Law Roundtable
- Recent Entries
March 13, 2010, 11:44 am, 665866
Vikram David Amar (Associate Dean, UC-Davis) & Kevin R. Johnson (Dean, UC-Davis), Why U.S. News and World Report Should Include A Diversity Index in its Ranking of Law Schools: 'Tis the season to be, if not jolly about, at least aware of, one of the most prominent law school rankings...
March 13, 2010, 9:43 am, 665842
For many employers in the United States and United Kingdom, talented workers from outside the US or Europe, respectively, are essential to the continued success of the business. However, numerous considerations must be taken into account, and sound legal advice taken, each and every time a non-domestic worker is ...
March 13, 2010, 9:43 am, 665841
The WSJ Law Blog has a post suggesting shaming may take on an increasing role in the sentencing of corporate offenders. Personally, I have been unimpressed by the idea of shaming as an effective form of deterrence or punishment ever...
March 13, 2010, 7:43 am, 665834
In real-time, we're learning that sudden acceleration is a myth. Yet is there anyone willing to wager that Toyota will not settle hundreds-of-millions to billions of dollars in lawsuits?
March 13, 2010, 5:44 am, 665832
Christiana Hji Panayi (Queen Mary University of London, School of Law) has published Corporate Mobility in the European Union and Exit Taxes, 63 Bull. for Int'l Tax'n 459 (2009). Here is the abstract: The author examines corporate mobility from a private international law perspective and an EC law perspective. In...
March 13, 2010, 5:43 am, 665831
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol European State Aid 2010 - How State aid is applied and interpreted Friday 7 May 2010, The Radisson Blu Portman Hotel, London W1 Chairman: Katherine Holmes Consultant, Reed Smith LLP Member, Competition Commission Failure to...
March 13, 2010, 3:44 am, 665814
Mark J. Roe (Harvard) has published Delaware’s Shrinking Half-Life, 62 Stan. L. Rev. 125 (2009). Here is the abstract: A revisionist consensus among corporate law academics has begun to coalesce that, after a century of academic thinking to the contrary, states do not compete head-to-head on an ongoing basis for...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665811
A callback interview is not the time to coast on the success of earlier interviews, say consultants Valerie Fontaine and Roberta Kass. It's a good idea to brainstorm and come up with some fresh information to discuss, and be prepared to be "on" for many hours with more than one ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665812
The debate over where to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is defined by sharp disagreement over the legal rights of accused terrorists and the relative strengths and weaknesses of civilian and military commission systems. The Obama administration is nearing a decision on where to hold a trial once slated for New ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665810
KB Home's former CEO "secretly padded his pay" by about $11 million when he backdated his own stock options without the knowledge of others at the company, including its in-house lawyers, a federal prosecutor alleged during opening statements in the criminal trial against Bruce Karatz. "He was the one who ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665809
A former in-house attorney who used company funds to cover rent for his summer home won't be practicing in Washington anytime soon. The D.C. Court of Appeals stopped short of disbarring former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing attorney Oscar W. Weekes Jr., who argued that he had filed an affidavit in ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665807
Participants in the massive, often bitter litigation over respiratory illnesses suffered by police, firefighters and private workers during the response and cleanup at the World Trade Center after 9/11 hailed as historic the settlement reached Thursday. A lawyer with an insurance entity created with a FEMA grant to help the ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665808
The New Jersey Supreme Court heard arguments last week on whether a corporation should be awarded counsel fees in a successful coverage dispute when it prevailed in a state that does not normally provide for them. A state appeals court held that since the corporation was successful in New Jersey ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665806
Pillsbury Winthrop is losing nine real estate lawyers -- including the managing partner of its 190-lawyer D.C. office -- to Boston-based Goulston & Storrs, which is known for its real estate expertise. Maureen Dwyer, who has been head of Pillsbury's D.C. office since the firm's merger with Shaw Pittman in ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665803
