Category: News Feeds

Well, well, well. Looks like that English teacher who told you using potty words was unprofessional was wrong.

During Supreme Court oral arguments earlier this week, a Biglaw partner dropped a “damn” to, um, colorfully illustrate his point. It’s no F-bomb, but it’s a victory for all of us who’ve been accused of being foul mouthed.

It happened during the arguments in Opati v. Republic of Sudan. Sudan’s lawyer, White & Case’s Christopher Curran, was in an exchange with Justice Stephen Breyer when he argued SCOTUS had previously held the retroactive assessment of punitive damages was unfair and a “draconian step.” That’s when the juiciness happened:

“So before we attribute that intention to Congress, we’re going to ask Congress to say it pretty damn clearly,” said Curran, paraphrasing the 1994 decision in the case Landgraf v. USI Film Products.

But, I’m sure Justice Breyer wasn’t too scandalized — he did use the word in 1997 during arguments in Richardson v. McKnight. And Chief Justice William Rehnquist let it fly in arguments in Donnolley v. Dechristoforo (1974). In fact, according to Law.com, “damn” has been said a handful of times during oral arguments from 1950-2015. However, the majority of the times it was used it was in quoting the record of the case. But at least one other advocate used “damn” for emphasis:

The one usage was by the late Tim Weaver, counsel to the Confederate Yakima Nation in the 1989 zoning case Brendale v. Confederate Yakima Nation. Weaver told the justices: “What happens on this piece of property directly affects what happens on the next piece of property. If someone wants to build a garbage dump next to your house, it’s pretty damn difficult for you to say to the zoning authority: ‘Gee, you ought to just stick on that piece of property and not let that use override onto my property.’”

Now, the use of “damn” is far from scandalizing, but that doesn’t mean appellate muckety-mucks don’t have thoughts on Curran’s word choice. Gibson Dunn’s Ted Olson said, “My personal opinion is that things like that, unless carefully considered, can distract from the substance of the message being conveyed. I try to avoid any slang, vernacular, argot, colloquialisms, street language, triteness or hyperbole. There may be times when something like that works, but very rarely, it seems to me.”

Paul Smith, vice president of litigation strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, expressed his disapproval, saying, “Supreme Court arguments can be done well in a conversational style, but this just seems a little jarring to me.” And David Frederick, a partner at Kellogg Hansen and author of Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy, said, “I’m not a fan of using swear words in any court, much less the Supreme Court. It’s impolite and draws attention away from the substance of the argument.”

But Curran seems to be taking it in stride. He reportedly laughed when asked about the usage, saying, “I think the term speaks for itself.”

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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).

Earlier this week, Americans received a rather stark warning from federal health officials about the inevitable spread of coronavirus in the U.S. “[T]his could be bad,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a press briefing. “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.”

Biglaw firms across the country are taking the news seriously, echoing the actions of their colleagues abroad and imposing travel restrictions and canceling events.

According to the American Lawyer, the following firms have either postponed or outright canceled their partner meetings and retreats:

• Orrick – the firm’s partnership retreat in San Antonio, Texas, has reportedly been rescheduled over coronavirus concerns
• Norton Rose – partners from certain locations (e.g., China) were not permitted to travel to the firm’s partners meeting in Austin, Texas, due to coronavirus fears
• Duane Morris – the firm’s Asia partners meeting has been canceled, but a firmwide meeting is still planned to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, next month
• Baker Botts – partners from Asian offices will not be permitted to attend the firm’s partner conference in Scottsdale, Arizona

Other firms are prohibiting and limiting travel to and within countries that have been stricken by coronavirus outbreaks:

• Baker Botts – the firm is not permitting any employees to travel to mainland China and will limit travel to Hong Kong to trips made for “essential business purposes” only, and such trips must be approved by management
• Paul Weiss – the firm will not allow any “non-essential” business trips to and from Mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Italy, and anyone who has traveled to or from those countries (or who was in close contact with someone traveling to or from them) must work from home for at least 14 days after traveling and may return to the office only if they are symptom-free

Work travel and meeting attendance come second when your health could be at stake.

“This is not something we came up with on our own. This is the advice we are giving to clients,” [Michael] Delikat, [an employment partner at Orrick,] said. “The focus has shifted to preventing transmission.”

