Category: News Feeds

He will die on the court. He’s just warming up. He still feels young, and there’s a lot of work to do.

— Armstrong Williams, a close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas, commenting on the likelihood that the associate justice will be retiring from the Supreme Court any time soon. “I have no reason to think the justice is going anywhere,” said former Thomas clerk Helgi C. Walker, a partner at Gibson Dunn. Thomas is the longest-tenured justice on the high court, and rumors of his supposed imminent retirement have been swirling ever since Donald Trump was elected president. Thomas, who has been surprisingly vocal lately during oral arguments, has repeatedly denied these claims.

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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.

Before the Trump administration guts Twitter, the website remains one of the best sites for free entertainment in the world. Because, as with “society” generally, once you cut through the lies, racism, bullying, posturing, homophobia, whining, and Russian bots… social media is a pretty cool place to share.

For example, have you ever found yourself holding archaic, misogynistic views about male ownership of female sexuality and wondered how you could turn those into a cause of action? Well, this guy is appealing to the “courts of heaven” for restitution because his daughter had sex with her boyfriend… a decade ago. According to Twitter user Isaac N., a friend of the accused, the ex-boyfriend’s wife of seven years found what functions as a pro se demand letter I suppose in the mailbox.

It has been nearly ten years since I learned that you stole my daughter _______’s virginity. Initially it was my intention to forgive you. But after I confronted you about it and you expressed repentance, I later learned that you have since gone and done the same to others.

Question: this guy is following up on the sex life of his daughter’s ex? What exactly are those Facebook stalking questions like? “Hi, you don’t know me, but it looks like you dated so and so… did you bone? Thanks.”

In the interim, I have thought, prayed and studied the Scriptures seeking for an appropriate response.

I feel like “let go and let God” is alluded to all over the place. Spoiler alert: this guy missed those passages.

At the time I was a man of modest means and you deliberately took from me my most precious treasure. A treasure I invested my heart and soul and every available resource in creating. For a brief pleasure, you forever took from me the sublime joy of giving my pure, virgin daughter away in marriage to her chosen husband.

Imagine the dowry this man of modest means will need to pay now!

Buckle up everyone because now we get to the real lawyerin’:

When Jacob sought to marry Rachel, the daughter of Laban, they agreed that Jacob would first serve Laban for seven full years tending his herds, flocks and tribes- Therefore, if we had mutually agreed that you could marry _______, the equivalent of seven years of your full-time service would have been a reasonable bride price.

The man’s found the market standard!

In fact, if a thief does not have the means to make full restitution, they may be sold into slavery as well.

I feel as though there’s been some intervening legislation on this point.

So, I have decided to petition the courts of heaven….

One of the seven footnotes in the letter appears here to let us know what he’s talking about. It points us to the Book of Daniel:

His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze. 10A river of fire was flowing, coming out from His presence. Thousands upon thousands attended Him, and myriads upon myriads stood before Him. The court was convened, and the books were opened.

So… Southern District of New York.

… to take from you and give to me that which is your dearest possession: your youth and all the good that goes with it Specifically I demand divine restitution that will age you and rejuvenate me 49 years.

As your Honor is aware, in the case of United States vs. Benjamin Button…

We’ve got a plague and fathers bartering over virginity… the Middle Ages are back people!

(Check out the whole letter on the next page…)

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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.

We post this for a few reasons:

(1) Because too few applicants know this — this is actually what starting salaries look like for those right out of law school. The graph below is pretty self explanatory. Note the extreme spike(s) (thus technically making it a trimodal distribution) at the far right end. In a regular salary distribution, these spikes might be shorter but much more spread out. But for law graduates, they are broader at the lower salary ranges. This again is not a concept that many know, especially those not in the legal field.

Note that the average starting salary for a new attorney is somewhere in the $90,000-$100,000 range — but very few new lawyers actually make this amount (less than 5%); many more make between $50,000 and $70,000, and then a portion make a typical Biglaw salary (over on the right side of the graph), largely concentrated in graduates from top law schools.

(2) Because we also want you to see, for comparison, what it looked like in 1991:

So what does this mean?

While we hate to speculate too far out, the general sense is those two spikes on the right side of the more recent graph will both get notably shorter in the next year or so. In other words, the vast proportion of graduating lawyers will only shift further left on the salary distribution — fewer people will get the Biglaw jobs.

What is the good news?