Davis Polk & Wardwell achieved what few New York firms were able to do last year, scoring fat increases in both revenue and profits per equity partner. The firm's revenue grew by about 7 percent, the highest percentage growth among New York firms. The firm's PPP rose an astonishing 10 ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665805
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. did not list at least six U.S. Supreme Court briefs that a questionnaire asked him to disclose during his confirmation process in late 2008, the Justice Department acknowledged Friday. Holder spokesman Matthew Miller said the briefs "should have been disclosed as part of the confirmation ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665802
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled Friday that thimerosal-containing vaccines do not cause autism, rejecting a second theory advanced by plaintiffs lawyers who blame the injections for contributing to the developmental disorder in children. The rulings in three test cases mark the second defeat for plaintiffs lawyers who are ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665804
After the Supreme Court ruled that companies can spend freely on political advertising campaigns, good-government advocates, liberal commentators and even the president warned that a flood of corporate money would overwhelm elections and subvert democracy. But the real impact of the decision may be much less extreme, say in-house attorneys ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665801
In rejecting the bulk of New York's content-based restrictions on attorney advertising, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Friday that a ban on the use of nicknames like "Heavy Hitters" or client testimonials about pending cases violates the First Amendment. The circuit also held that preventing lawyers from ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665800
In large, multinational organizations, implementing a legal hold is difficult, says consultant Brett Burney. It can be impossible to know exactly where data resides, and tracking hold notices for several thousand employees can be quite hopeless, but now PSS Systems Atlas can assist.
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665797
Anyone who hoped commercial litigation would help law firms weather the recession was surely disappointed last year. That's judging by recoveries that National Law Journal affiliate VerdictSearch counted among its Top 100 Verdicts of 2009. Commercial verdicts, including breach-of-contract recoveries, fell from $1.4 billion in 2008 to just $421 million ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665798
Washington Mutual's estate has reached a proposed settlement with JPMorgan Chase and federal regulators that will result in the return of $4 billion in deposits and nearly $2 billion in other cash that will be used to pay WaMu creditors, according to lawyers involved in the matter. As part of ...
March 13, 2010, 1:43 am, 665799
Thomas Russo's old life as GC of the collapsed Lehman Brothers is in the news again with the release of the bankruptcy examiners' report. Russo and Lehman's legal department weren't blamed for accounting chicanery, according to the report. But it shows they were involved in negotiations with other financial institutions ...
March 12, 2010, 11:44 pm, 665791
A puzzle for constitutional law buffs: I just read a recent case which explored the interaction between the Second Amendment and part of the Sixth Amendment. What is that interaction?
I realize, of course, that one can dream up all sorts of theories for how any two ...
March 12, 2010, 7:44 pm, 665775
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last year, despite the very modest nature of his success in actually achieving peace so far, has stimulated a record number of nominations for the prize this year:
A record 237 people and organizations have been nominated for the 2010 ...
March 12, 2010, 7:44 pm, 665774
On the afternoon of Friday, March 26, and the morning of March 27, Harvard Law School will be celebrating the work of Bill Stuntz, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law. The conference will be a bittersweet event. It will be sweet in that many outstanding ...
March 12, 2010, 3:44 pm, 665673
Kim Brooks (McGill) has posted A Comment on Watersheds: Runoff from the Tax Code, 34 Vt. L. Rev. ___ (2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The role of tax as an instrument of social and economic policy has recently come to the fore in debates about the environment. This...