He said clients, similarly, are canceling management retreats, banning all travel and rethinking other large gatherings of employees, except for mission-critical travel. Companies are no longer just limiting travel to China, he said, mentioning the possibility of employees, during a work trip, possibly coming in contact with travelers who may have been exposed to coronavirus in a number of countries.

What is your firm doing to protect its employees from potential exposure to coronavirus? Please email us or text us (646-820-8477). Stay safe, everyone.

Paul Weiss Restricts Travel, Orrick Postpones Partner Retreat Over Coronavirus Fears [American Lawyer]

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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.

Donald Trump may not be able to define (or spell) “irony,” but he has nonetheless set up a solid lesson in irony through the Department of Homeland Security. Starting this past Monday, his administration has started implementing its “public charge rule,” which denies immigrant visas and adjustment of status — including green cards, which confer lawful permanent residency — to immigrants the government thinks are likely to depend on public benefits.

And in a neat little catch-22 worthy of The Bad Place itself, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s rewrote its rules for implementation to say that applying for a green card makes immigrants more likely to depend on public benefits and should officially count against them. Thus, applying for a green card now makes you less eligible for a green card.

It’s just what the Framers wanted!

Some background, for those of you who don’t walk around in a permanent state of immigration-law-related outrage: The public charge rule is actually a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act, but the Trump administration has redefined it to make it harsher. It says immigrants are ineligible for visas or admission to the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become a public charge.” Previously, the implementation guidance on this gave decision-makers a list of four assistance programs and told them to exclude people who used those programs for more than half of their income.

But DHS under Ken Cucinnelli — the definitely-not-a-racist who rewrote “The New Colossus” to say the opposite of what it means and then argued that it was only supposed to apply to Europeans anyway — has expanded it considerably. According to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., immigrants are now considered public charges if they are “more likely than not” to participate in cash assistance programs, food stamps, Medicaid, and rental assistance for more than 12 months in total out of any 36. There’s more, but you get the idea: Down with the poor! To underscore the point, the rules even let immigrants who have the means buy their way out of the policy by making a large deposit.

Of course, this being the Trump administration, the actual point is to exclude as many people as possible from immigrating. The Migration Policy Institute calculated in 2018 that the public charge rewrite would expand the number of noncitizens deemed inadmissible to 47% from 3%. And it’s already scaring immigrants into avoiding public benefits programs, even the ones that aren’t on the list, like free and reduced school lunches. Medical policy wonks are particularly worried about the public health effects of keeping a bunch of people uninsured, underfed, and in poor housing.

Immigrant advocates have sued to stop this at least eight times, but the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide injunction in the matter in January, with Justices Gorsuch and Thomas writing to explain that they were rilly rilly concerned about nationwide injunctions. If this sounds familiar, it may be because they abandoned that fig leaf of an argument this week by blocking an injunction that only applied to Illinois. That’s what triggered Justice Sotomayor’s excellent dissent calling out the majority for rubber-stamping every stay the Trump administration asks for, and then Trump’s call for Sotomayor (and Ginsburg, for good measure) to recuse themselves from anything related to him.

On the plus side, Trump managed to spell “recuse” correctly. Hey, when you cover immigration, you have to grasp for whatever silver linings you can find.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.

Yesterday, the Justice Department announced the formation of a new section to enforce the president’s MAGA agenda. The Department’s Civil Division will now house a dedicated Denaturalization Section, working to strip American citizenship from “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters.” The government needs full-time staff for all the people we’re going to be chucking out of the country.

“While the Office of Immigration Litigation already has achieved great success in the denaturalization cases it has brought, winning 95 percent of the time,” reads the DOJ press release, “the growing number of referrals anticipated from law enforcement agencies motivated the creation of a standalone section dedicated to this important work.”

“When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system—and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt announced. Which certainly makes it sound like they’re going after scary bad guys, to keep Americans safe.

Except most of the time, they aren’t.

Operation Janus, the denaturalization task force partnered with Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has combed databases to revoke American citizenship from people who pose no danger whatsoever to their communities.

People like Norma Borgono, a 64-year-old grandmother living in Miami for the past 30 years. The Complaint to Revoke Naturalization against her alleges that, “Between at least April 2003 until May 2009, Defendant conspired to obtain more than $24 million in fraudulent loan transactions from the U.S. Export-Import Bank (“Ex-Im Bank”).”

But according to The Miami Herald, Borgono was a secretary making $500-a-week, who helped her boss prepare fraudulent loan applications, testified against him, and took a plea deal.

