SBM Blog

The Greatest Lawyer Response Letter Ever?

From Deadspin, "The Greatest Letter Ever Printed On NFL Team Letterhead," from 1974 competes with this year's entry from New Jersey as found in Above The Law's "The Awesome Aftermath of the West Orange Cease-and-Desist Letter That Went Viral Worldwide."

If You're A Michigan Lawyer And A Shakespeare Lover...

Get yourself to Stratford, Ontario on October 4-6 for "Shylock Appeals." On Saturday, October 5 at 10:30 a.m., two prominent [Canadian] lawyers will argue Shylock’s sentence before a panel of judges including Beverley McLachlin, the Chief Justice of Canada. Meet at the Down The Street Bar and Restaurant?

HT: Slaw

Art: Shylock and Jessica, Maurycy Gottlieb,1876

How Satisfied Are Michigan Law Grads With Their Career Choice?

Wade H. McCree, Jr., Collegiate Professor of Law Emeritus David Chambers analyzes forty years of survey data from University of Michigan Law grads, starting in the early sixties, in "Satisfaction in the Practice of Law: Findings from a Long-Term Study of Attorneys' Careers." He finds:

[A]mong Michigan’s graduates five, fifteen and twenty-five years out of law school, for both men and women, overall work satisfaction is much more closely related to perceptions of the social value of their work and the quality of their relations with co-workers than it is to their satisfaction with income or with their prestige in the community.

The big surprise? Women grads on the whole are somewhat more satisfied. Chambers speculates that this is because women in general place a higher priority than men on finding employment in settings where they perceive the  work as having comparatively high social value and where they are likely to have especially good relations with coworkers.

The article speculates about the effect of the Great Recession on satisfaction:

We note again that the Michigan surveys ended in 2006. Thus we can say nothing about the effects on work satisfaction of the severe economic downturn that is still going on. The only guidance the Michigan data provides comes from prior, less profound recessions that occurred during the years when the Michigan surveys were conducted. For example, one prior serious downturn that affected attorneys began in 1990. The recession officially lasted only eight months – from July 1990 until March 1991 – but lawyers in the United States in general experienced effects for several years. Many large law firms laid off large numbers of first and second year associates. More broadly, initial employment for law school graduates in the United States as a whole declined from 92.2 percent in 1987 to 83.4 percent in 1993.  Within the Michigan data, those working in settings other than private law firms continued to report essentially the same generally-high levels of satisfaction that they had in prior years, but for those in private law firms, a several-year long downward trend in satisfaction among both the five and fifteen year graduates reached its lowest point with the classes surveyed in the years 1992 and 1993, when, among private-firm lawyers, only 30 percent of five year graduates and only 44 percent of the fifteen-year graduates reported being quite positive about their careers. Satisfaction improved over the years that followed. We fear that, for private firm lawyers, the trough in satisfaction will reach lower and last longer for those who were five or fifteen years out of law school at the time we completed our surveys in 2006.

In a post about the Chambers' article, Legal Ethics Blog's John Steele asks why Michigan Law discontinued the survey.  Anybody got an answer?

Report: Add Judges In Macomb, Oakland and Kent Counties, Cut In Wayne County And Outstate

The biennial Judicial Resources Report of the State Court Administrative Office, released today, is a relatively modest affair compared to the record-breaking report of two years ago.  Nevertheless, it signals a continuing rebalancing of the state's judicial resources based on changes in caseload, provided this Legislature is as receptive to the recommendations as the last Legislature, which agreed dto eliminate 36 trial court judgeships by attrition. 

The Report's changes overall would be a wash in terms of overall judicial numbers. It calls for eliminating four Wayne County circuit court judgeships while adding four judges to the Macomb circuit court and two to the Oakland circuit court. The report does not recommend any judgeship changes for the 36th district court (Detroit), a court that is now undergoing overall review. Within Wayne County, the report recommends reconfiguring the district court in Westland by merging it with one of the other surrounding district courts, and consolidating the Woodhaven district court with the Southgate district court. In Macomb County, the report also calls for converting the remaining municipal still in operation into either a single Grosse Pointes district court or merging them into the Harper Woods district court.

