Category: News Feeds

Stephen Susman remains unconscious and hospitalized today, according to a report in Law360, after a serious biking injury sustained on April 22.

Susman, an avid bicyclist, decided to spend the COVID lockdown in Houston where the weather allowed the 79-year-old to remain active. Unfortunately, while riding with some colleagues, Susman went over the handlebars when his front wheel struck an uneven spot on the pavement. As Law360 points out, Susman has run in 150-mile charity rides, making this a reminder that accidents can befall even the most experienced of riders. Be careful out there everyone.

We here at Above the Law are wishing Susman a speedy recovery and thinking of him, his family, and his firm.

Trial Attorney Stephen Susman Hospitalized After Bike Crash [Law360]

---

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.

Austerity measures continue to be rolled out at law firms across America, and this afternoon, we have news from one of the very first firms to be affected by the coronavirus crisis. In mid-March, Davis Wright Tremaine closed several of its offices after an employee who displayed COVID-19 symptoms passed away. Although that employee ultimately tested negative for the virus posthumously, the firm asked all attorneys and staff to work remotely across all offices for the foreseeable future. Now, DWT is doing what it can to make sure the firm remains open after all is said and done.

Davis Wright currently finds itself in 92nd place in the Am Law 100 rankings, with $414,144,000 in gross revenue in 2019, and the firm is trying to keep its finances on the up and up by offering up a veritable smorgasbord of cost-cutting efforts, from reduced partner distributions to salary cuts for associates and staff to furloughs and reduced schedules for staff. Here’s what’s going on:

• Partner Distributions: Quarterly equity partner distributions will be reduced, with the expectation that equity partner compensation for the year will be at least 25% below budget.

• Salary Reductions: Effective with the pay period beginning May 2 through December 31, 2020
  15% for contract partners
  12% for associates, counsel and of counsel
  15% for C-level executives
  6-10% for staff based on salary level, with no reduction below $60,000

• Furloughs: Effective May 2, we will temporarily furlough approximately 8% of our staff to adjust for workflows that have been disrupted or diminished due to reduced demand. Those furloughed will be eligible for the expanded federal unemployment benefits. The firm will also continue to provide them with medical, dental, and vision benefits, as well as access to our new Employee Disaster Relief Program, described below. We anticipate they will return to work as soon as we can resume more normal operations. We’re not planning to furlough any attorneys at this time. We’ll continue to share resources across practice groups to take advantage of available bandwidth and support the areas that remain very busy.

• Reduced Schedules: In addition, a small number of staff members will move to reduced schedules to account for decreased workflow. Most of them (based on their state) will also be eligible for unemployment benefits and receive continued benefits. We anticipate that they’ll return to their standard schedules when workflow returns to normal for their functions.

On the bright side, DWT has established an Employee Disaster Relief Program, funded by partners, to provide monetary relief to staff members who suffer financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. The program is designed to provide assistance with various household expenses. In addition, the firm has created a vacation donation bank for staff to donate unused time for others who don’t have the leave needed to help with medical emergencies or the time needed to care for family.

Here’s a statement from Jeff Gray, Managing Partner of Davis Wright Tremaine:

We came into this crisis after a record year in 2019 and a strong first quarter, even as we adjusted to office closures and a changing business environment. We have continued to build our firm for the future, including bringing in several new laterals in the first quarter to service clients in our key industries. Though demand remains high in some practice areas, it’s decreasing in several others, and we’re seeing a significant slowdown in collections. We’ve delayed actions that affect jobs and paychecks for as long as we could. But, like many of our peers, we now must take additional steps to protect the firm, while continuing to provide the highest level of client service and ensure we emerge in the strongest possible position.

Our approach addresses business necessity in a manner consistent with our core values. We’re sharing the sacrifice across the firm and protecting jobs as best we can. We’re asking more of those who make more, with the hope that we will not need to take additional action. We must make sacrifices together, but we will also share in our success. If we end the year better than we currently expect, which we are working very hard to do, we will share that financial success across all levels of the firm.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

---

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.

Over 1,000 signatures now grace a petition directed at the Harvard Law School Administrative Board, a testament to how law students really can identify procedural unfairness when they see it.

The petition demands the Administrative Board call off its investigation of three students who engaged in a silent protest during the school’s 45th Annual Fall Reunion on October 26. The Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign organized the protest and the students involved complied with the school’s Orwellian “Protest and Dissent Guidelines” during the event and went on about their lives for months after the fact.

