US needs to lead international efforts to craft a new rules-based regime to govern all space activities — from exploration to commercial ventures to military interactions. As the two argued in a recent op-ed in Breaking D, “Great-power competition among the United States, China, and Russia has launched into outer space without rules governing the game.”

“The international law of space, centered on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is outdated and insufficient for a future of space in which economic activity is primary. The international community needs a new foundational space treaty, and the United States should precipitate its negotiation,” the study argues.

James elaborated that the idea would be to craft a more expansive treaty that covers emerging issues like debris mitigation and removal and commercial extraction of resources from the Moon and/or asteroids. That said, she stressed that the US should not abandon the OST — which has been signed by 193 nations — unless and until something new is there to replace it.

In the medium term, the study says that the US should push for expanding the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to space, “or creating an ICAO-like organization for space activity.” Interestingly, this very idea was put forward more than a decade ago by a group of scientists and academics, spearheaded by the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), but was rejected by the US — which traditionally has not wanted to create new international legal structures.

The Atlantic Council report further recommends that the White House create a “special envoy for space” housed in the State Department to handle such negotiations. It also urges the Biden administration move to make the National Space Council permanent, and empower it to craft and drive implementation of a similar 30-year government space strategy.

The study argues that one of the reasons an entire new international, and domestic, regime is necessary is the commercial boom in space and the expectation that commerce over the next 30 years will push all the way out to the Moon and beyond. This is another reason that the US needs to update its own domestic laws — to ensure that they will help “accelerate private-sector use of Earth orbit in the short term, while developing cislunar space toward the end of the thirty-year period.”

“We’re going to initiate sustained cislunar operations by the late 20s,” said Cartwright. “That’s a big step. That’s utilizing cislunar at a level of scale that it is not there today. The second one is that we’re going to bring in private and competitive commerce into that environment. If the government doesn’t support this, and if we are not able to bring the commercial sector along with us, then we’re going to have what the paper calls the Wild West or Gold Rush scenarios where there are no rules, and everybody’s just doing their own thing.”

Scott Pace, former executive secretary of the National Space Council, cautioned against pushing the Wild West analogy too far — noting that there are norms and rules of behavior. While many of those are voluntary — such as the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) debris mitigation guidelines — they have been negotiated from the “bottom up” and have widespread support, including by potential US adversaries.

Pace also pushed back against calls for adding cislunar protection to the Space Force’s current mission set.

“There are people who look at space and envision a Bluewater Navy — in the Royal Navy or US Navy post-World War II kind of mold. All of our strategic interests are still on Earth, and therefore I think, thinking [about] what SpaceForce is doing as more of a coastal, or even a brown-water Navy is probably a better analogy.”

While stressing that there are threats from Russia, China and others that ought to be driving the US to pursue a new rules-based regime for space, Cartwright and former NASA administrator Charlie Bolden both cautioned that the US needs to avoid hubris — that is, be willing to actually negotiate rather than simply insist others follow its lead.

“The question is can we build relationships and alliances that can sustain themselves through the obvious disagreements that will come,” Cartwright said. It also means that any new “norms and regimes” will need to “be responsive to industry to governments … In other words, the US can’t just say: ‘it’s going to be this way.’ We’ve got to be willing, as Charlie Bolden said, to meet people halfway, and to figure out how to do this.”

Further, Cartwright similarly cautioned against a tendency for US officials to over-hype threats.

“We have to be careful. I mean, if everybody we talk to is the enemy, and there’s a boogeyman behind every question and every opportunity, we’re not going to go anywhere,” he said. “We’re frozen. So we need to find a way to legitimately protect those things that we want to protect, but to be more open and transparent to long term goals, the ability to share space operate together in space compete in space. We probably right now are taking our terrestrial examples and exporting them to space, and that is probably not a good thing to do.”

Picture this: A few weeks into a difficult matter, your toughest client tells you, “Well, I guess you really do know how to think like a lawyer.”  You feel a momentary glow, because there’s at least a chance it’s a compliment, even if a grudging one. But then they add, “Yeah, and you write like a lawyer, too.” Ouch. You thought your writing was just fine: precise, logical and, even better, free of jargon. What’s the problem?