Outstate, the Report calls for adding one circuit and one district judge to Kent County, but eliminating one district judge each in Saginaw, Berrien, and Delta counties, as well as in the 12^th Circuit consisting of Baraga, Keweenaw and Houghton counties. The report also recommends realigning Hillsdale and Branch counties into a single circuit, followed by judicial reduction.

Here's the full report (PDF).

Technology+18 Hour Days+30 Second Bathroom Breaks=Phenomenal Law Firm Startup Success

The New York Times reports that by at least one ranking, murthy.com is the world’s most visited law firm site. The founder of the immigration law firm tells the Times how she did it including her mistakes and what she's learned:

I’m intense. I work 12 to 18 hours a day, no lunch break, bathroom breaks of less than 30 seconds. In the beginning, I assumed my staff shared my vision and passion and expected them to be excited just because I was. I worried about overpaying people, and worked them to death. I expected them to be my slaves, whipping limping horses. I was such a moron, I don’t think I even knew the Department of Labor laws.

Could A U.S. Lawyer Legally And Ethically Advise Edward Snowden On Avoiding Extradition?

This question posed by NYU Law prof and legal ethics guru Stephen Gillers on Legal Ethics blog is slyer upon reflection than it first appears. Read the comments.

How Big Is Tuesday's Voting Rights Act Decision, Really?

Michigan Law prof Ellen Katz calls it "consequential" in her commentary at SCOTUSblog. From her post:

Shelby County’s greatest import may lie in this supposition – namely, the majority’s belief that the validity of the coverage formula requires that those subject to preclearance currently engage in the sort of defiant obstructionism that made the VRA necessary in the first instance.

But specific acts traceable to public officials openly bent on denying norms of equality capture but a portion of the ways racial discrimination operates today. Put differently, the conditions that made preclearance necessary in the first instance have shaped the modern landscape in ways that create distinct opportunities for more subtle forms of discrimination, including intentional discrimination, to thrive.  Many or even most public officials may act without ill will, but still intentional discrimination from some and the implicit biases of many may generate substantial obstacles for minority voters in the political process. Today’s decision makes clear that such obstacles are insufficient to justify the coverage formula and an operational preclearance regime.

Former Michigan Law prof Rick Pildes, now at NYU School of Law, has called some pre-opinion reactions to Shelby "hyperbolic."  In a SCOTUSblog post yesterday he describes the deep divisions about what the Voting Rights Act symbolizes:

To those who will be distraught, outraged, or fearful, the essential question at stake in the Court’s decision – and in the continuing vitality of Section 4 — is whether we believe racial discrimination in voting still exists in the South.  The question being framed this way, the Court’s decision today will appear to be, at best, a denial of reality and a reflection of a naïve “post-racial” view that in the Obama era, racial discrimination in voting has ended.   Justice Sotomayor, at oral argument, perfectly reflected this perspective on what the decision represents when she posed this pointed question to the VRA’s challengers:   “Do you think that racial discrimination in voting has ended, that there is none anywhere?”  The answer to that question must be no.  From this vantage point, then, as long as racial discrimination in voting still does take place at all in the South, Section 4 of the VRA – the part the Court invalidated – remains not just justifiable, but essential.

In addition, to many people, the VRA symbolizes protection of the crown jewel of rights, the right of access to the ballot box.   For those who know the history, this right was born from the blood and the bodies of all those who had been given the last full measure of their devotion to secure full access for all to the ballot box – those beaten on the bridge from Selma, Alabama in 1965, the three civil rights workers lynched in the Mississippi summer of 1964, and many others.  How can the Court find unconstitutional an Act that plays any role at all in ensuring political equality regarding this most sacred right?  And why should the Court second-guess Congress on these issues?