In February, the students were informed that they were under investigation, but to date, the school hasn’t even bothered to provide the students with the evidence against them. As they study for finals and prepare for their uncertain careers in the middle of the pandemic, Harvard officials seem more occupied with making sure they’ve properly quieted all dissent by keeping protesters in limbo.

To this day, not a single administrator, a single professor, a single disciplinarian has ever stated what action exactly that I have taken that may have violated the guidelines,” [Amanda] Chan said. “Yet here I am 182 days later, still under investigation, still unsure if I’m going to be able to graduate on time, still unsure if I’ll even be charged in the matter.”

It’s difficult not to see the arbitrary move to dig into this protest months after the fact as tied to the January protest at a Paul Weiss recruiting event calling on the firm to ditch its ties to Exxon. Facing increasing activism, heading into the archives to gin up investigations of students with the propensity to launch even fully compliant protests might be one method to lean on anyone eyeing graduation as a protest site or something. Perhaps that’s overthinking it, but the school could defuse these connections pretty easily by just being upfront.

But, again, it’s encouraging to see so many students come together to sign this petition. It’s not like the divestment initiative is necessarily supported by the vast majority of Harvard students — if it were, there wouldn’t only be three students in this matter — but even folks who have never considered the prospect of the school’s investment in private prison companies can respect a railroading when they see it.

And this whole thing is going to make a few more students take a look at exactly what the Divestment Campaign is all about, meaning the Administrative Board unintentionally gave the protest even more exposure so at least there’s something good coming out of it.

Petition Calls on Harvard Law School Admins to Drop Investigation into Student Protesters [Harvard Crimson]

Earlier: Harvard Law School Students Protest Paul Weiss Recruiting Event

In most video games, one tries to avoid death. As a trusts and estates attorney, my mission is to address problems that arise after death. I make it my business to avoid troubling family members, distant relatives, and the state.

A last will and testament determines who receives one’s estate upon death. Whether one has a few hundred dollars or many millions, a last will dictates who receives. The recipients need not be relatives, or even people. One can leave assets to schools, religious institutions or charities, or even set up foundations for the benefit of causes or trusts to take care of pets.

Not everyone signs a last will and testament and the consequences can be downright shocking if not unfortunate. Every state has its own set of intestate laws wherein a statute determines who is next-of-kin and the recipient of the decedent’s assets. If there is no next-of-kin, generally the state takes the estate.

Property that has escheated means that it has reverted to the state. This may pertain to abandoned property or assets that one never knew about. In the context of an estate, one’s property would escheat to the state in the event there are absolutely no living heirs to take pursuant to the laws of intestacy. Depending on one’s family, this may be preferable to some relatives receiving.

Each state is different. In some states, a surviving spouse and children will split the estate. This can be difficult in the event the children are not the children of the surviving spouse. Even if they are, monies that may have been intended for the surviving spouse will now belong to the younger children, leaving the spouse with less than she can survive on, or worse, dependent on the children.

In some cases, there is no spouse or children, but a life partner who bears no legal status in the decedent’s life. Thankfully, same-sex marriages have mitigated many problems that used to exist when individuals were unable to marry, but were life partners.  For roommates, best friends, business partners, and significant others, problems in inheritance persist, as they do not take under the laws of intestacy. Without a last will and testament, they will not be included, no matter how devoted or involved they were to the decedent.

The laws of intestacy get interesting when the next-of-kin stretches beyond spouses, children, and even parents and grandparents. Siblings generally come next in line in addition to their children, the decedent’s nieces and nephews, you know, the ones who never call to thank you for the birthday gift. Uncles and aunts, the siblings of parents may stand to inherit and even their children, who are the descendants of grandparents, otherwise known as your cousins. Certain states break it down even further and name children of cousins, for example, a first cousin once removed.

Some states go even further and permit step children to inherit in the event there is no one to receive under one’s own family tree. It could be strange for a spouse’s children from another relationship to receive all of a decedent’s belongings.

In many jurisdictions, next-of-kin must be notified in the event a will is offered to the court for probate. This gives the family the ability to object in the event they feel the will was executed as a result of undue influence or the testator lacked capacity. Often when writing a last will, clients will state that they do not have any known relatives. In this day and age, with the internet as our tool, those proclamations can usually be debunked. It is therefore prudent for all clients to identify any possible relatives so that they can be blatantly disinherited under the last will, if appropriate, or easily located in order to garner their consent upon death.

In the event one does not address one’s last will and testament, the administrator will have to deal with the issue upon death by diving into the laws of intestacy. There is often a search for next-of-kin and genealogical consultants and websites are consulted to track down relatives, around the world. Once reached, the response from the long lost cousin is awkward at best. Perhaps excuses are given as to why they were out of touch, stories provided as to how close they were during childhood, but grew apart. Sometimes there are no words as to the discovery of the found money. Just a silent laugh, hence why this recipient is often referred to as the laughing heir. Shut him up and execute a last will and testament.

