The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Legal Times Awards Gala Photos Now on Flickr

If you were at the second annual Legal Times Awards Gala at the Ritz Carlton on Tuesday, chances are National Law Journal Photo Editor Diego M. Radzinschi snapped a picture of you at some point in the evening. Have a look at our just-created Flickr page to find your photo. If you weren't there, click the link to see what you missed. 

And just in case you did miss it, here's a recent BLT post about the event. See you next year.

Race Issues at Covington's Washington Office?

Covington & Burling is taking some heat over at The Huffington Post.

Yolanda Young, a former staff attorney, published a blog item Monday that compared the firm’s efforts at diversifying its workforce with segregation laws in the Jim Crow South.

“Covington has certainly diversified its firm; however, its attorneys are far from equals,” she writes. “The vast majority of Covington's black attorneys do no substantive work, have no control over their case assignments and no opportunity for advancement.”

She contends that black lawyers make up less than 5 percent of partners and associates in the firm’s Washington office, but compose nearly one-third of the staff attorneys despite their experience and education.

Covington’s management committee released a statement to Legal Times, which said the firm may have had less success in terms of the percentage of black lawyers as partners, counsel, and associates. But it’s not for a lack of trying.

“[R]oughly 10% of the lawyers we hired during the past two years are African-American,” the statement says. “Over time, we are hopeful that these percentages or higher percentages will be reflected in our overall numbers.”

The statement also says Young’s blog was “replete with distortions and inaccuracies” and that she misrepresented the firm's ongoing commitment to diversity and “the advancement of black lawyers in a wide range of practice areas and positions of firm leadership.”

Harry Potter and the Order of the IP Attorneys

From broken embargoes on book release dates to academic papers on the legal principles of magic (just say "estoppel!"), the Harry Potter books have intersected with the law more than one might think. The most recent bit of legal wizardry has been author J.K. Rowling’s lawsuit to stop a Harry Potter fan site’s proprietor from publishing a lexicon of the books’ characters, places and potions, and over at Salon.com's Machinist blog, Farhad Manjoo goes into some of the legal and moral quandaries wrapped up in the suit.

The first thing to note: Rowling's suit has, at least temporarily, worked. Plans to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon, compiled by Steve Vander Ark, have been shelved pending judicial review.

Manjoo notes that Rowling’s attorneys have significant copyright precedent in their favor, including a ruling that found that “The Seinfeld Aptitude Test,” a book of show-related trivia, infringed upon Castle Rock Entertainment’s copyrights for the sitcom. Detracting from her case, however, is the writer’s prior statements of affection for the online version of the Harry Potter Lexicon. (In one blog post, Rowling even mentions how she has used it to settle factual matters about the characters from time to time.)

The issue of fan-created works is, of course, very contentious. See this recent dispatch by a Wired Magazine writer from a Tokyo manga mega-market that sells both leading comics and fan-created knock offs, a genre that in Japan receives tacit approval.

Weblog Awards Recognize ALM Blog

The finalists for the yearly Weblog Awards have come out, and nominees for Best Law Blog include the ALM blog How Appealing.

According to the site, the Weblog Awards attracted a half a million votes last year in categories such as Best Online Community, Best Comic Strip (for what it's worth, I voted for XKCD), and Best Celebrity Blogger, among a host of others. Voting closes November 8. The winners will be announced live at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas.

Can Larry Craig withdraw his guilty plea?

Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is engaged in a lively conversation about the specifics of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s ability to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct involving alleged cruising for sex in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. Several criminal attorneys have commented on the blog suggesting that the claim by Craig that he did not understand his rights when he waived his right to counsel is contradicted by the plea agreement itself. They point out that the written plea agreement (which you can review here, courtesy of FindLaw and The New York Times) contains clauses that imply there was some negotiation and strategy on Craig’s part, which seems to indicate that Craig was thinking more clearly than he claims.

BLT readers, what do you think of these ideas? Does Craig have grounds to withdraw his guilty plea?

Firm Editing on Wikipedia

A post on the law-professor blog Concurring Opinions is drawing attention for its finding that law firms have been editing pages on Wikipedia. Professor Dave Hoffman of Temple University writes, "Law firms are using Wikipedia to burnish their reputations and trash their competitors." Many of the changes appear to be firms modifying (correcting?) their own entries, but others apparently involve "fixing" entries for competing firms. Hoffman's post lets readers see a list of firms involved and then check out their Wikipedia modifications.

Legal Blog Watch discusses the ethics of firms editing their competitors' entries. Above the Law focuses on the edits from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. And one commentator at Concurring Opinions notes the "vast number of edits to movie star pages" apparently originating from within the Justice Department.

No word on whether he drowns puppies, though.

How can the United States' moral standing have plummeted as a direct result of a foreign policy designed to create more U.S.-friendly democracies in the world? Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer and author of A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, said at the Cato Institute earlier today that the belief that We are Good and They are Evil is the fundamental philosophy of the Bush administration as well as the cause of that seeming paradox.

