Category: News Feeds

You’ve likely heard of “feeder judges” — that is, the federal judges who send the most clerks on to work for Supreme Court justices — but we suspect you’ve not yet heard about the new phenomenon of “academic feeder judges.” According to a study by Florida International University law professor Howard Wasserman, if one of your career goals is to eventually become a law professor, then your best bet may be to get a clerkship with one of the judges named in this new ranking of sorts.

Law.com has some more details on Wasserman’s study:

The paper, titled “Academic Feeder Judges,” is the first comprehensive look at which jurists have the most former clerks working in legal academia. …

“Given the intimate (if not essential) connection between clerkships and the legal academy, the time is right to identify academic feeder judges—the judges for whom significant numbers of law professors clerked at the beginning of their careers and the judges who ‘produce’ law professors from the ranks of their former clerks,” reads the paper….

In all, Wasserman and his team of researchers examined the résumés of about 10,000 full-time law professors, nearly 38 percent of whom had worked as judicial law clerks in the past, to see compile the list of which lower court federal judges had the most former clerks working as law professors (by a measure of eight or more).

Here is the ranking for the top five academic feeder judges, out of a list of just over 101, each of whom launched the careers of more than 14 academics:

Judge Guido Calabresi, Second Circuit: 42
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Ninth Circuit (deceased): 32
Judge Stephen Williams, D.C. Circuit: 29
Judge Dorothy Nelson, Ninth Circuit: 28
Judge Richard Posner, Seventh Circuit (retired): 28
Judge Harry Edwards, D.C. Circuit: 22

Here are some additional fun facts from Wasserman’s study:

• For lower court judges appointed since 1995, Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit leads the way, with 15 former clerks now teaching.
• Former law professors who later became judges have more former clerks working as law professors (e.g., Judge Calabresi, former dean of Yale Law; Judge Williams, former professor at Colorado Law; Judge Nelson, former professor at USC Law; and Judge Posner, former professor at Chicago Law).
• On the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has the most former clerks who are now working as law professors (29), followed by Justice Stephen Breyer (24), with Justice Clarence Thomas in third place (13).
• Traditional feeder judges largely overlap with academic feeder judges. Since 2004, 11 lower court judges have placed 20 or more clerks at SCOTUS, and seven of those judges now have 10 or more former clerks in legal academia.

Congratulations if you were able to land a coveted job as a law professor after you completed your judicial clerkship. Not only did your valuable clerkship experience help you get your job, but it also helped your judge earn a spot on a new ranking.

Want to Be a Law Prof? Clerk for These Judges [Law.com]

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.

* A Baltimore man is claiming a constitutional right to sell pizza out of his food truck. Didn’t Patrick Henry say “give me pizza, or give me death”?… [Baltimore Sun]

* A New York lawyer has been suspended from practice for assaulting a woman he met through an online dating service. [Bloomberg Law]

* A Utah man charged with dealing drugs claims he was “breaking bad” to pay a lawyer to handle an unrelated sexual assault case. [New York Post]

* A man has sued the city of Honolulu and its police force for purportedly making him lick a urinal. [Fox News]

* The lawyer for the alleged Monsey Hanukkah attacker has been scolded by the judge on the case for allegedly tipping off media to a sealed hearing in the matter. [New York Post]

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.

“This year’s drought is unprecedented, causing food shortages on a scale we have never seen here before,” said Dr. Michael Charles, Head of the International Federation of the Red Cross’ Southern Africa cluster in a public statement. “We are seeing people going two to three days without food, entire herds of livestock wiped out by drought and small-scale farmers with no means to earn money to tide them over a lean season.”

Families hit by the deadly threat of famine can find some support in relief agencies, but as the World Food Programme (WFP) has made quite clear, this level of need will overwhelm relief capacity.

“As things stand, we will run out of food by [the] end of February, coinciding with the peak of the hunger season – when needs are at their highest,” said Niels Balzer, WFP’s Deputy Country Director in Zimbabwe in one statement.