Unlike during the Great Recession, this shift shouldn’t last as long. There are several reasons for that. One is that money is moving, and thus deals are being done. The severe problem in the Great Recession was the lack of deals. Two, law firms still remember how they overcorrected during the Great Recession, and were soon thereafter left with no mid-level associates (which is where firms start to actually make money).

Finally, firms have made adjustments in many ways because of the Great Recession. In a sense, they have been preparing for the next one — for the very reason that they ideally don’t have to make the same cuts as last time.

In summary

Salary freezes and cuts are already occurring. But they shouldn’t be as long-lasting as during the Great Recession. On a personal note, I was a dean of career services during the Great Recession. It was a very painful period for many of my students. Those who remained upbeat almost always found employment, though, and many are absolutely thriving in their careers today. Let’s hope this legal hiring momentum change is not very long lasting.

Graph sources

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Mike Spivey is the founder of The Spivey Consulting Group and has been featured as an expert on law schools and law school admissions in many national media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist, the ABA Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report, CNN/Fortune, and Law. Prior to founding Spivey Consulting, Mike was a senior level administrator at Vanderbilt, Washington University, and Colorado law schools. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram or connect with him LinkedIn. 

Joe and Kathryn chat with Matthew Barach of Barach Law Group and author of The Family Law Guide to Appellate Practice about the impact of COVID-19 on this practice area. Will we see a spike in divorce? Will couples stay together until assets recover? What toll does quarantine take on joint custody agreements? Perhaps the biggest takeaway when it comes to this area of law is that it’s going to challenge the conventional wisdom.

As we continue to deal with the fallout of our thin-skinned President throwing a hissy fit over Twitter daring to provide more context to conspiracy theory nonsense that Trump himself tweeted, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has apparently decided that it’s more important to stomp on Twitter while it’s down, rather than protect the wider internet. In a shameful display of opportunistic nonsense, Zuckerberg went on Fox News and pretended that Facebook was somehow not interested in moderating content the way Twitter did:

“We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg told Dana Perino, host of the Fox News show The Daily Briefing, in an interview clip. The full interview is expected to air on Thursday.

“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. In general, private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that,” Zuckerberg added.

Perino said that Zuckerberg told her that Facebook refuses to intervene in censoring public posts unless there’s a threat of imminent harm. She added that Facebook is “hands off” when it comes to political speech.

Sure, they have a different policy, because almost all sites have different policies, but if you compared Facebook’s policies on content moderation to Twitter’s you’d find that Facebook does vastly more moderation than Twitter has ever done and Facebook introduced similar “fact checking” efforts years ago. To pretend that Facebook doesn’t do the exact same thing that Twitter is accused of doing here is just ridiculous. And, we all agree that no platform should be “the arbiter of truth” but that’s not the same as saying “do no moderation” (and again, Facebook does a ton of moderation). As for the final claim that Facebook is “hands off” when it comes to political speech, that’s also false. Facebook is hands off on political ads, but not all political speech. And so is Twitter, in that it bars all political ads in the first place.

This is disappointing, but all too common from Facebook, the company that stabbed the open internet in the back by supporting FOSTA a few years ago. The company has clearly made the decision that it can sell out the open internet in favor of more political clout.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Ridiculously Wrong, Misleading, And Self-Serving Statements Regarding Twitter Fact-Checking The President

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

DC Appeals Court Dumps Lawsuit Claiming Multiple Tech Companies Are Engaged In An Anti-Conservative Conspiracy
The Two Things To Understand About Trump’s Executive Order On Social Media: (1) It’s A Distraction (2) It’s Legally Meaningless
Hell Hath No Fury Like A Federal Law Enforcement Agency That Keeps Finding Some Way To Break Into IPhones

Wells Fargo has taken a lot from the people of its nominal home state over the years. And sure, the bank has had to give back some of what it “earned” on the unauthorized accounts, firing those who expressed concern about unauthorized accounts, improper fee savings, running forgery academies, ripping off small businesses, unnecessary pet insurance, improperly foreclosing on houses and so on. But one San Diego man felt they hadn’t given back quite enough, and also hungry.

At around 3:30 a.m., San Diego police were dispatched to the Wells Fargo bank branch on 346 Euclid Ave. after a burglar alarm had gone off.

Responding officers arrived to find a broken window near the bank’s drive-thru.

The alarm company told police that surveillance cameras inside the branch captured a man inside a break room and using the microwave….