---

Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.

Manatt, a Biglaw firm with $313,200,000 in 2018 gross revenue making it 107th in the Am Law 200, finds itself in a similar position as many of its peers. The economic uncertainty surrounding the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe is weighing on firms, and they’re looking for ways to cut costs and preserve cash flow until this whole mess (hopefully) blows over. In Biglaw, one of the go-to methods to trim costs has been to slash salaries, and it looks like Manatt is on board with this approach.

According to tipsters at the firm, Manatt has cut the paychecks of all attorneys by 20 percent — annualized to a 13 percent pay cut. Certainly not as severe a pay cut as some firms have undertaken, but also a far cry from those that have managed to get by without any austerity measures. Hopefully, this will be the only cut the firm needs to make to get through the COVID-19 craziness.

We reached out to the firm for comment, but have not yet heard back.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

---

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).

Ed. note: Please welcome Ken Crutchfield to the pages of Above the Law. He’ll be writing about technology’s increasing role in the innovation of the legal profession.

The coronavirus crisis has impacted different industries in different ways, ranging from massive job losses to an increased reliance on technology for working remotely. With so many people working from home as part of a nationwide mass movement of social distancing, we’re starting to see how the impact of tech will permanently change how professionals approach certain types of work. At a time when we’re facing new challenges and inevitable transitions, it can be useful to look to other times — and other industries — for lessons on tech innovation.

In 2002, I made the transition from legal industry software to the tax and accounting industry. The transition was actually quite natural. If you really think about it, tax is just a very specialized part of the law that has long tentacles of compliance. At a consumer level, taxpayers have to “comply” with complicated tax laws on an annual basis.

It was the technology that was different. When I began working in the tax and accounting industry, my perception was that accountants lagged behind lawyers technologically — but I found that tax and accounting was actually way ahead of law. Adapting to new technology has been a necessary component in the evolution of tax and accounting, by streamlining the massive amounts of paperwork. Less than 12% of all tax returns are now filed in paper and only a minuscule number of those are done without the aid of software.

Products like TurboTax behave like giant client intake applications that guide clients through the logic and questions required to complete a tax return. More than 79 million tax returns are also filed with the help of tax preparers. Most of those are credentialed Certified Public Accountants who perform a function analogous to that of a paralegal.

Ironically, a CPA credential has nothing to do with tax. The CPA certification allows an accountant to attest to the accuracy of accounting. But the compliance burden is large for taxpayers, and the revenues generated by tax practices at small and large CPA firms alike are significant.

Today, technology solutions for tax and accounting professionals have grown and expanded significantly, and the sophistication of software has made enormous strides. Yet the tool of choice for most tax and accounting professionals is spreadsheet software like MS Excel or Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are to tax and accounting professionals as Word Processing software is to a lawyer who spends significant time drafting and editing documents.

One of the more significant trends in tax and accounting is the use of robotic process automation (RPA) to reduce or eliminate mind-numbing and extremely manual processes.

RPA technologies like Alteryx, UI Path, and BluePrism emulate human beings accessing various systems to perform a task.  For example, an RPA product can pull information out of a billing system, merge it with other information from an HR system, sort the information in a spreadsheet, and then e-mail a report to a distribution list.

A couple of years ago, I had a senior partner at one of the Big 4 tell me the impact of these technologies was so significant on their firm that it completely changed their staffing model. Manual work that was sent to “low cost” locations are now often completed by RPA tools. The “robots” can work 24/7, and they are not subject to human judgment or fatigue, so they actually perform the tasks better and more efficiently than humans. Think about what that can do for profitability per partner if a firm is not billing by the hour!

E-discovery is the best analogy that I can think of in the practice of law. At one time, armies of young associates and paralegals would sift through boxes of paper for months, searching for relevant facts in a sea of documents. Today, the same tasks are handled by e-discovery solutions and are measured in minutes.

HBR Consulting’s LegalLab 2019 survey suggests that Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) have tripled their market share since 2015 (from 2% of legal spend to 6% of legal spend). And some of that money is going to accounting firms.

With the rise of legal operations and a move toward more structured data and legal data analytics, ALSPs (and possibly accounting firms) may play an even larger role in legal work.