March 12, 2010, 3:44 pm, 665672
The Tax Foundation has published Can Income Tax Hikes Close the Deficit?: Using the Tax Foundation's Microsimulation Model to analyze the deficits projected by the President's Budget, we can project how much revenue a broad-based increase in federal income tax rates would generate. As usual, the President's Budget forecasts lower...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665671
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Thursday that Les Schwab Tire Centers, based in Seattle, has agreed to pay $2 million to resolve claims that it failed to hire qualified women for tire-changing jobs at its stores in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Utah. The settlement resolves ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665670
Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Randall Rader is getting down in the trenches in the nation's patent litigation hot spot -- and already his rulings have swayed cases in favor of Silicon Valley tech companies and set the patent bar chattering. Rader, the incoming chief judge of the ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665668
The highlight of the 2,200-page report released Thursday that examines the demise of Lehman Brothers starts at around page 700, when the examiner, Jenner & Block chair Anton Valukas, delves into the accounting tricks Lehman used to temporarily shift $50 billion in bad assets off of its balance sheet. The ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665669
Darby & Darby, a century-old New York intellectual property boutique, said Friday that it would begin the process of dissolving. The decision follows a series of departures, as partners left to join general practice firms including McDermott Will & Emery and Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Darby & Darby made ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665667
Striking differences emerged for valuing leisure. GenY was much more likely than previous generations to say they wanted a job with an easy pace and lots of vacation time, and less likely to want to work overtime. They also saw work as less central to their lives and ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 pm, 665666
FoxNews is now reporting about the nomination of Robert Chatigny to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The editorial is unfair, but nicely summarizes Judge Chatigny's handling of the Michael Ross case. Let's discuss why Judge Chatigny should not be elevated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Michael Ross ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 pm, 665590
Wei Cui (China University of Political Science and Law) has posted Business Tax: China’s Quasi-VAT, International VAT Monitor, No. 4, pp. 291-95, 2009, on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Recent VAT reform in China has created a new focus on the Chinese business tax (BT), as the BT currently covers...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 pm, 665589
Wall Street Journal, A Peep at EU Tax Law. Read On. Really., by Charles Forelle: Your run-of-the-mill tax dispute is a dry affair. But now comes case C-3/09, Erotic Center BVBA v. Belgian State, before the European Court of Justice. The question at law: Can a peep-show purveyor enjoy the...
March 12, 2010, 1:43 pm, 665588
Given that President Obama turned his attention to immigration reform this week, see NYT story, it is somewhat ironic that the issue also surfaced in a more unlikely place, the Texas Supreme Court. The issue before the Court -- whether or not a jury should be informed (repeatedly) that ...
March 12, 2010, 1:43 pm, 665587
The discussion is nicely leading to the next question: what other international rules are relevant to trade in natural resources and how do they relate to WTO rules?
March 12, 2010, 1:43 pm, 665586
Ted Frank's op-ed shares something that everyone seems to have ignored, and about which I was ignorant: "Sudden acceleration" is allegedly an electro-mechanical process that only seems to afflict old people:
The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, ...
March 12, 2010, 1:43 pm, 665585
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Serdar Dinc (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Isil Erel (Ohio State University) analyze Economic Nationalism in Mergers and Acquisitions. ABSTRACT: This paper studies the government reaction to large corporate merger attempts in the European Union during...
March 12, 2010, 11:44 am, 665518
I’m pleased to say that Ben Zimmer, a contributor to one of my favorite blogs — Language Log — will be the New York Times Magazine’s new On Language columnist, replacing the late William Safire. The press release:
The New York Times Magazine announced today the appointment of ...
March 12, 2010, 11:44 am, 665517
Business Insider's Law Review, The Year's Top 10 Published Law Professors: One of the greatest responsibilities, or at least requirements, of being a renowned law professor is publishing. Whether there should be so much import placed on authoring discussion papers is debatable — some argue that professors should be more...
March 12, 2010, 11:43 am, 665516
My good friend, Rick Garnett (Notre Dame) has posted on Prawfsblawg an entry entited: The "Institutional" First Amendment. In the post, he discusses the Ninth Circuit's recent decision in McDermott v. Ampersand Publishing (9th Cir. March 11, 2009). The Central...
March 12, 2010, 11:43 am, 665515
The most recent issue of the SSRN abstracting journal, Economic Perspectives on Employment and Labor Law is out and includes another great article by friend of the blog, David Yamada. Here's the table of contents: Program Take-Up Among CalWORKs Leavers:...
March 12, 2010, 11:43 am, 665514
This blog is about business law, which I am taking to include the business of law (at least for this post). A recent ABA Journal article reports that, according to a consultant, midsize law firms are at "serious risk" because...