Working two jobs, she paid off her restitution and was relieved of her sentence early. Two years after she put it all behind her, Borgono received the letter notifying her that the U.S. government wanted to take away her citizenship.

The stated reason was that Borgono became a U.S. citizen after the fraud scheme started. Although she had not yet been charged when she applied for citizenship, the Department of Justice is now arguing that she lied by not divulging her criminal activity on her application.

“Had the threat to her citizenship been brought up,” during the original case, Borgono’s daughter, Urpi Ríos, told The Herald, “we would have gone to trial or found some way to fight it.”

The Justice Department’s press release trumpets its successful denaturalization of Guillermo Mondino, Borgono’s boss, for “conspiring to defraud the U.S. Export-Import Bank of more than $24 million, resulting in more than $12 million in unrecovered losses.” It fails to mention the ongoing effort to rid this nation of his secretary, a church-going abuela with kidney problems who never pocketed a cent from the scheme.

No one is unhappy that Sammy Rasema Yetisen aka Rasema Handanovic aka Zolja was denaturalized because she failed to disclose that she had been part of a firing squad that executed six Bosnian Croat civilians in 1993. But we managed to do it without a Denaturalization Section. And, unless the feds are expected a wild upswing in undiscovered terrorists and sex traffickers in our midst, the “growing number of referrals anticipated” will probably look more like Norma Borgono than Sammy Yetisen.

With his travel bans, fearmongering about scary caravans of brown people storming the border, declarations of a national emergency as justification to raid military funds for his border wall, and weekly lists of immigrants convicted of crimes, Trump has done everything he can to stoke fear of the OTHER. And there’s no reason whatsoever to see this new Denaturalization Section as anything but a continuation of these racist, xenophobic policies. Particularly when Bill Barr just announced that he would be looking into state prosecutors who “undercharge” defendants to avoid making them deportation-eligible.

What’s the opposite of “benefit of the doubt?” Because this administration has definitely earned it.

The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases [DOJ Press Release]
Miami grandma targeted as U.S. takes aim at naturalized immigrants with prior offenses [Miami Herald]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Jim Cramer—known to one of the personalities in his head as Jimmy Chill—is a touch worried about all of these people getting the sniffles.

The delegation also met officials from various ministries, civil society, private sector and multilateral financial institutions, during which they were briefed on the current macro-economic, social and political environment in the southern African nation.

During the meeting with President Mnangagwa, the delegation appreciated ongoing reform efforts initiated since January 2019 as part of the government’s Transitional Stabilization Program 2018 -2020 under the IMF Staff Monitored Program (May 2019 – March 2020). They welcomed the president’s pledge to recalibrate the Program, which aims to implement a coherent set of policies that facilitate a return to macroeconomic stability.

The reforms include introducing necessary policy and institutional reforms for private sector-led growth, addressing infrastructure gaps, and launching quick-wins to stimulate and restore growth.

“I would like to express my gratitude to the Bank for the commitment towards Zimbabwe. We need more assistance as a country, more so, as we embarked on substantive economic reforms based only on domestic resources without help from the international community,” said President Mnangagwa.

The directors noted that despite some positive results, reform coordination in the country remains a challenge, against a backdrop of a continuing general rise in poverty levels, especially in the urban areas.

Zimbabwe is also still feeling the after effects of Cyclone Idai, which hit the country in March 2019, and the 2019/20 drought, which has left more than 8.5 million people (3 million of whom are in urban areas), food insecure.

The delegation also visited several Bank-funded projects, including the Post Cyclone Idai Emergency Recovery and Resilience Programme (PCIREP), implemented in the Chimanimani district, which was severely affected by Cyclone Idai. The project, funded to the tune of 24.7 million, focuses on public infrastructure interventions aimed at re-establishing sustainable livelihoods and kick-starting economic activities of the affected population.

They commended the government’s rebuilding efforts in Chimanimani and other parts of the country, and reiterated the Bank’s commitment to the people of Zimbabwe and the country’ economic development agenda.

The group urged perseverance in the implementation of reforms and called for early normalization of relations with development partners, which would help unlock more substantive external resources for Zimbabwe, including from the African Development Bank.