It’s not that you write badly, but that lawyers face a tougher task than most writers ever confront. Although your subject matter can be complex and technical, your readers are impatient, often irascible, and occasionally hostile. Some writers can simplify their content to keep their readers happy. You do not have that luxury. Some writers can expect their readers to follow along patiently until an analysis or story reaches its end. You cannot.

As a result, legal writing requires two key skills law schools seldom teach.

The first: imposing on dense, complicated material an organization that is not only logical, but also makes it as easy as possible for readers to absorb and remember the substance. Even if your raw material is as convoluted as the Rocky Mountains, you are still obligated to make it seem as smooth to navigate as an interstate across the Great Plains.

The second skill: crafting documents so they establish your credibility with readers from the start, especially by showing them promptly how your work will benefit them.

These are not “writing” skills in the law school sense — they are skills for communicating effectively with tough audiences through your writing. If your ability to communicate your thinking is to become as sophisticated as the thinking itself, you must learn to “think like a writer” with the same sophistication with which you think like a lawyer. Otherwise, you risk producing writing that looks just fine to you, but leaves your readers frustrated and unhappy.

What does it mean to “think like a writer”?

When you think like a lawyer, you do more than simply deploy precedents and interpret statutes. You also apply your understanding of the fundamental principles that govern an area of the law, and how those principles flow through all the cases, statutes, or regulations floating around within it. Similarly, thinking like a writer requires understanding the fundamental principles that govern, for example, how to organize a document or structure a sentence so it can be read easily and efficiently, and how to establish your credibility with demanding and skeptical readers.

These principles rest on two foundations: what we know about how the brain processes complex information, and what rhetoric teaches us about establishing a connection with our audience. They lead directly to specific, concrete advice at all levels of a document, from its overall organization down to its sentences. They can also transform you into a much more incisive editor of both your own writing and the writing of others — and, if you supervise other lawyers, a more effective coach for their development as legal writers.

In the newly updated Fourth Edition of Thinking Like a Writer: A Lawyer’s Guide to Effective Writing and Editing (PLI Press), authors Stephen Armstrong, Timothy Terrell, and Jarrod Reich demonstrate how even first-rate writers can raise their writing to a new level of effectiveness. Like the earlier editions, this publication provides scores of illuminating before-and-after examples and applies its advice to specific types of legal writing (emails, memos, letters, briefs, and judicial opinions).

The new edition has also been updated, however, to reflect the increased impatience and speed-reading habits of readers, and the profession’s increased reliance on email and forms of instant messaging rather than on formal memos or letters.

Biglaw has never been known for its reasonable hours — even in the best of times. But as we all know, surviving and working through a pandemic makes everything more challenging.

Client demands haven’t taken a knee as COVID raged on. So even when you had to teach your kid some new math or tried to get anyone to take a nap, work still had to be done. According to reporting by Law.com, Biglaw was sympathetic to those other obligations — but that meant the day just ended later, because the work still had to get done:

“We have made it clear that we understand that there are periods of time in the normal working day in which you are unavailable,” said William Hartnett, chairman of Cahill Gordon & Reindel’s executive committee. “People had gaps during the working day in which they weren’t working, which extends their days into the early evening.”

Some attorneys, for example, cannot be available from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on school days, so they’re online at midnight, Hartnett said. Time zones are also a complicating factor: Cahill litigation department chairman Herbert Washer logs in at 5 a.m. for his European clients and often ends his day around 11 p.m. after wrapping up his domestic work.

While client demands don’t stop, those arbitrary deadlines that are infamous in Biglaw can be curbed:

“We’re all required to meet their schedules. One thing that both Herb and I insist on is that the scheduling pressure should come from the outside, not internally. We don’t have control of the clients’ schedule, nor are we entitled to,” Hartnett said.