March 12, 2010, 9:44 am, 665431
Neil H. Buchanan (George Washington), Is the IRS the Most Trustworthy Agency in the Country? Even Republicans Seem to Think So: [M]y claim here is that, if one looks carefully at the role that the IRS is repeatedly asked to play in our society, it is evident that politicians across...
March 12, 2010, 9:44 am, 665430
The International Legal Technology Association’s Knowledge Management Peer Group is conducting its biennial knowledge management survey to probe the trends, hot topics and development of KM in the legal industry.
Survey results will be published in the KM White Paper, scheduled for June. ILTA encourages all legal organizations to submit ...
March 12, 2010, 9:43 am, 665429
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Douglas D. Davis (Department of Economics, VCU School of Business) has a paper on Advance Production, Inventories and Market Power: An Experimental Investigation. ABSTRACT: This paper reports an experiment conducted to assess the effects of...
March 12, 2010, 7:44 am, 665376
Wall Street Journal editorial, Maryland's Mobile Millionaires: Income Tax Rates Go Up, Rich Taxpayers Vanish: Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state's top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He'd better hope this works...
March 12, 2010, 7:44 am, 665375
Two more handfuls of embedded metaposts and their back references (See my post of Feb. 22, 2010: Part XLIII), conjointly with the number of their back references. 1. 3M (See my post of March 2, 2010: 3M Corporation with 7...
March 12, 2010, 5:44 am, 665332
This week’s National Journal poll of political bloggers asked left-leaning political bloggers “If Congress enacts something close to President Obama’s latest health care reform plan, how would that affect the Democratic Party in the midterm elections?” The right-leaning bloggers were asked the same question about the effect on Republicans. On ...
March 12, 2010, 5:44 am, 665330
Allen D. Madison (University of Navarra, School of Law) has posted The Tension between Textualism and Substance-Over-Form Doctrines in Tax Law, 43 Santa Clara L. Rev. 699 (2003), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article discusses the tension that exists between the recent textualist approach taken in the U.S....
March 12, 2010, 5:44 am, 665331
Charles R.T. O'Kelley (Seattle) has posted several of his tax papers on SSRN: The Parenting Tax Penalty: A Framework for Income Tax Reform, 64 Or. L. Rev. 375 (1986) Tax Policy for Post Liberal Society: A Flat Tax Inspired Redefinition of the Purpose and Ideal Structure of a Progressive Income...
March 12, 2010, 5:43 am, 665329
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Today I am in New York to present at a conference at Fordham Law School on New Ideas for Limiting Bank Size - the Murphy Conference on Corporate Law. Most papers are by non-antitrust people...
March 12, 2010, 3:44 am, 665305
From Judge Reinhardt’s 133-page dissent in the pledge-of-allegiance case, Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School District, the first dissent I have ever read that comes with a table of contents:
For many Americans, the current version of the Pledge is the only version they have ever known. Some individuals ...
March 12, 2010, 3:43 am, 665304
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol Philippe Aghion, Richard Blundell, Rachel Griffith, Peter Howitt, and Susanne Prantl address The effects of entry on incumbent innovation and productivity. ABSTRACT: How does firm entry affect innovation incentives in incumbent firms? Microdata suggest that...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665267
While welcomed by the Haitian-American community, the temporary protected status granted by the Obama administration to Haitians living in the United States is turning out to have its pitfalls, say attorneys and paralegals. Among the problems: The status is good for only 18 months. After that, they say, what are ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665266
Within the big pyramid that is the law firm are many little pyramids, each topped by a rainmaker, notes the Rodent. And it's vital that an associate cultivate one of these "pharaohs" who will advocate for him or her. An orphan associate is an eternal associate, says the Rodent.
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665260
Montgomery Blair Sibley, best known for his representation of the late
"D.C. Madam," had his law license suspended for three years by the D.C.