The Big 4 have the C-level relationships and a lot of know-how in structured data that lends itself to rows, columns, reports, and spreadsheets. But even firms with deep wells of experience in specific disciplines can benefit from adapting to new realities in the workplace, and can learn from watching the innovations that occur in completely different industries. I recall a story from Don Tapscott’s Paradigm Shift (1993) about a competition for how far a car could go on a gallon of gas. The hydraulics department at Michigan State figured out a way to store energy used in braking that could be released to accelerate a car after stopping at a traffic light.  My conclusion is that the breakthrough concept of approaching the problem from a different perspective and a different discipline led to the energy-capturing technology used in today’s hybrid engines.

Law firms will need to continue to embrace innovation and automation, including innovation that may come from other industries, similar to the way the auto industry was influenced by the Michigan State hydraulics department. Corporations are re-evaluating the way they buy legal services and technology is enabling alternatives for legal activities and legal spend (contract review is currently being automated). The larger accounting firms may be well positioned to step into legal workflow given their leverage and embrace of technology.

As an example, accounting firms play a major role in advising corporations on their financial reporting as their auditor. Is it far-fetched to suggest that an accounting firm might make more inroads into the workflow that has been the traditional domain of the securities partner at a large law firm?

An innovative law firm will look to serve their clients more effectively by leveraging more technology in advising clients. They will leverage more analytics in supporting litigation and controversy. And they will look to successes in other industries that can be applied to law firms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how quickly the world can change, and how reliant on technology our professions are becoming. We can’t ignore this. We must embrace tech and use it to adapt quickly to the new normal.

---

Ken Crutchfield is Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Ken has more than three decades of experience as a leader in information and software solutions across industries. He can be reached at ken.crutchfield@wolterskluwer.com.

Insurers are owed $12 billion in unpaid federal subsidies, the Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision on Monday.

The plaintiffs in the case, which include Maine Community Health Options, Moda Health Plan and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, said they were owed millions in unpaid subsidies promised as part of the Affordable Care Act’s risk corridor program. Maine Community Health Options has argued that it was owed $57 million, while Blue Cross NC has said it was owed more than $147 million.

The now-defunct risk corridor program was intended to help offset the risk of health plans launching plans in the first three years after the ACA exchanges were established. The program ran from 2014 to 2016, with the government collecting funds from profitable plans and paying out those that had experienced losses. But it wasn’t budget neutral.

“Each year, the government owed more money to unprofitable insurers than profitable insurers owed to the government, resulting in a total deficit of more than $12 billion,” according to court documents.

In 2015, Congress passed an appropriations bill that would bar the funds from being used to cover payments to insurers under the risk corridor program. But according to the Supreme Court’s ruling, those bills don’t release the government from its mandate to fund the program.

In an 8-1 ruling, the court determined that the government had an obligation to make the promised payments. Plaintiffs would be able to seek the unpaid amount as well as damages in the Court of Federal Claims.

“These holdings reflect a principle as old as the nation itself: The government should honor its obligations,” the court wrote in its opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the sole dissenting opinion, saying the payments would provide “a massive bailout for insurance companies that took a calculated risk and lost.”

The case is Maine Community Health Options v. United States.

Photo credit: Mykola Velychko, Getty Images

It’s another day in the world of the coronapocalypse, and law firms continue to do whatever they can to cut costs so they can survive when all of this is over. Over the past few months, we’ve seen some of the largest law firms in the world conducting salary cuts, furloughs, and even layoffs — and we don’t think this is going to stop anytime soon.

Littler, the largest employment firm in the world, came in 66th place in the 2020 Am Law 100 rankings with $590,038,000 gross revenue in 2019, but that’s not stopping the firm from slashing salaries across the board.

Equity partners at the firm (“participating shareholders” in Littler lingo) and corporate management will have their salaries reduced by 20 percent as of May 8, while highly compensated nonequity partners (“non-participating shareholders”) and non-attorney senior-level administrative employees with compensation of more than $300,000 will have their salaries reduced by 15 percent on the same date. (These cuts will occur in Mexico and Canada on May 15.)

The rest of the firm will have their salaries reduced by an average of 10 percent on June 5. These are the tiers by which all other non-equity partners, principals, other attorneys, paralegals, and office and corporate administrative employees will have their salaries slashed in about a month from now (Littler’s memo on the next page):

• Up to $50K: 4 percent
• >$50-$75K: 6.5 percent
• >$75-$100K: 9 percent
• >$100-$200K: 11 percent
• >$200-$300K: 13 percent

All other employees who are unable to work remotely due to their job responsibilities will see their pay reduced by 50 percent on June 5, but they’ll be able to tap into their paid time-off balances to make up for the difference.

We reached out to Littler for comment on its salary cuts, but have yet to hear back.

