Category: News Feeds

Hertz went bankrupt for a reason. Actually, the car-rental agency went bankrupt for many reasons: a fleet of cars no one wanted to rent, nearly $20 billion in debt, buying Dollar Thrifty, an ill-conceived challenge to Avis Budget and Enterprise, the rise of ride-sharing, losing most of its staff in a move from New Jersey to Florida, Carl Icahn’s advice. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic finished it off, Leon Black knew that Hertz was screwed, and the near-total halt in travel made it so.

And yet, in spite of Jim Cramer’s warnings, Icahn’s capitulation and the absolute lack of any reasonable grounds for hope for the company, over the past week Hertz shares inexplicably soared from around 40 cents to as much as $6.25, possibly due to day trader boredom. Since Hertz isn’t Tesla and there’s no good reason for said rally—the company is bankrupt and shareholders and probably gonna be wiped out—it could not last. And it did not, thanks to the folks at the New York Stock Exchange.

* GrubHub is facing a lawsuit filed by the company that owns KFC. GrubHub should know they don’t want to piss off the Colonel… [Fox Business]

* A Texas immigration law firm is suing a former attorney at the firm for allegedly trying to take clients with him after he resigned. [Texas Lawyer]

* A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a member of a Satanic temple which argued that Missouri’s abortion law violated religious rights. [Minnesota Lawyer]

* A woman has dropped a lawsuit against a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino which alleged that she had an allergic reaction to jalapeno peppers. Kind of reminiscent of a scene from Mrs. Doubtfire. [Sioux City Journal]

* An opera singer accused of crashing into Mar-a-Lago security checkpoint is using an insanity defense. Maybe she thought she had a “magic flute”? [AP]

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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.

The organization is also concerned that persons with albinism are at increased risk of attacks for their body parts during the lockdowns because they are locked down in insecure homes and communities with suspected perpetrators.

“Governments across Southern Africa must pay special attention to persons with albinism who are being left further behind in the wake of lockdown measures to curb the virus,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Southern Africa.

“We know marginalized groups have greater difficulty exercising their human rights, including accessing healthcare and livelihoods in normal times. They are so much more vulnerable during a pandemic.”

Governments across the region have introduced a number of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, including lockdowns and curfews. While these lockdown measures are being relaxed in some countries, they remain tight in other countries making it difficult for people to move around freely. Shops have been shut, public transport reduced, and specialized health services cut off in many places.

As a result, persons with albinism are struggling to access healthcare facilities for skin cancer testing and treatment, get treatment for visual impairments or buy sunscreen lotion, which is not always readily available particularly in rural areas.

Albinism is an inherited genetic condition that prevents the body from making enough colour, or melanin, to protect the skin from the sun. Due to their skin sensitivity to light and sun exposure, persons with albinism are likely to suffer from sunburn leading to skin cancer and other skin-related conditions. Therefore, they require sunscreen and other remedies to protect them, something those living in poverty cannot afford without government assistance.

Governments have provided food aid and stimulus packages to help people cope with the pandemic. However, Amnesty International has found that persons with albinism are often excluded from accessing state aid, such as social grants, in some countries due to access criterion that does not view their condition as a disability.

For example, in Malawi, the organization has found that persons with albinism were often excluded from registering for government poverty alleviation programmes simply because of their condition.

One woman told Amnesty International that when she tried to register for the Social Cash Transfer programme, she was told by traditional leaders charged with registering people for the programme that persons with albinism were ineligible.  The woman should have been registered like others to receive social support.

“Authorities must ensure that measures to respond to COVID-19 are inclusive of the specific needs of persons with albinism, including provision of sunscreen lotions, enabling access to information, increasing community policing and improving access to social protection in order to maintain their health, safety, dignity, and independence during and post the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Tigere Chagutah.

Background

 

Persons with Albinism endure structural and systematic discrimination across southern Africa. They continue to live in fear for their lives, as they are actively hunted and killed for their body parts in many countries across the region. Graves of those that have died are often tampered with and their remains stolen.

Approximately 151 persons with albinism have been killed in countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia since 2014 for their body parts.