But even with firms trying to alleviate the extra stressors for their attorneys, folks are still working like dogs. Cahill says demand is up 20 percent, and elite firms are generally doing pretty well for themselves in the COVID world. No wonder they’re happy to share the largesse with associates:

“These firms understand how busy their associates are and people are working much harder than they have in the last 10 years,” said Ru Bhatt, a partner in Major, Lindsey & Africa’s New York associate practice group. “Firms are in a place where they’re sharing the wealth a little bit because they understand it’s tough.”

While all the extra bonus money sure has been nice for associates, being able to take a breather and get back to some semblance of normalcy is really what everyone is hoping for.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

As an immigration attorney, I have the privilege of helping people from different walks of life. Sometimes it is an American individual reuniting with a loved one. Sometimes it is an American organization trying to recruit foreign talent to further their U.S. business purposes. And there is an alphabet-length list of visa types to help them pursue those. One is the religious visa, used generally by churches, temples, synagogues, or schools that provide religious education.

The visa applications are often for priests, pastors, teachers, or workers in the religious field, who want to come to the U.S. to lead and perform sacred religious rituals or teach religious education.

There are two forms of visas available to them, — a temporary visa, R-1, and a permanent one that uses Form I-360.

The R-1 is for a total of five years and given in 2.5-year intervals. Decisions are usually delivered pretty quickly, especially if an expedited fee is paid.

For permanent status there is no option for an expedited fee, and the application processing is laboriously slow. We used to expect it to take about seven to nine months; these days we have no idea how long it takes.

Here’s the story of how the delay by the immigration service in one extraordinary case caused immense stress for a congregation of thousands during one of the worst pandemics in history.

Having a place of worship is important to most communities. One particular immigrant community in Seattle built its own church about two decades ago. They wanted to create a place of worship, education, and spiritual sanctuary. And as the community grew, they needed more priests and pastors to serve the growing congregation; from general worship to specialty rituals, the needs were unique to this religious group.

As their search to fill those positions in the U.S. failed, they looked elsewhere. And, over the years, like many churches, they, too, have been able to fulfill their community needs with trained and experienced priests from abroad.

For one particular priest on an R-1 visa, the church intended to apply for a permanent green card so that the priest could continue to serve the congregation without any disruptions. With about a year left on this R-1 status, we looked at a calendar and made some educated guesses on the processing times for approving the I-360. We estimated, based on past experience, that would happen around June 2020, soon after which we would file the green card application, Form I-485. This timeline gave us about three to four months to spare on the five-year deadline.

Our client would be able to remain in the U.S. and on the work permit that accompanied the pending green card application and continue to serve the church. We did not take into account an unforeseen pandemic that could derail these carefully thought-out plans.

In early 2020, before the coronavirus halted everything, and anxious about the tight timeline, we started making inquiries with U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) about the status of the priest’s pending I-360 application. We did not receive a helpful response. We made those inquiries periodically as the months went by but became increasingly concerned as the pandemic worsened because we began to notice delays at every stage for all our cases.

We sought assistance from our local congressional representative, as we sometimes do with tough cases, and were fortunate to have one of the most experienced and compassionate caseworkers from that office on our side. But he, too, was given the brush-off by USCIS.

During this time, like many other religious organizations, the church transitioned all its services and events online. With people stuck at home, attendance peaked. The fears that gripped the nation in 2020 — a year of protests, election anxiety, social isolation, homeschooling kids, working from home, the change in our very way of life — were causing mental anguish for the nation. This congregation was not immune.

When people are stressed, scared, and overwhelmed, they often turn to religion and spirituality as ways of coping. And here, the church had a priest they respected, admired, and loved. In fact, the pandemic brought the community closer in unprecedented ways. The church, for example, increased the number of services during weekends and evenings so people wouldn’t feel isolated. And the priests made more (masked) individualized home visits for special rituals than they would have.

As we approached the fall of 2020, the priest was reaching the end of his fifth and final year on the temporary visa, and the I-360 was still pending.  To maintain status in the hopes that the approval would arrive soon, we applied to change the priest’s status to that of visitor, on a B-2 tourist’s visa, especially since flying was practically impossible due to COVID-19 airline restrictions and travels bans. My previous article here will explain other complications that delayed the B-2 visa.