Court of Appeals on Thursday. The court's decision is a reciprocal
disciplinary sanction that stems from a 2008 decision by Florida's
Supreme Court to pull Sibley's license in that state ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665265
Chefs and restaurant owners have been opening new eateries in Oakland, Calif., right through the recession, and lawyers have been eager for a seat at the table. Local firms like Wendel, Rosen, Black & Dean are stepping up their marketing efforts and plumbing their personal networks to raise their profiles. ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665264
A New York jury this week convicted the business partner of a Long Island lawyer who was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Korean restaurant in October 2008 for arranging the hit. Ronald Thornton was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy in the death of James ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665261
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Thursday appointed former Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye to take over his office's investigations of Gov. David Paterson for possibly misusing police personnel to intervene in an aide's domestic violence case and for improperly accepting Yankees tickets. Having concluded that an immediate resolution ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665262
The D.C. Circuit on Thursday declined to rehear a major case on the rights of street demonstrators, sparking a worried dissent from one judge that the decision could have a chilling effect on political expression. The circuit let stand a ruling from November, in which a three-judge panel found that ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665263
A law firm that engaged a retiring judge in employment talks while he presided over one of its cases is not liable for damages to the other party, a New Jersey appeals court ruled Wednesday. The appeals court affirmed the dismissal of legal malpractice and deprivation of due process counts ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665258
A settlement has been reached by New York City and its contractors with plaintiffs in the more than 9,000 cases involving respiratory and other illnesses suffered by police, firefighters and workers who responded to the World Trade Center terror attacks and cleaned up the site. A federal judge is set ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665259
The independent examiner's report investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers is out, and the snippets making early headlines suggest that the examiner, Jenner & Block Chairman Anton Valukas, spreads the blame around in a thorough 2,200-page report. The report, which cost $38 million to produce, points a finger at JPMorgan ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665257
The Federal Circuit has offered more guidance on willful patent infringement in a revised ruling in i4i Limited Partnership v. Microsoft Corp. The ruling upheld a lower court's $290 million patent judgment against Microsoft and found that Microsoft must stop selling an infringing version of Microsoft Word 2007. The holding ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665255
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to adopt four articles of impeachment against Eastern District of Louisiana Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr., wrapping up a wide-ranging investigation into allegations that Porteous took cash and gifts from lawyers and lied in his own bankruptcy case. The stage is set for ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665256
Both appointed to the 9th Circuit in 1979 as part of a historic reshaping of the court, Stephen Reinhardt and Dorothy Nelson parted ways Thursday as Nelson handed Reinhardt a bitter defeat by siding with conservative Judge Carlos Bea in an opinion upholding the words "under God" in the Pledge ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665253
The Justice Department unlawfully recorded privileged phone calls between former Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., and his lawyers during an insurance fraud probe, a federal magistrate judge in Arizona ruled Thursday in recommending the recordings be suppressed. Magistrate Judge Bernardo Velasco found that prosecutors made false statements to the supervising judge, ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665254
When Kathleen Sullivan began practicing law about 30 years ago, there were no female litigation partners practicing at big firms. On Thursday, capping a career that has also included stints as a Harvard Law School professor and the dean of Stanford Law School, Sullivan became a name partner at Quinn ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665252
The regulatory and legal landscape for data privacy is changing rapidly. Although these changes have not garnered much attention, say attorneys Satish M. Kini and Thomas S. Wyler, they deserve careful consideration by in-house counsel, privacy compliance staff and IT departments.
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665251
Cutting-edge questions in the First Amendment arena have recently stemmed from clashes between students and school districts over limits put on speech posted on social networking sites. Now lawyers on both sides of the issue are urging the 3rd Circuit to vacate two seemingly conflicting decisions by two different three-judge ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665249
Robert Ruyak, Howrey's managing partner, confirmed Thursday that the firm plans to cut between 20 and 30 partners. The firm's profits per partner dropped 35 percent in 2009, and the acquisition of high-profile laterals created internal client conflicts that hurt some partners, sources say. Ruyak says that the hope is ...
March 12, 2010, 1:44 am, 665250
What may have been a case of oversharing on the part of a DLA Piper associate has dragged the firm into court to defend a legal malpractice lawsuit. Former client George Sutton & Associates, a San Diego software company, claimed in a complaint filed on Tuesday that DLA Piper unlawfully ...