The latest murder was the brutal killing of a 43-year-old carpenter and father of three, Emmanuel Phiri in Zambia on 25 March.

Post published in: Featured

Flatten the Research Curve

Flatten the Research Curve

Wolters Kluwer

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

According to data compiled by preLaw magazine, which law school had the greatest improvement in first-time test takers passing the bar from the class of 2018 to the class of 2019?

Hint: Bar passage for first time test takers went up an impressive 24.3 percent for the class of 2019 over the previous year.

See the answer on the next page.

In spite of some well-earned skepticism, Chewy.com has not precisely charted the course of its predecessors, infamous Internet bubble disaster Pets.com. A year after its initial public offering, Pets.com had been dead for three months, its very name sold off to the same company that went on to create Chewy, PetSmart. A year after its initial public offering, Chewy has more than doubled in value and is rolling in revenue from all of those people who thought adopting a pet in the middle of a pandemic was a good idea.

Technology

The program was the first in the United States to license paraprofessionals to give legal advice without the supervision of a lawyer.

By https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2020/06/washington-state-that-pioneered-licensed-legal-technicians-cancels-the-program.html

at 4:46 PM

Topics

While the country debates renaming military bases and statues of Confederate generals are decapitated and drowned by protestors, the state of Tennessee is sticking with Confederate General and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest.

On Tuesday, the Tennessee House Naming, Designating and Private Acts Committee voted 11-5 to keep the bust of the notorious slave trader on display in the in the state capital building. The vote was on party lines, with all Republicans in favor of honoring their “heritage” with a monument to the military commander who brutally massacred 300 mostly African American Union troops who had surrendered at Fort Pillow in 1864.

But the Klansman is not without his supporters.

“It was not against the law to own slaves back then,” Rep. Jerry Sexton (R-Bean Station, no seriously) said yesterday. “Who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days. Laws change.”

Will we have slavery in the United States of America? WHO KNOWS.

Rep. Mike Stewart (D-Nashville), an actual lawyer, reacted strongly to his colleague’s comments.

“I think everybody was just astonished because it just was totally at odds with the very poignant testimony by the sponsor of the bill about how burdensome the legacy of slavery is,” he told local NBC-affiliate WSMV. “The remark is more broadly reflective of the attitude that has left that bust in place.”

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, (D-Memphis) was more blunt.

“Made his fortune on the selling of bodies, selling Black folks like we were tractors. We were considered 3/5th a person. I want ya’ll to understand what that means and what that feels like to then have someone like that be honored,” she said.

Protestors gathered at the statehouse after the vote for a movement called “I Will Breathe,” which plans to seek signatures for a petition to the governor.

In fact, the bust was only put up in 1978 to counterbalance a recently-installed statue of Union Admiral David “Damn the torpedoes” Farragut. Like most Confederate memorials, it was erected long after the Civil War during a period of civil rights expansion and African American enfranchisement. The statue of a KKK hero wasn’t a history lesson — it was reminder of who holds real power. And it still is.

But the Klan figure did suffer one minor defeat this week. Current Tennessee law requires the governor to sign a proclamation honoring his birthday. A bill making that proclamation voluntary was approved by the Tennessee Senate and passed out of the House Naming, Designating and Private Acts Committee by a one-vote margin. If the full chamber approves the measure and Governor Bill Lee signs it, he and his successors will have the right to choose whether to honor a brutal slave trader and symbol of organized racism, or not.

It was the least they could do. Literally.

Protesters want Nathan Bedford Forrest bust removed from Tennessee State Capitol [WSMV]
Bid to remove Nathan Bedford Forrest bust from state Capitol fails in House committee [WBIR]

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

William Jacobson heads up the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School. But his real passion is running his blog, Legal Insurrection, which provides a what can best be called “legalish” spins on the standard conspiracy theories and white persecution complex tropes of the modern conservative movement. The front page of the site right now features talk about “race-hustlers” and a Tucker Carlson quote about “bloodguilt” to give you a sense of the sandbox they’re playing lawyers in.

But Jacobson’s latest post expresses his deep concern that there’s a “movement” underway at Cornell to get him fired.