Trees for the Future Executive Director John Leary says both farmers and relief agencies are making the same grave error.

“There is too much reliance on maize,” he says. “Smallholder farmers living on the edge of poverty are gambling with their livelihoods, health, and lives when they only plant one crop. What happens when the rains don’t come or a pest ravages the produce? You’re left with nothing.”

In particular, Zambia has historically produced maize as a staple crop, but in the last five years drought has decimated the country’s production. In 2019 the country’s harvest neared a decade low with the national harvest falling to 2 million metric tons, that’s compared to a 2017 high of 3.6 million. Decreased supply and inflated prices has left more than 2 million Zambians food insecure.

“Zambian farmers, and farmers in other developing countries, will continue seeing inconsistent yields as long as the planet continues to warm,” Leary says. “But farmers can protect themselves from those inconsistencies by protecting their land and diversifying what they grow.”

In semi-arid regions like Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa, the low rainfall and unrelenting heat means that farmers should be strategic about what they grow. Periods of drought are to be expected. Families in this region of the world are well-accustomed to lean seasons when there is little to eat because of growing conditions.

Trees for the Future (TREES), an international development organization, uses agroforestry and regenerative agriculture training to help smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa escape hunger and poverty, while improving their ecosystems and the environment. Contrary to the monocropping intensification techniques (one crop) used by farmers around the world, TREES teaches farmers to plant productive polycultures. The Forest Garden Approach teaches families to protect, diversify, and optimize their land by planting fast-growing trees, fruit trees, and permagardens.

Leary says the first step smallholder farmers can take toward achieving food security is to plant a wall of trees around their farm. In zones across Africa where livestock roam free much of the year, living fences provide a free and renewable barrier to herding animals as well as harsh winds. Once land is protected he says the soil improves and farmers can plant a variety of crops. Just as a financial portfolio should be diversified, so too should a farm.

“The maize may fail due to drought one year, but hardier crops like sorghum and cassava would fare much better,” Leary says. “And though an early or late start of the rains could ruin an entire monocrop, tree crops like avocados, macadamia nuts and cashews will be a lot less affected.”

While there are barriers to acquiring seeds and learning new farming tactics, stakeholders in the region are recognizing the need for crop diversity in the region. A notable voice on the issue is Zambia’s Vice President Inonge Wina. Wina has been publicly encouraging Zambians to reduce their reliance on corn in their diets and look to more nutrient-rich and drought-tolerant options.

“The Vice-President has appealed to all Zambians to focus on diversifying diets at household-level,” said Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Vice-President Stephen Mwansa in a statement. “The switch is one of the low-cost and effective ways of also addressing stunting and malnutrition in the country, as well as assurance of food security at domestic and community-levels.”

“It’s promising to see a national leader advocate for crop and nutrient diversity,” says Leary. “The next step is convincing local farmers that there is a better option out there and helping farmers to think differently about their production systems.”

Leary’s organization began implementing and measuring the benefits of the Forest Garden Approach in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014. Since then, Trees for the Future has helped more than 73,000 people revitalize their lands and achieve food and income security. Using the FAO Household Food Insecurity Access Scale and the Household Dietary Diversity Score, TREES saw farmers’ food insecurity rates drop by 33 percent and dietary diversity scores improve by 44 percent.

“We’re working in some of the hottest, driest places in the world. But we see Senegalese and Tanzanian farmers using climate-smart permaculture and agroforestry to sustain themselves through drought,” Leary says.

Changing weather patterns and increased frequency and severity of droughts are unquestionably tied to global warming. This is exacerbated by unsustainable land use techniques, particularly the widespread use of fire to clear land for monocropping. Shortsighted slash-and-burn tactics are widely used in Southern Africa — in satellite imagery, fires in Australia and the Amazon pale in comparison to those burning on one-hectare farms in Sub-Saharan and Southern Africa. The lack of rain hasn’t kept Zambian farmers from burning their fields either. And sadly, these practices contribute to the cycle of drought and warming.

And while agribusinesses and farmers are leading contributors to land degradation and a changing climate, they are also the solution.