As officers took him outside and arrested him, the man told 10News’ Breaking News Tracker that he entered the bank just so he can microwave his Hot Pockets.

When asked if the Hot Pockets were worth it, the man responded, “Hell yeah it was worth it.”

* A Florida man who had his law license revoked has filed a pro se lawsuit challenging Governor DeSantis’s lockdown orders. Guess he found one way to get back into a courtroom. [ABC News]

* A lawyer who helped a witness skip town so she wouldn’t have to testify in court has been suspended from practice. [Bloomberg Law]

* If you have ever considered life as an American expat attorney, check out this article. [Black Enterprise]

* A CNN news team was arrested on live TV this morning while covering Minneapolis protests related to the death of George Floyd. [CNN]

* Harvey Weinstein is facing additional sexual misconduct lawsuits. [Vulture]

* The wife of an attorney is accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from an elderly victim. At least she can get free legal advice from her husband… [CBS News]

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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.

HARARE Magistrate Barbra Mateko on Thursday 28 May 2020 rejected a bid
by prosecutors to impose onerous bail conditions on three opposition
MDC-Alliance party youth leaders, who were charged for allegedly
participated in an anti-government protest, in a matter in which
authorities conducted a bedside court session at a hospital in Harare.

Prosecutors led by Tinashe Makiya from the National Prosecuting
Authority had on Wednesday 27 May 2020 asked Magistrate Mateko to
order Harare North legislator Hon. Joana Mamombe, Cecelia Chimbiri and
Netsai Marova to deposit RTGS$2 000 as bail money and to report three
times in a week at  a Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) station until
their matter is finalised.

The State’s proposal was strongly opposed by Hon. Mamombe, Chimbiri
and Marova’s lawyers Roselyn Hanzi and Jeremiah Bamu of Zimbabwe
Lawyers for Human Rights, who accused prosecutors of seeking to impose
onerous bail conditions on their clients and of discriminating the
trio against other male MDC-Alliance party youth leaders, who were
arrested recently and admitted to bail on flexible terms.

On Thursday, Magistrate Mateko agreed with Hanzi and Bamu and ordered
Hon. Mamombe, Chimbiri and Marova to pay $1 000 as bail money and to
report once a week at Harare Central Police Station and to continue
residing at their given residential addresses and not to interfere
with state witnesses until their matter is finalised.

During the hearing of their bail application, Bamu and Hanzi, who
objected to the placement of their clients on remand and raised
several complaints against ZRP members regarding the ill-treatment and
violation of several of their clients’ fundamental rights, also gave
notice that Hon. Mamombe, Chimbiri and Marova will petition the
Constitutional Court seeking redress.

The trio return to court on 13 August 2020.
Hon. Mamombe, Chimbiri and Marova were on Tuesday 26 May 2020 charged
with participating in a gathering with intent to promote public
violence, breaches of the peace or bigotry as defined in section 37 of
the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act and for contravening
section 5(3) (a) as read with section 5(1) of Statutory Instrument 99
of 2020 of Public Health (COVID-19 Prevention, Containment and
Treatment) (National Lockdown) Order, 2020.

The MDC-Alliance party youth leaders were accused of participating in
an illegal demonstration held on 13 May 2020 in Warren Park 1 suburb
in which opposition party supporters allegedly staged a flash protest
against abuse of financial resources and the extension of a government
enforced national lockdown by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

During the demonstration, prosecutors argued, the alleged protestors
reportedly carried a placard inscribed “Unlock Us Before We Revolt”.

The prosecution of Hon. Mamombe, Chimbiri and Marova comes at a time
when the trio is currently receiving treatment at a local medical
facility following their abduction, disappearance and torture on 13
May 2020 and to date, no arrests have been made by ZRP members of
people who abducted, disappeared and tortured the opposition youth
leaders.

Meanwhile, a Harare Magistrate on Wednesday 27 May 2020 granted RTGS$1
000 bail to Lovejoy Chitengu, the Youth Organising Secretary for the
MDC-Alliance party’s Harare Province after he was arrested and charged
with participating in a gathering with intent to promote public
violence, breaches of the peace or bigotry as defined in section 37 of
the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act and for contravening
section 5(3)(a) as read with section 5(1) of Statutory Instrument 99
of 2020 of Public Health (COVID-19 Prevention, Containment and
Treatment) (National Lockdown) Order, 2020.

Chitengu, who is represented by Gift Mtisi of ZLHR, will return to
court on 13 August 2020.