SBM Blog

Justice Hathaway's Answer To Civil Fraud Complaint

Justice Hathaway and her husband Michael Kingsley have filed this answer (PDF) to the complaint filed last week by the U.S. Attorney's office in Detroit. The case has been assigned to the Hon. Marianne Battani.

Governor Appoints Martha Snow to the 3rd Circuit Court, Wayne

Gov. Snyder has appointed Martha Snow to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Judge Gershwin Drain. She is a shareholder of the Xuereb Snow law firm and has more than 20 years of experience as a civil trial lawyer, primarily practicing family law. Snow previously was a special assistant attorney general, shareholder of the Martha M. Snow law firm, and an associate attorney at Pepper and Associates. She was admitted to the state bar in 1991, and has a law degree from Wayne State University Law School and a bachelor's degree from Central Michigan University.

Governor Appoints Dean Ausilio to 37th District Court, Warren

Gov. Snyder has appointed Macomb County attorney Dean Ausilio to the Warren district court judgeship vacated last May by the Hon. Dawnn Gruenburg. According to this story in the Royal Oak Daily Tribune, Ausilio plans to take the bench next Wednesday. Ausilio is a partner of the Law Offices of Ausilio and Ausilio, where he has practiced family law and other civil and criminal law matters for more than 20 years. He previously served as special assistant attorney general, deputy treasurer for the city of Warren, and was an associate attorney at the Bailey and Tull law firm. Ausilio has law and bachelor's degrees from Wayne State University.

Criticize Your Former Client In The Newspaper?

Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment legal wizard who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and Sen. Mitch McConnell in the Citizens United case has a letter to the editor in the New York Times criticizing the Times criticism of Justice Alito's defense of the Citizens United case. (Got that?) Abrams says the Times misapprehends the nature of its own victories in the Pentagon Papers and New York Times v. Sullivan cases. John Steele at Legal Ethics Forum asks whether there is any ethical problem with Abrams calling out his former client on the very matter on which he provided representation -- and suggests that there probably isn't. The comments agree.

Rationing Legal Services

Concluding that there "is and always will be persistent scarcity in the availability of both criminal and civil legal assistance," Harvard Law School's I. Glenn Cohen analyzes how legal service providers should allocate their resources. Concentrate on young offenders over older ones?  Death penalty cases over life imprisonment? His paper is posted at SSRN.

OSU Football Scandal Fallout: Buckeye Lawyer License Busted For One Year

The National Law Journal reports that yesterday the Ohio Supreme Court suspended the license of attorney Christopher Cicero for one year because he shared with Buckeye coach Jim Tressel information from a potential client about the impending scandal. Cicero is a former walk-on OSU linebacker.  The penalty was twice what the Ohio Office of Disciplinary Counsel had recommended, and one Justice dissented from the order, in favor of the lower recommended sanction. Here's the order. (PDF)

Law School Dean: "Stop The Nonsense"

What nonsense, you say? In a NYT op-ed yesterday, Case Western Reserve University dean Lawrence Mitchell says that an "overwrought atmosphere" and "hysteria" is discouraging folks who should be going to law school:

The starting point is the job market. It’s bad. It’s bad in many industries. “Bad,” in law, means that most students will have trouble finding a first job, especially at law firms. But a little historical perspective will reveal that the law job market has been bad — very bad — before. To take the most recent low before this era, in 1998, 55 percent of law graduates started in law firms. In 2011, that number was 50 percent. A 9 percent decline from a previous low during the worst economic conditions in decades hardly seems catastrophic. And this statistic ignores the other jobs lawyers do.

Even so, the focus on first jobs is misplaced. We educate students for a career likely to span 40 to 50 years. The world is guaranteed to change in unpredictable ways, but that reality doesn’t keep us from planning our lives. Moreover, the career for which we educate students, done through the medium of the law, is a career in leadership and creative problem solving. Many graduates will find that their legal educations give them the skills to find rich and rewarding lives in business, politics, government, finance, the nonprofit sector, the arts, education and more.

Meanwhile, National Law Journal reports "Law School Enrollment Continues Its Decline." 

Not Fade Away: The Judicial Version

This week the Washington Post astonished the world by discovering that the average age of the members of the Rolling Stones -- 68 years and 297 days, exceeds that of the U.S. Supreme Court by almost two years.  Perpetuating the hilarity, MiLW Blog extended the comparison to the Michigan Supreme Court, but its analysis, alas, was incomplete:

Of the four justices whose birthdates could be found — Chief Justice Robert Young Jr. and Justices Michael Cavanagh, Marilyn Kelly and Stephen Markman — the average age is 67 ½.

When the missing ages of the other three Justices are added to the equation -- Justice Diane Hathaway at 58, Justice Brian Zahra at 52, and Justice Mary Beth Kelly at 50 -- the average age of the court falls to a mere 61 ½. 

More to the point (whatever it is), The Rolling Stones and Justice Mary Beth Kelly both came into being in the same year -- 1962.

Airlines About To Be Caught In Legal Catch-22, Coming and Going

What's an international airline to do? The WSJ Law Blog reports that the EU's Directive 2008/101/EC requires all airlines to participate in Europe’s greenhouse-gas trading system and get allowances for carbon dioxide emitted during their flights, but in the U.S., the President has just signed the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act, which authorizes the Secretary of Transportation to prohibit those who operate aircraft in the U.S. from participating in the European program.

Admire 10 Notable Legal Mustaches, For A Cause