Again, we made inquiries through our congressional representative, but to date, the I-360 remains pending. And as it became clear that this cherished priest would have to leave the country, an already stressed and anxious congregation inundated the congressperson’s office with phone calls.

As I see it, there are three things that could have helped the priest’s case. Firstly, USCIS should allow the church the opportunity to pay additional fees to expedite the case. As I noted before, premium processing is available for several categories of visa applications, but not for Form I-360.

Secondly, the government should allow for concurrent filing of Forms I-485 and I-360. A pending I-485 allows a person to remain in the U.S. until the case is decided.

And finally, notwithstanding the pandemic, all cases were slowed under the previous administration. Changes need to be made to increase USCIS staff level to reduce these crisis-level backlogs.

To date, the case is still pending, the priest has left the country, and the congregation is dealing with yet another loss in their lives. Once the green card application is processed, he will likely be able to return but that may take two years, possibly longer.

You may not have thought that immigration laws could be a barrier to the practice of spirituality, but during one of the most challenging times the world has confronted in modern history, that is exactly what happened.

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Tahmina Watson is the founding attorney of Watson Immigration Law in Seattle, where she practices US immigration law focusing on business immigration. She has been blogging about immigration law since 2008 and has written numerous articles in many publications. She is the author of Legal Heroes in the Trump Era: Be Inspired. Expand Your Impact. Change the World and The Startup Visa: Key to Job Growth and Economic Prosperity in America.  She is also the founder of The Washington Immigrant Defense Network (WIDEN), which funds and facilitates legal representation in the immigration courtroom, and co-founder of Airport Lawyers, which provided critical services during the early travel bans. Tahmina is regularly quoted in the media and is the host of the podcast Tahmina Talks Immigration. She was recently honored by the Puget Sound Business Journal as one of the 2020 Women of Influence. You can reach her by email at tahmina@watsonimmigrationlaw.com or follow her on Twitter at @tahminawatson.

Ed. note: This column represents a combination of two different posts that originally appeared on Original Jurisdiction, the latest Substack publication from David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction on its About page, and you can register to receive updates through this signup page.

When will Justice Stephen Breyer retire from the U.S. Supreme Court? It’s a question on the minds of many Americans who understand the power and importance of the Court in resolving some of the most critical issues faced by the country.

At the current time, there’s a 6-3 conservative majority on SCOTUS. If Justice Breyer, 82, were to retire sometime soon, President Joe Biden could replace him with another liberal justice, whom the current Democratic Senate could confirm, God (of the Senate) Joe Manchin willing. But if Justice Breyer decides to stick it out at the Court, and then the Democrats lose the White House, the Senate, or both, he could end up leaving the Court at a time not of his choosing — e.g., because of death or disability — and might then be replaced by a conservative justice, giving conservatives an overwhelming 7-2 majority. Fearing this prospect, many commentators on the left have urged Justice Breyer to retire as soon as possible.

What do we know right now about Justice Breyer’s retirement plans? Bupkis. When Dahlia Lithwick of Slate asked him about his retirement plans in December, he responded, “Well, I can’t answer this question because it is too close to something that is politically controversial. I mean, eventually I’ll retire, sure I will. And it’s hard to know exactly when.”

Thank you, Justice Breyer. That was about as illuminating as one of your hypothetical questions at oral argument.

They say that actions speak louder than words, so let’s look at Justice Breyer’s actions: specifically, his hiring of law clerks, the brilliant young lawyers who assist him with his judicial duties and change over with each new Term of the Court. In the past, some Supreme Court justices have telegraphed their retirement plans through their law clerk hiring practices (intentionally or not).