Yet to others, including the Court’s pivotal actor, Justice Kennedy, the essential question at stake is whether our political system is frozen in place on issues concerning race.  Do our political institutions and culture have the capacity to recognize that dramatic changes at the intersection of race and voting have taken place over recent decades?  Section 4 was created in 1965 as a short-term measure for five years; in initially upholding that system, the Court called it “an uncommon exercise of congressional power” justified by the “exceptional circumstances” of the massive disfranchisement of black voters (and many poor whites) that existed when the VRA was enacted.  In 1970, Congress extended this system for another five years; in 1975, for another eight; and in 1982, for twenty-five more years.   Then, in 2006, in the provision the Court struck down, Congress re-authorized this system for another twenty-five years, until 2031.  Thus we moved from a five-year regime in 1965 for exceptional circumstances to a sixty-six-year regime that continues to single out nine states (and fifty-three other counties) for unique federal control.

Pildes concludes that President Obama is uniquely situated to "cut through these radically irreconcilable meanings of the Court’s decision and lead forward on these explosive issues."

The Biggest Unresolved Same-Sex Marriage Question?

MIchigan Law grad Steve Sanders, now an Indiana University Law prof, addresses the question of what the next big issue will be in the wake of today's same-sex marriage decisions, Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor.  From his SCOTUSblog post:

On this blog and in a recent article for the Michigan Law Review, I have argued that a person who legally marries in her home state, then pulls up stakes and moves to another state, acquires a significant liberty interest under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause in the ongoing existence of her marriage.  This liberty interest creates a right of marriage recognition that is conceptually and doctrinally distinguishable from any constitutional “right to marry” in the first instance.  It is a neutral principle, grounded in core Due Process Clause values: protection of normative expectations about marital and family privacy (if a state can’t take away your child without due process, how can it take away your spouse?); respect for established legal and social practices (state-to-state marriage recognition is a longstanding default rule); and rejection of the idea that a state can unilaterally sever a legal family relationship without important, proven justifications.

Did the Court today provide any support for my argument?  To be sure, Justice Kennedy’s Windsor  opinion is solicitous toward the prerogative of states to define marriage for themselves.  But his analysis is entirely in the context of vertical federalism: federal law, the Court said, may not “injure” same-sex couples whom a state has seen fit to “protect” with the status of marriage.  The key here, I think, is that many of the Court’s rationales for condemning DOMA also implicate horizontal federalism:  the obligations states owe one another as coequal sovereigns.

ALL CAPS BULLETINS, So Passé

Not that any lawyer or judge would ever use all caps to emphasize a point in a brief or opinion (RIGHT?!!), but this is interesting -- the Navy has announced that it will no longer use all-caps communiques.  The Atlantic explains why all-caps are so darned irritating, including being harder to read:

"A typeface is designed to be used with capital and lowercase letters," explains the typographer Jonathan Hoefler. "That's because, from a physiological standpoint, lowercase letters are easier to read. They're more distinguishable, they have ascenders and descenders, they have modulated widths, and all this creates a texture that's easier and more pleasing to the eye. Capital letters don't have that."

Opinionated Metaphors: Shelby County v. Holder

There's such a flood of online commentary about Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court decision throwing out the preclearance formula for enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, that SBM Blog's curating capacities are simply swamped. Instead, for those of you who don't have time to read the actual opinion, we hereby offer as the inaugural post in our new occasional feature, Opinionated Metaphors,* the chief metaphorical salvos from the majority and the dissent:

From the Roberts majority opinion:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem. Section 5 of the Act required States to obtain federal permission before enacting any law related to voting—a drastic departure from basic principles of federalism. And §4 of the Act applied that requirement only to some States—an equally dramatic departure from the principle that all States enjoy equal sovereignty. This was strong medicine, [weak, but he's just warming up] but Congress determined it was needed to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting, “an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.”

The dissent also turns to the record to argue that, in light of voting discrimination in Shelby County, the county cannot complain about the provisions that subject it to preclearance. But that is like saying that a driver pulled over pursuant to a policy of stopping all redheads cannot complain about that policy, if it turns out his license has expired. Shelby County’s claim is that the coverage formula here is unconstitutional in all its applications, because of how it selects the jurisdictions subjected to preclearance. The county was selected based on that formula, and may challenge it in court.

From the Ginsburg dissent: 

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

*includes similes.