“The solution to climate change in the long term, is also the solution to hunger and famine right now,” says John Leary, Trees for the Future Executive Director. “When we transform the way we grow our food, we will reduce our impact on the environment, and we can also become more resilient, and less vulnerable to drought, natural disasters, and disease.”

Trees for the Future currently works in Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Their training materials are free and open to the public in Trees for the Future’s Forest Garden Training Center.

Post published in: Featured

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Not since Florida’s hanging chad debacle of 2000 has there been an electoral clusterf*ck like last night’s Democratic caucus in Iowa. It’s been a full 12 hours since they finished playing musical chairs down at the VFW Hall, and the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) has released zero official results.

Maybe jamming all the voters in a phone booth and having them knock the crap out of each other is actually … a bad way to choose a presidential nominee?

Iowa is home to about 700,000 registered Democrats, who are invited to caucus at one of 1,678 precincts (or 99 satellite sites in places as far afield as Tbilisi, Georgia). Candidates must win the support of 15 percent of attendees to be considered viable, and the threshold is higher in smaller precincts.

After the first round, supporters of viable candidates are locked in and cannot switch teams. Oddly enough, if the “Uncommitted” group has 15 percent or higher, those people are also committed to their “no candidate.” Then supporters of viable candidates fall on the supporters of the also-rans and try to browbeat them into joining a team for the second alignment. And in its infinite wisdom, the DNC will report both of these numbers publicly.

But wait, there’s more! Each caucus precinct is awarded a predetermined number of state delegates based on Democratic turnout for the general elections in the 2016 presidential race and the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial election. That delegate allocation will not change no matter how many people show up to caucus. So if 18 people show up at one precinct, and 81 people show up at another, they can still wind up splitting the same number of delegates depending on historical turnout data from elections past.

Moreover, the division of delegates seems entirely arbitrary. How can Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren all wind up with two delegates in this scenario?

Who could predict that such a logical and streamlined process would break down? And yet, it did.

Smarting from accusations the it had rigged the nominating process for Clinton in 2016, the DNC bent over backwards to make this caucus as transparent as possible. They planned to publicize the first and second round data, along with the final delegate tallies, and they whipped up a cool new app for precincts to report their results. Silicon Valley saves the day again!

Or, maybe not. The app crashed, and the IDP’s phone line was deluged with phone calls from 1,700 precinct captains desperately trying to hand in their homework. There are also multiple complaints of miscounts because precinct captains didn’t understand that the new rule locking in supporters after the first viability threshold meant that they could leave and still have their votes counted.

As of this morning, the Party was manually retrieving caucus results and inputting them into their system. IDP Chair Troy Price promises to release half the results at 4 p.m. this afternoon, a result which should please exactly no one.

Particularly not Joe Biden, who appears to have suffered a massive loss, failing to reach the 15 percent cutoff in multiple precincts. The last thing he needs is two news cycles reporting his Iowa collapse before the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday, so he’s demanding a full investigation before any results are released.

And if the DNC was hoping to avoid charges that the primary was rigged, it seems to have managed to do exactly the opposite.

And when they finally put out the dumpster fire, this flawlessly equitable process will yield 11,402 county delegates, who will be winnowed down to 41 representatives to the Democratic National Convention in July where they’ll join 3,938 other state delegates to determine who will be the Democratic nominee in November.

That’s right, all this rigamarole, from a state which will almost certainly vote for Donald Trump, is for a whopping ONE PERCENT stake in the Democratic nomination. Just as the Founders intended.

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

It’s the most amazing and underrated perk to be able to do things like that instead of waiting until you retire.

— Al Saikali, a partner in Shook Hardy & Bacon’s Miami office, commenting on some of the wonderful things he was able to do during his three-month sabbatical from the firm, like taking his teenage daughter to the movies at noon. At Shook Hardy, lawyers are eligible for these sabbaticals every six years once they’ve spent seven years at the firm. Saikali also took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Middle East during his time away from the firm.

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.