A brief bit of background. As an active justice, Justice Breyer is entitled to four law clerks to assist him with his work at the Court. As a retired justice, on the other hand, he would be entitled to only one law clerk. So whether he has hired zero clerks, four clerks, or some number in between could be an early indicator of his retirement thinking.[1]

Timing matters as well. The Supreme Court’s Term starts on the first Monday of October, which is why, for example, the current judicial year (2020-2021) is referred to as October Term 2020. Most justices who are planning on sticking around — including Justice Breyer, in years past — hire clerks a year or more in advance of the start of each new Term in October. Since we are now in April 2021, we would expect Justice Breyer, based on the general practice of the justices and his own past practice, to have already hired four clerks for October Term 2021.

(Some justices hire law clerks even farther in advance. For example, Justice Kavanaugh has already hired law clerks for October Term 2023.)

How does law clerk hiring change when justices are planning on retiring? Let’s look at the four most recent justices to retire from the Court — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Anthony M. Kennedy — and how they handled clerk hiring prior to announcing their retirements.

Justice O’Connor announced her retirement on July 1, 2005. As of April 2005, she had hired just three clerks for October Term 2005. In June 2005, Professor Orin Kerr pointed out her “apparent failure to hire a fourth law clerk for the new Term” and speculated that maybe she was thinking of retiring — which turned out to be correct. So in Justice O’Connor’s case, her law clerk hiring did offer a window into her plans.

Justice Souter announced his retirement on May 1, 2009, (although Nina Totenberg of NPR broke the news on the evening of April 30). As of April 2009, he had hired no law clerks for October Term 2009. Although Justice Souter tended to be the last justice to hire clerks during his time on the Court, generally hiring less than a year in advance, he was usually done by April for the October Term. So his having hired zero clerks by April was a sign — an accurate one — that he was eyeing the exit.

Justice Stevens announced his retirement on April 9, 2010. As of September 2009, he had hired just one clerk for October Term 2010 — and the Court even confirmed to the media his hiring of a single clerk for that next Term. Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported:

The alternative [to hiring just one clerk] is to hire [multiple] clerks now for a job that might evaporate later, something Justice Stevens would not do lightly, people who know him said.

“Justice Stevens is a man who cares deeply about treating people with respect,” said Christopher L. Eisgruber, the provost of Princeton University, the author of The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointment Process and a former clerk to Justice Stevens.

There is at least some reason, Professor Eisgruber said, to think the justice intends to retire relatively soon.

So Justice Stevens hired just one clerk, the single clerk he was entitled to as a retired justice, before retiring. Once again, law clerk hiring gave accurate insight into his retirement plans.

This brings us to Justice Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, 2018. At the time of his announcement, he had hired four law clerks for October Term 2019 — clerks he actually had in place by December 2017, if not earlier. So of the past four justices to leave the Court through retirement, he was the only one to have hired a full clerk class before peacing out — and there are reasons to believe he was anomalous.[2]

So what does this history tell us? Of the last four justices to retire, three engaged in abnormal law clerk hiring activity prior to stepping down. This suggests that law clerk hiring, while not infallible, is often a decent indicator of a justice’s retirement plans.

This brings us to Justice Breyer. He has hired four law clerks for the next Term, October Term 2021. We know three of them:

• Elizabeth Deutsch (Yale 2016/Pillard/Oetken (S.D.N.Y.))
• Erika Hoglund (Stanford 2019/Thomas (9th Cir.)/Chhabria (N.D. Cal.))
• Joel Wacks (U. Chicago 2018/McKeown/C. Breyer (N.D. Cal.))

Upon information and belief, the “missing” Breyer hire is a woman who graduated from Yale Law School. If you have her information, please email me: davidlat@substack.com.

Hiring a full complement of clerks — with the last clerk to be hired, Erika Hoglund, getting hired within the past few weeks — suggests to me that Justice Breyer plans on sticking around. If I had to toss out numbers, I’d say there’s a 70-30 chance that Justice Breyer remains on the Supreme Court for at least one more Term, October Term 2021.