Greenwald, speaking before a packed basement auditorium, discussed what he saw as the dangers of this philosophy: (1) Once you believe in it, there is no limit on the means or the weapons you can amass, because there is no more important cause than "fighting evil"; and (2) the philosophy promotes absolute faith in leaders, because those on the side of good would never do something "evil" such as abusing power. Oversight and skepticism become part of the evil because they question the good.

In one of the more interesting moments of the talk, Greenwald praised one of his ideological opposites, law professor and occasional Legal Times contributor John Yoo for what he saw as an "intellectually honest" position in favor of the unlimited power of the executive. Greenwald cited a conversation in which Yoo had been asked if it would be legal for the president, if he believed it to be in the national security interest, to authorize torture by crushing the testicles of young boys. Yoo had answered that it would be.

Naturally, when Baker & Hostetler partner Lee Casey took the podium to offer an opposing viewpoint, he felt it necessary to first give a disclaimer: "I have no desire to crush the testicles of children," he said.

Blogosphere Runs Homegrown Candidate

Ron Shepston announced today that he is running for Congress in California's 42nd District. If you are drawing a blank on the name it is because Shepston is not a public figure. He is a blogger on The Daily Kos, a site dedicated to electing Democrats. Why should you care? Bloggers are becoming increasingly more powerful in the
political arena. By playing a key role in ousting Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary from the left and assisting in decimating a bi-partisan immigration bill from the right the blogosphere has placed an indelible mark on politics of recent times.

Need further reason on why you should care? He could possibly win. Shepston is running against Rep. Gary Miller (R-Calif.). Miller is under investigation by the FBI, which is never a good harbinger for political success. Ethics concerns brought several Republicans down in '06, thanks in part to the blogs and there is speculation that it could hurt them again. If Shepston can harness the financial possibilities of the blogs and capitalize on the negative news about Miller we could be looking at the first homegrown blog congressman.

Now may not be the time to break out the champagne if you are a left-leaning blogger, however. The 42nd is a Republican district. Miller has been the representative since 1998, but had no Democratic
challenger in the 2006 election. Miller will have the considerable clout of incumbency in his corner. This will be a formidable test of the power bloggers possess to organize their own campaign. Shepston's campaign manager will be a blogger and his financial base will be drawn from the Internet. If they can take down the incumbent Republican in a Republican district, the era of the blog as an electoral force may officially begin.

Blog Hits 4 Linguistics

Bill Poser at the blog Language Log takes issue with the Supreme Court’s decision in Morse v. Frederick, not because of the legal ideas involved but, more importantly, because they misinterpreted the semantics of the phrase "Bong Hits 4 Jesus":

The kind of meaning that the Court purports to find is propositional. It claims, in effect, that the interpretation of the banner is something like "It is good to smoke marijuana even though it is illegal." or "Go ahead and smoke marijuana.". However, the banner does not, on any plausible analysis, contain the kind of syntactic structure that serves to express propositions, namely a sentence, not even a sentence part of which is not overt. Nor is this an example of a construction with an implicit verb, such as "Freedom for Tibet", which means something like "Freedom for Tibet would be good" or "We support freedom for Tibet". (The Court does not argue that the banner means "It would be good for Jesus to smoke marijuana.")

Poser makes a number of other interesting points about the semantics of the phrase and how it can and cannot plausibly be interpreted. Of course, the only interpretation of the banner that really matters at this point is the Court’s.

Blog Watching, Supreme Court Edition

The blogs aren't standing idly by as the Supreme Court hands down decisions that have implications for First Amendment rights, as bloggers on both the left and right see free-speech protections as integral to their role in the political discourse. Some blogs are applauding the campaign finance decision, but the Morse v. Frederick decision (and the Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation decision, in some circles) caused a good amount of consternation. A few reactions:

• "Apparently the founders were in favor of every kind of speech except those that got in the way of government aims. If Larry Flynt’s case went to the court right now, he would be a convict."
  
• "Roberts has signaled early in his tenure as Chief that he is more interested in crafting the widest possible consensus on the Court than in issuing sweeping decisions. That he was only able to get a bare majority for such a tepid ruling, therefore, would seem to indicate that this was as far-reaching as the Justices were willing to go."
  
• "This new excuse, justifying bans if they can be linked tenuously to “imminent unlawful action” will surely provide a useful tool for those who want to ban every political expression they disagree with. After all, when every political disagreement can be found “offensive” and linked by some contorted logic to “hate speech”, then they can now be banned as leading to “hate crimes”, right? "
  
• "We should've thrown BCRA out entirely but this is a good start. In fact, the Roberts Court rectified the error of the Rehnquist Court."
  
• "There are plenty of instances in which vulnerable people have been proselytized with public funds, faith-based grants have been blatantly politicized to further a partisan agenda, religious ministries are treated as just another special interest group competing for grants from the federal government, and extremist groups most American would find offensive have sought and received assistance from taxpayers. All of these things happened, and five Supreme Court justices just made it harder for Americans to challenge the practice in court."
  

Read any good blogs on the topics? Feel free to link to them in comments.