To support his theory, he cites a number of emails that have come in from alumni complaining about seeing the Cornell name attached to articles the Jacobson wrote last week pitching “accurately detail[ing] the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started,” by which he means “peddling conspiracy theories about a widespread anti-capitalist movement using ‘fraudulent narratives’ about police killings to generate support.” Does it also tag George Soros as the secretly bankrolling this “movement”? Oh, you bet it does!

Earlier this week, other members of the Cornell Clinical Law Faculty drafted an op-ed generally criticizing Ivy League professors using that cachet to perpetuate racist tropes. Specifically, the letter calls out the use of the racially loaded term “wilding,” a byproduct of the Central Park Five case — where, we all remember, five minority kids were wrongly convicted of a crime — which directly addresses Jacobson, who used the term in a recent headline.

None of the 21 signatories, some of whom I’d worked closely with for over a decade and who I considered friends, had the common decency to approach me with any concerns. Instead they ran to the Cornell Sun while virtue signaling to students behind the scenes that this was a denunciation of me. Such is the political environment we live in now at CLS.

Yeah… it might be the “political environment we live in now at CLS,” or it might just be that you unabashedly manage a website replete with racist rhetoric and these professors are genuinely sick of your crap and how it impacts the school? Sometimes it’s not a George Soros masterminded Bolshevik conspiracy — sometimes it’s just you.

Jacobson notes that he’s never been accused of discrimination and that may well be true, but also completely misses the point. In the pursuit of equality, that’s a floor not a ceiling. There are numerous ways to intimidate and ostracize black people and other minorities that don’t require active discrimination. Indeed, the picture attached to the article is a selfie of him performatively going down to a kneeling rally in order to mockingly stand and that’s the kind of garbage — a professor showing off how little he cares about a man’s death because he thinks it’s all part of some widespread plot against “America” as he imagines it — that gets faculty and students alike fed up. This isn’t academic freedom, it’s just disrespectful trolling.

So it’s no surprise that he demands the troll’s satisfaction: a “debate.” Which is to say less a debate than an exercise in empty sophistry. Ben Shapiro is all about these little forays into controversy theater where the whole point is to show a phony “both sides” equivalency by packing the room with enough supporters to make it all seem like an earnest discussion or to set up schoolyard “chicken” taunts if the other side wises up to the rouse. No one should ever take this bait.

BLSA and other groups are working on their own effort against me. Based on documents I’ve seen, there was consideration of demanding my firing, but it appears to have moved away from that not because they don’t want me fired, but “because calling for his firing would only draw more attention to his blog and bolster his platform, and we do not want to give him that satisfaction.” The plan is to call for “the law school to unequivocally denounce his rhetoric, acknowledge the harm caused by subjecting students to his racist pedagogy, and critically examine the views of the people they employ as professors of the law.” They plan to circulate the petition to the law school community and to “inform incoming students” of the situation.

They aren’t calling for Jacobson to be fired? Dude, that’s a win for you.

I have little doubt that many students will sign because there is no choice in this environment. BLSA has announced on its Facebook page that “Silence Is Violence.” Who would refuse to sign when failure to sign would be deemed an act of violence?

A theme is becoming rapidly apparent. At every turn the critics aren’t “real.” The professors signing the op-ed are just “virtue signaling.” The people signing the petitions are just bowing to peer pressure. The criticism is never genuine, but the product of the disingenuousness of others. It’s a common theme in conservative jeremiads borne of their refusal to accept that the free market of ideas is burying their ideology, giving rise to the foundational conviction that most of their critics can’t really disagree with them and must be cynical actors playing a part. If it weren’t happening to adherents of such a toxic philosophy, it would be a condition worthy of profound pity.

But no, Occam’s Razor still holds sway — they’re just sick of your crap.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

(Melinda Oliver, showing her mother her acceptance letter to DePaul University College of Law, in a tweet that has since gone viral. Oliver’s video has been watched almost 15 million times, and she’s received generous offers of support from lawyers across the country. Thus far, lawyers have offered to pay for several semesters of books, her airfare to school, as well as her rent.)

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.