(Flip the page to see the details from Littler’s memo on salary cuts.)

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

---

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.

One of my favorite legal columns is authored by Linda Greenhouse at the New York Times. Last week, she issued a fascinating piece detailing a United States Supreme Court in crisis. In Greenhouse’s view the crisis is due to the fact that the nine justices seem more concerned with advancing political agendas than settling the legal disputes in front of them. To be sure, the argument that our Supreme Court operates more out of a concern for political partisanship than by application of the law is nothing new. But Greenhouse makes a unique argument that this modern Court has distinguished itself by its “inability to provide a coherent answer” to the questions it chooses to take on. In other words, Greenhouse is pointing out that although past Supreme Courts have been partisan, they at least provided clear legal doctrines to follow, unlike this current one. Sadly, these sorts of partisanship-based problems are not limited to our Supreme Court.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how federal district judge Justin Walker issued an ex parte temporary restraining order against the mayor of Louisville. As others beside myself have observed, this 86-footnote-long order included a drawn out and completely irrelevant diatribe of religious grievance and victimhood. Even more remarkable is that, as it turns out, the order itself was completely unnecessary. Absent a real case or controversy, the reason behind the order can logically be traced to the fact that the federal judge issuing it is being considered for promotion. Meaning that such theatrics were likely intended to bolster his political support. Outside of helping Walker’s career however, the effect of such blatantly political-based orders is profoundly damaging to the legitimacy of our courts.

Think about it, how on Earth can any future party going before Walker on a case regarding religious liberty ever expect to have a fair hearing? Of course, if you are a conservative Christian you can expect Walker (and the law in general) to be biased in your favor to the great expense of everyone else, particularly nonbelievers. Regardless of whether such bias is working for or against you, however, it certainly erodes the courts’ legitimacy as neutral arbitrators. Worse still, a lot of evidence suggests the clear bias of the federal judiciary extends well beyond judge Walker and the subject matter of religion.

In a study conducted by Clark Neily at the CATO Institute, the professional background of every sitting federal judge was examined. What was discovered should be concerning to everyone. Neily found that “a disproportionate number of federal judges served as government lawyers before donning a robe.” Just how disproportionate? When it comes to former prosecutors as opposed to former criminal defense attorneys the ratio is 4 to 1, but when you expand the parameters to include “judges who previously served as courtroom advocates for government in civil cases” the ratio becomes 7 to 1. The negative impact this imbalance has on the perception of our courts is substantial, according to Neily:

“The radical imbalance between former government advocates and former government opponents on the federal judiciary is particularly concerning when we consider what federal judges actually do, as well as the key role of the judiciary in our system of government. While the bulk of the federal court docket involves disputes between private parties, around 20 percent of all federal cases are criminal prosecutions, with another 15 percent involving various challenges to government power, including civil rights cases and habeas corpus petitions. Some of these are literally a matter of life and death — and not just in capital cases — whereas others involve constitutional challenges to laws that restrict people’s ability to work, speak, worship, travel, get married, or raise their own children. Other cases involve fundamental questions regarding the size, scope, and nature of government power, including the legitimacy of our ever‐​expanding, increasingly unaccountable federal bureaucracy. If a person’s last job before judging the legality of that bureaucracy was representing its interests in court, who could fault the civil rights plaintiff for suspecting that the agency she’s suing might enjoy a bit of a hometown advantage?

As demonstrated above, when criminal and civil rights cases pitting individuals against government are filed in federal court, the chances are nearly 50 percent that they will be heard by a judge who served as a courtroom advocate for the government (but never for individuals against government), whereas there is only a 6 percent chance that the case will be heard by a judge who represented individuals in cases against the government (and never served as an advocate for government). No prosecutor would relish the prospect of trying a case before a jury half‐​filled with former criminal defense attorneys — just as no criminal defendant relishes the idea of going before a judiciary half‐​filled with former government advocates. But for now at least, that’s the system we have.”

Combine all this blatant partisanship and professional imbalance and what do you get? You get a federal judiciary facing a legitimacy crisis more serious than at any other point in modern history.

Given that both Republican and Democratic administrations contributed to the current imbalance, engaging in a partisan blame game is probably the worst — or perhaps the most useless — thing we can do right now. What’s needed is a modern commitment to rectifying this imbalance and bias. Of course, given our current state of extreme polarization this might seem impossible. Therefore, I will end with some good news in the form of recent data that demonstrates, as a whole, the country is steadily moving away from the exclusionary concepts of American identity that have led to our current divide. The great hope therefore, is that although this crisis is well earned, our incoming generations have a chance to make it only temporary.

---

Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.