Some of you might have noticed that Justice Breyer gave a recent speech at Harvard Law School about the future of the high court. Do his remarks shed any additional light on his plans? Specifically, Justice Breyer returned to his alma mater last Tuesday to deliver the annual Scalia Lecture. In his nearly two-hour talk, entitled “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics,” Justice Breyer sounded skeptical notes about so-called “court packing,” urging folks inclined to support structural changes to the Court to “think long and hard before embodying those changes in law.” He repeatedly emphasized the difference between law and politics and noted that the conservative majority at the Court frequently ruled against former President Donald Trump and refused to get involved with the 2020 election.

The upshot of his remarks: the Supreme Court is not as political and politicized an institution as many people think. And if that’s the case, justices should retire for personal reasons — e.g., they no longer feel they can do the job — as opposed to political reasons having to do with control of the White House and Senate. So this strikes me as a preemptive defense by Justice Breyer of his decision to stay on the Court, directed at individuals and groups like, say, Demand Justice:

Of course, this is all just conjecture on my part, and I must offer the standard disclaimers. As mentioned earlier, Justice Kennedy hired a full complement of clerks and then retired anyway, so Justice Breyer might very well do the same.

At the end of the day, I rely on you, my wonderful readers, for important information and updates about topics like SCOTUS clerk hiring. If you know about hires (whether by Justice Breyer or others) that don’t appear in my prior roundup and weren’t already tweeted from @SCOTUSambitions, please email me: davidlat@substack.com. Thanks!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] What do law clerks to retired justices do? They work with their retired bosses on various projects — e.g., assisting justices who sit with lower courts (as Justices O’Connor and Souter did in retirement), helping out with speeches or articles — and they also get farmed out to the chambers of an active justice to work on cases alongside that justice’s clerks.

[2] What explains Justice Kennedy’s hiring four clerks prior to retiring? Two things. First, as subsequent reporting later revealed, he was genuinely on the fence about retiring, for months leading up to his final decision. Retirement was on his mind; in fact, he warned the folks he gave clerkship offers to that he might be retiring. But he didn’t completely make up his mind until fairly late in the game, and hiring a full set of clerks allowed him to keep his options open.

Second, Justice Kennedy was one of the most media-conscious of the justices. He cared quite a bit about his press coverage, he was conscious of how he was being watched by the press, he vigorously pushed back on retirement rumors back in 2016 — and I don’t think he liked the idea of tipping his hand on something as important as his retirement through something as mundane as law clerk hiring. So he decided to fake us all out by hiring four clerks. (And those four clerks all wound up fine, in case you’re wondering; consistent with the Court’s tradition surrounding “orphaned” law clerks, places were found for them in the chambers of other justices.)

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David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer and speaker about law and legal affairs. You can read his latest writing about law and the legal profession by subscribing to Original Jurisdiction, his Substack newsletter. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. Before entering the media and recruiting worlds, David worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at davidlat@substack.com.

The average hedge fund just enjoyed its best start to a year in more than 20, rising 6.1% in the first quarter. Not only is that its best quarterly return since the turn of the century, it even managed what feels like a rarer feat: Beating the broader markets by nipping the S&P 500, which managed only a 5.8% Q1.

* An MLB umpire was awarded $500,000 after filing a defamation lawsuit against a former pro baseball player. Guess his lawyers hit the case out of the park and that can buy a lot of peanuts and Cracker Jacks… [USA Today]

* Fox News has hired a new general counsel as it battles a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. [Reuters]

* Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer claimed his client is going blind and is missing teeth in a bid to block extradition to California. [Fox News]

* A New York attorney recently appeared on Jeopardy! [Bronx Times]

* A lawyer for Marking a Murderer‘s Steven Avery claims a new witness’ statements may exonerate her client. Maybe they’ll be another season of the series afterall… [Newsweek]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

Of the 36 members of the newly created Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, how many are former SCOTUS clerks?

Hint: Co-chairing the commission are Bob Bauer, a New York University School of Law professor, and Cristina Rodríguez, a Yale Law professor (and former O’Connor clerk).

See the answer on the next page.

Are you not enjoying the “rapidity of the rise and collapse of bubbles, fueled by retail trading platforms and social media?” Snowbird Dan Loeb is.