Travelling to Zimbabwe were Mbuyami Matungulu who represents a constituency covering Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo); Judith Kateera representing Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe; Kenyeh Barlay for Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan; Paal Bjornestad for Denmark, Finland, India, Norway and Sweden; Amod Kipronoh Cheptoo, for Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda); and  Mmakgoshi Lekhethe, for Eswatini, Lesotho and South Africa.

Eugenio Paulo, Senior ED Advisor, and Josephine Ngure, Acting Director General (RDGS) also participated in the mission.

Post published in: Featured

* Stephen Barnes’s girlfriend is suing his ex-partner Ross Cellino and Cellino & Barnes over a bonus she is allegedly owed. Hopefully she gets the infamous jingle in the settlement. [Buffalo News]

* Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer has suggested he may not favor releasing Weinstein since Weinstein might get arrested on different criminal charges when released. [Bloomberg]

* A Utah woman who was seen topless by her stepchildren has taken a plea deal to avoid being labeled a sex offender. Her topless husband was standing next to her and wasn’t prosecuted…seems like a double standard. [Fox News]

* President Trump’s re-election campaign is suing The New York Times for libel over an opinion piece about Russian interference in the 2016 election. [USA Today]

* Joe Biden has announced that he intends to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court if he is elected president, and some see parallels to a promise Reagan made during the 1980 presidential campaign. [Washington Post]

* The New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected a lawyer’s claim that his sleep apnea was to blame for his professional misconduct. Got to hand it to this lawyer for coming up with a creative argument. [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.

At the epicentre of the cash challenges are the rent-seeking activities and contradictions surrounding the exchange control. A misplaced introduction of bond notes in 2016 was the genesis of the financial crisis, a backfiring attempt to monetise a deficit created by fiscal indiscipline in which the Zanu PF administration under Chinamasa had spent beyond the government’s means.

The trend has continued under Mthuli Ncube, with the government raiding NOSTRO accounts, printing money, incurring new debts outside Parliament and issuing toxic treasury bills. It was bound to happen that the need to monetise the fiscal deficit would push the government to revert to a currency they can print. This was a misinformed decision because a full introduction of a local currency ought to have been supported by proper economic fundamentals.

In any case, a currency is a relationship between your imports and exports or your trade position. Countries with a stronger trade position tend to have stable currencies. An abused citizen rejects the authority of the government and a country’s currency becomes an immediate casualty, as has become the case in Zimbabwe where people have organized themselves outside the realms of the State, creating what is loosely called the alternative market.

It is, however, important to note that what is called the black market is a second-generation problem emanating from a first generation problem of shortages. The shortages are a result of unreasonable exchange controls. In the Zimbabwean case they are compounded by government expenditure.

We have a government which spends foreign currency which it does not earn. They raid accounts and impose unreasonable export retention laws which encourage exporters to evade the Zimbabwean banking system. A reasonable government would give incentives and not punish production.

Then comes the contradictions of several statutory instruments, including a misplaced ban on the use of forex when in fact the economy has dollarised. What has worsened the situation is another contradictory instrument that gives exemptions to some individuals and sectors exemption by allowing them to use forex, which the government purports to have banned.

More contradictory is the government’s affinity to levy taxes in foreign currency, which foreign currency the same government purports to have banned. Therefore, policy contradictions by the inept and illegitimate regime are at the epicenter of our national crisis. With the fundamentals not supportive of introduction of a local currency, coupled with policy inconsistency and lack of public confidence, it was predictable that the introduction of the Zimbabwean dollar was premature and unsustainable.

Inflation is sky rocketing to the extent that the government even barred publishing of annual inflation figures. Shortages of imported goods including mealie meal, fuel and electricity are now the order of the day. This has resulted in the unpalatable suffering of the Zimbabwean masses; prices have gone beyond the reach of many while the wages of the few that are still at work have remained the same. The value of the money in bank accounts has been eroded; pensions have been wiped out again while health insurance has been rendered ineffective. The MDC therefore restates its position that the following measures be taken:

We propose the following urgent remedies:

i) Immediate scrapping of the Zimbabwean dollar

ii) Returning to and strengthening the regime of multiple currencies in the short-term.

iii) Rationalizing the capital account.

iv) Increasing productivity and growing GDP in order to build substantive reserves in the country.

v) Ring-fencing USD Dollar balances in banks at a specific date to protect depositors against a second attack.

vi) Pay civil servants in US dollars

vii) Offer supply-side solutions to the crisis, increase productivity and shift from consumption-based revenue collection.

Post published in: Business